Porn-Banning Trend Hits Luxembourg, As Parliament Posts Petition

LOS ANGELES—As countries across Europe and around the world move toward placing severe restrictions and even outright bans on otherwise legal pornography, the tiny country of Luxembourg appears to be the latest to jump on the bandwagon. According to a report by the Luxembourg-based news site RTL Today, the country’s Chamber of Deputies — the 6-member Luxembourg parliament — has posted a series of citizen petitions, with the first petition on the list calling for a ban on porn.  “The petitioner argues that the ban would protect minors and shield adults from ‘pornographic perversion,’” according to the RTL report.  Under Luxembourg law, citizen petitions, once green-lighted by a parliamentary committee, will be subject to public debate and could be voted into law, once they receive 4,500 signatures, in the compact country of approximately 625,000.  The specifics of how the Luxembourg porn ban would work were not made clear. The United Kingdom last year abandoned a two-year effort to impose an “age verification” system, supposedly blocking all porn sites for anyone under age 18. But a judge’s ruling in a recent lawsuit appears to have put the law back on the table. At the same time, the French parliament has now approved a similar age-verification law — a type of porn ban now under consideration on Australia and Poland as well. An effort to bring a porn-blocking bill to the New Zealand parliament hit a dead end last month, when the bill failed to gain enough support among the country’s governing, three-party coalition. Porn is widely banned in Asia, including in China, South Korea, and Nepal.  The porn-banning trend has also shown signs of reaching the United States. Last December, four Republican senators sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr, urging him to direct resources of the Justice Department toward a new crackdown on porn. Photo By Denise Hastert / Wikimedia Commons