UK: Child block on porn sites breaches adults' rights, says UN official

London: A new law that makes age checks on porn sites mandatory, breaches human rights of adults who use them, a senior United Nations (UN) official has said.

According to a report in Daily Mail, following the website’s campaign, UK Culture Secretary Karen Bradley was about to make age-checks mandatory for porn sites to ensure only adults access explicit material online. Sites that do not comply can be fined up to £250,000.

However UN’s special rapporteur for promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion, David Kaye, condemned the decision saying the rule ‘unduly interferes with rights of freedom of expression and privacy.’

In a letter to the ministers, he said that the Digital Economy Bill, currently in the Parliament, could infringe the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protects the right to ‘maintain an opinion without interference’.

He further opined that private user information of adults who watch porn was not safe, making the rule fall short of international human rights law standards. ‘Anyone whose data is stored by such sites could ‘easily be subject to abuse, such as hacking, blackmail and other potential credit card fraud’, he was quoted as saying.

While observing the need to protect children from mature content on the internet, he opined that the measure’s ambiguity makes it ineffective. He also suggested that the users should be allowed to communicate ‘secretly without having to be identified’, according to the report.

The UN diplomat faced flak from various quarters for his remarks, with some terming the remarks ‘rubbish’.