Pornography Petition

Current status: please sign the petition, here.

From MediaWatch-UK: Tony Blair has recently set up a scheme of on line petitioning to enable the public to express their concerns about any issue directly to him. Lobby group mediawatch-uk has taken advantage of this to express support for the Government’s plans, set out in the Criminal Justice Bill, to make extreme pornography illegal.

Speaking today, John Beyer, director of mediawatch-uk welcomed the opportunity the online petitions give to the public. Our petition, which has been approved by officials at 10 Downing Street, calls upon the Prime Minister to “steadfastly proceed with plans set out in the Queen’s Speech and to widen the scope of the law to include a much wider range of pornographic imagery such as material rated R18 by the British Board of Film Classification. We believe that pornography contributes to a range of social and moral problems that attack the family and the fabric of our society. Mr Beyer went on: “the pornography industry has exploited to the full a law passed in 1959 that is inherently flawed and has failed miserably to fulfill the intentions of Parliament to strengthen the criminal law. The fact that very extreme violent material is so readily available proves that the 1959 Obscene Publications Act has had the opposite effect”.

Any British citizen or resident may sign the online petition and addresses will be kept confidential. The petition is at:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/obscenitylaw/

and will run until 7 March 2007. Mr Beyer concluded “Almost 600 people have already signed but it is vital that it attracts hundreds of thousands of signatures so that the Prime Minister is not left in any doubt about the strength of public feeling against offensive and harmful pornography”.