Legal bid to make ministers ban children from porn sites

MINISTERS will be taken to the High Court today in an unprecedented legal action to force them to ban children from watching pornography online.

Age verification firms, backed by all Britain’s major children’s charities, are mounting the judicial review because they claim it was unlawful for the Government to withdraw its plans for a porn ban even though they had been passed by Parliament. They will claim there is accepted legal precedent that a Government cannot pass a law, secure Royal Assent for it and then frustrate the will of Parliament by deciding not to introduce it.

The law, which was part of the Digital Economy Act, introduced age restrictions on viewing porn for the first time anywhere in the world.

Anyone who visited a pornography site from a British IP address would be asked for “proof” they were 18, provided either from ID such as driving licences or from age verification cards bought in shops.

The Government had secured agreement from all the main pornography websites that they would introduce age verification schemes.

But after a series of delays ministers decided to pull it, saying it wanted it to be part of its wide-reaching planned duty-of-care laws requiring social media firms to protect children from online harms.

The children’s charities said this could delay a ban until 2024 – by which time tens of thousands of children could be exposed to pornography.

Stuart Lawley, chief executive of age verification firm Avsecure LLC, said: “Our primary goal in court is to make the Government see sense, dust off this hard-won legislation, and take action sooner than 2024 to protect our kids from stumbling over porn when innocently researching blue tits for a primary school nature project.”