The Dutch Minister of Justice will not ask Internet service providers (ISPs) in The Netherlands to continue the development of internet filters against child pornography. There has been a significant reduction in the supply of child pornography on websites that are accessible to the general public, according to the service providers. Therefore, Internet filtering has lost its meaning. Child pornography is now mainly found in less accessible parts of the Internet. (...)

Ivo Opstelten, Minister of Security and Justice, follows the advice of several ISPs, united in the ‘Platform for Internet Security’, to stop the development of an Internet child porn filter. He announced this in a letter to the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, earlier today. Of course, the police will continue to fight against child pornography, but they will consider other means. For example, the police - along with ISP LeaseWeb – is setting up a test method to put the uploading of child pornography images to an end.

Wihout doubt, the letter from Minister Opstelten (Liberal Party) will spark emotional debates in Parliament. In February of this year, Jan Mulder, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament for Opstelten’s Liberal Party (VVD) pleaded in Strasbourg to block websites with child pornography in the European Union. European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has also called for filtering in the EU a number of times. However, no agreement on proposals to make filtering obligatory in the EU could be reached in the European Parliament, so far.

Until today, a number of Dutch ISPs were indeed investigating the possibilities for filtering pedophile content, by compiling a blacklist of suspicious webpages. However, the usefulness of such a filter is now being questioned by the ISPs. The goal of a filter was to prevent that internet users could find child pornography online, either deliberately or accidentally. But in practice, the chance of encountering such material today is very small. The exchange of child pornography went 'underground' and moved to specific sites and confined spaces on the Internet. Pedophiles will know where to look for this content and a filter is will not be a barrier for them.

Opstelten told parliament that the police will now mainly focus on the creators of the material and the victims. The people that download child pornography from the Internet will remain criminal, but they will not be prime targets of police investigations. A truly new approach to child pornography has not yet been launched, because the police are too busy to handle current child pornography cases. The number of cases of child pornography that the Dutch police has to deal with is still "unacceptably high", according to the Minister. The workload of the police is around 750 cases per year. Experts estimate that 80 percent of Dutch cases come from abroad.

Source: De Telegraaf (Dutch)