EU Council: Messages distributed on the internet containing illegal and harmful content

IRIS 1997-1:1/3

Ad van Loon

European Audiovisual Observatory

In a Resolution adopted on 28 November 1996, the Council of the European Union invites the Member States to introduce a number of measures in regard to illegal and harmful content on the internet.

The measures called for concern encouragement and facilitating of systems of self-regulation between representative organisations of service providers and internet users, the drafting of efficient codes of conduct, and possibly, on-line mechanisms which can directly be accessed by the public, signalling illegal and harmful content. In addition, the Council invites the Member States to encourage that filter meachanisms are made available to users and that encoding systems are developed that allow electronic content selection. Member states are also asked to actively participate in an international ministerial conference on the issue of illegal and harmful content on the intenet, which will be organised by Germany.

The Commission is asked to, inter alia , promote the coordination of representative self-regulatory bodies at the level of the Community and research relating to the technical aspects of filtering and encoding mechanisms. Furthermore, the Commission is asked to study in-depth the question of liability for messages send through the internet.