Council of Europe

06.09.2011 - Storing child sexual abuse images is not a crime in Russia. Russian laws protecting children’s rights are still not strong enough.

According to statistics and analyses available, the USA and Russia are the leading countries for distributing and disseminating child sexual abuse images. Sexual abuse for the purpose of producing child sexual abuse images involves not only perpetrators from Russia, but many other actors from the international criminal chains and networks also play a role.

Children may be exploited in several ways in the development of child sexual abuse materials and actions towards putting a halt to this have, of late, been seriously examined.

Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s Children Rights Commissioner has called for urgent measures to protect children from sexual abuse. Astakhov said it is important to speed up the adoption of a law that increases the punishment for sex crimes against children.“Until Russia creates adequate legislation to protect children from paedophilia and pornography and bans the advertisement of those obnoxious things on the Internet which stimulate sexual encroachments against children, such cases will continue”.

Russia’s efforts to tackle issues related to this topic have so far included Bilateral Cooperation for the Adoption of Children between Russia and the USA, ratification of the Child Abduction Convention as well as raising-awareness of behaviour on the Internet (instigated by the Safe Internet League).

To read more about this theme:
http://rt.com/politics/press/rossijskaya-gazeta/information-internet-child-distribution/en/  http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-02/world/russia.child.porn_1_child-pornography-sexual-abuse-child-advocate?_s=PM:WORLD