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In a blog post, Commissioner Malmström's press spokesman Love Berggren placed the blame for the perceived need to impose EU-wide blocking squarely at the feet of the governments in the USA, Russia and Ukraine. He said that "a check of the internet by hotlines in 35 countries recently found 144 web sites in the USA, Russia, Ukraine and other countries. One year later, a majority of the sites were still operating".

It is quite puzzling that the Commission has chosen to publicly criticise Russia and Ukraine in this context. There is widespread agreement that the problem of child abuse websites has decreased significantly in recent years in Russia and efforts are ongoing to address the problem there ever more effectively. This was partly to be attributed to efforts of former Commissioner Frattini for positive international engagement with Russia to remove the websites completely from the Internet rather than the new focus of blocking the sites while taking no new initiatives to take them offline.

Similarly, Ukraine has never appeared significantly on the reports of European hotlines with regard to child abuse images. However, and this may be an indicator of a wider strategy of the Commission, it has repeatedly been criticised with regard to intellectual property infringements.

The big question then is: why are the sites hosted in the USA not taken down? This is all the more surprising when it is precisely the USA in the ACTA negotiations that is pushing a "notice and takedown" regime for websites accused of infringing intellectual property - can the USA really be simultaneously pushing the world to delete alleged copyright-infringing websites and refusing to delete child abuse websites? What position has the US government taken with regard to the very serious accusation of Commissioner Malmström?

It does not come as a surprise that the "impact assessment" of the proposal which suggests blocking as a solution does not identify the nature of the problems that lead to child abuse websites being left online. After all, with a solution as populist as blocking, who needs to specify the problem?

Apparent location of child abuse websites and trends from 2007 to 2008 from the Irish hotline
http://www.hotline.ie/annualreport/images/graphs/trends/compaysNT800w....

Proposal for a Directive on combating the sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, repealing Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA (29.03.2010)
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:0094:FI...

Impact assessment (25.03.2009)
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=SEC:2009:0355:FI...

Commissioner Malmström's blog (in Swedish and English) on this issue (29.03.2010)
http://ceciliamalmstrom.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/ett-slag-for-barnens-...

(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)