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Federal police call for law to block child porn sites

The chief of Germany’s federal police called Wednesday for a law to allow authorities to block access to websites featuring child pornography in order to hobble a booming online trade.

Published: 27 August 2008 17:24 CEST

The head of the Federal Crime Office, Joerg Ziercke, said the distribution of videos and photographs featuring juveniles in sexual situations rose 55 percent in Germany between 2006 and 2007, most of them on commercial websites.

He said other European countries had managed to stem the flow of such images by blocking access to offending sites, adding that voluntary schemes with the Internet sector had been ineffective in Germany. “I think we are only going to make headway with a legal requirement,” he told reporters at the presentation of an annual report on organixed crime. “Experts say it is technically possible to block access and there is no opposition from the European Union. So why do we have nothing in Germany?”

Currently authorities have to work with Internet providers when illegal content is discovered on a website. Ziercke said access blocking would allow police to take direct action. Last year German authorities reported 11,357 child pornography offences, up from 7,318 the previous year. The number of cases on the Internet more than doubled in the same period, to 6,206 cases.

Ziercke said the trade produced millions of euros in revenue every month with “younger and younger” victims. He said Norway, for instance, had had enormous success with access blocking, netting some 15,000 attempts to find child pornography online each day. Other countries with access blocking laws on the books include Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan, according to Ziercke.

In the United States, access providers participate on a voluntary basis, while the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Iceland, Poland, Australia and Japan are considering legal crackdowns, he said. “I have the impression that we will soon have to justify why we are not taking the lead,” Ziercke said.

A government spokesman said there were already legal mechanisms to take action against websites “on a case by case basis,” adding that any question of new legislation would be better taken up by the EU rather than Germany alone.

The German Internet Industry Association (eco) insisted the sector took the problem seriously and had been working for years with authorities to stamp out illicit images of minors and other banned content. Eco president Harald Summa said it was more effective to continue the current practice, with an online complaint centre collecting reports of offensive contact by Internet users and handing them over to authorities. “We want to continue this effective cooperation,” he said in a statement. Internet users who wanted to find child pornography would be able to get around “access blocking,” Summa added.

Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.

The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres (more than one foot) in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.

He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, prosecutors said.

“The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.

German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza war erupted on October 7th with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.

The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.

The incident capped a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate of immigration.

Three people were killed last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing at a festival in the western city of Solingen.

READ ALSO: ‘Ban asylum seekers’ – How Germany is reacting to Solingen attack

The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.

A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany, which was recently demonstrated by the serious crimes in Mannheim and the attack in Solingen, but also by acts that were fortunately prevented by the timely intervention of the security authorities”.

The Solingen stabbing followed a knife attack in the city of Mannheim in May, which left a policeman dead, and which had also been linked to Islamism by officials.

Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.

READ ALSO: Debt, migration and the far-right – the big challenges facing Germany this autumn

The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.

The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.

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