IRELAND is now preparing to join the many countries which have tried to control the distribution of pornography on the Internet. Late last year Fianna Fail introduced The Child Pornography Bill 1996. The Minister for Justice, however, has indicated that this problem will be dealt with by introducing amendments to the Children's Bill currently before the Oireachtas.
The Minister has suggested that all manifestations of child pornography in films, videos, photographs, in written or auditory material, as well as on the Internet will be subject to the Bill. Producing printing, publishing, exporting, importing selling or distributing such pornography will be made an offence, as will trafficking in children.
These legislative efforts may be inspired by the recent success of the British authorities in prosecuting a pornography distributor in R-v-Fellows under the British Protection of Children Act 1978. Fellows, who was employed by Birmingham University, held 11,650 pornographic pictures, including 1,875 listed under "Young/minors" in the university's computer and distributed them on the Internet.
He was convicted and sentenced to three years imprisonment. The success of the British authorities in this case does not mean that we can expect to see a flood of such convictions. Like any case involving the Internet, the gathering of evidence is a major challenge for prosecutors, but as Fellows kept his pornography on a computer belonging to someone else his activities could be easily monitored.
For a country as traditionally conservative as Ireland the proposed legislation is surprisingly tame, since it covers only children. The Bill reflects the reality that cultural and moral standards on the Internet will be set on an international level.
Material which is mundane in Amsterdam may be shocking in Ireland but attempts to restrict access to such material may run counter to European doctrines such as the free movement of goods. Another factor is the reality that the Internet is at present dominated by the US.
It has been estimated that about 60% of the content available on the Internet is provided by Americans, but the US dominance of the Internet goes beyond this. The Internet is an American invention, the technology, programs and computer systems which run the Internet are virtually all American in origin.
This means that anyone who uses the Internet will have been exposed to American values such as the very high value they place on freedom of speech. It also means that if they feel that their right to free speech is being interfered with they may appeal to a large international support network.
At present, the control of pornography in the US is comparatively weak. The US government sought to deal with the problem of pornography by enacting the Communications Decency Act of 1996 which prohibited the transmission of sexually offensive or indecent material which might be accessible to children on the Internet.
This was challenged in the American courts and in American Civil Liberties Union-v-Reno the Act was found to infringe the right to freedom of speech protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution. The case is currently under appeal to the US Supreme Court.
In view of the free access to material available to Internet users in the US, governments may be tempted to restrict access to the parts of the Internet which are based there. This creates a dilemma for governments. Restrictions which protect citizens from terrorist information or pornography may appear justified, but such restrictions may also have the effect of turning your country into a boreen running alongside the Information Super highway.
In view of the difficulties which many countries have with objectionable content on the Internet, the logical response would be to create international treaties which would control such content. However, the international standards protected by such treaties would probably just reflect the standards of the US. If a treaty did not reflect American standards it is unlikely that