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Virtual Child Porn Ban Proposed in UK Parliament
posted on by Egan Loo
A piece of legislation known as the "Coroners and Justice Bill" has been proposed in the British Parliament to explicitly extend "the law proscribing possession of child pornography to include non‑photographic images." The Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons (the lower of two houses in the Parliament) is scheduled to finish its clause-by-clause scrutiny of the bill on Tuesday. The bill still needs to pass both houses of the parliament to receive royal assent and thus become law.
A similar ban on "virtual child pornography" (explicitly sexual depictions of fictional children) was under consideration in the Diet (the Japanese parliament). The Japanese government decided last June to study the issue of virtual child pornography for three years, despite protests from the Japanese branch of the United Nations Children's Fund. The parliament will consider the results of the study before making a future decision on the issue. Nobuto Hosaka of Japan's Social Democratic Party introduced a petition in October that called for illustrations and other fictional portrayals to be specifically exempt from the pending child pornography ban.
The other Group of Eight (G-8) countries besides Russia have laws that ban child pornography, but one ban against the virtual kind, the PROTECT Act of 2003, is being tested in American courts. There is a pending trial for an Iowan man accused of receiving and possessing obscene Japanese manga. The court in the case struck down some the pornography charges and parts of the PROTECT Act as unconstitutional last year, but the court still has yet to rule on whether the material is obscene by legal definition.
Source: Onii-chan no Ecchi via ikimashou.net
