STRASBOURG, France — The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent’s main post-World War II human rights organization, issued a resolution today urging European nations to mandate online filters for “pornographic materials” on all devices, to be “systematically activated in public spaces, such as schools, libraries and youth clubs.”
The resolution was based on a report prepared by Dimitri Houbron of the center-right alliance ALDE, and was adopted unanimously, the Council of Europe announced via its official website.
The PACE parliamentarians “expressed deep concern at ‘the unprecedented exposure of children to pornographic imagery, which is detrimental to their psychological and physical development.’ This exposure, they said, ‘brings increased risks of harmful gender stereotyping, addiction to pornography and early, unhealthy sex.’”
There is no scientific evidence for a clinical “addiction to pornography,” and neither Houbron nor the parliamentarians offered any definitions of what they consider “unhealthy sex” or “pornographic materials,” or explained how these mandatory filters would be coded and by whom.
The resolution, according to the Council’s statement, “invites member states to examine the existing means and provisions to combat children’s exposure to pornographic content and address the gaps in relevant legislation and practice ‘with a view to better protecting children.’ It calls for relevant legislation to ensure that both dedicated websites hosting adult content and mainstream and social media which include adult content, are obliged to use age verification tools.”
The resolution also "advocates the introduction of an alert button or similar solutions for children to report accidental access to pornographic content, and envisages follow-up actions, such as warnings or penalties for relevant websites."
The parliamentarians “called for a public debate on children’s exposure to pornography and the means for addressing the problem.”
As XBIZ reported, in November 2021, the Council of Europe published a resolution recommending sweeping government intervention in the regulation of adult content online.
The Council of Europe resolution was hailed by religious anti-porn groups as a blueprint to censor sexual content in all of the 47 member countries of the organization, which includes 27 EU countries.
The Council of Europe’s resolution includes a number of controversial and suspiciously-sourced statements that seem to echo anti-porn propaganda by both religious activists and sex-worker-exclusionary feminists.
To read that resolution in full, click here.
