§ Sir Dudley SmithTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will respond to the speech of the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington on 13 June,Official Report, columns 871–72, on how hard pornography emanating from an established European television channel can be prevented from being transmitted in the United Kingdom by satellite or other means.
§ Mr. RentonI wrote to my hon. Friend on this subject on 6 July. In that letter I said
It was to avoid precisely this sort of problem that we were keen to secure agreement on provisions in the Council of Europe convention on transfrontier television which would preserve acceptable standards of taste and decency. I am pleased to say that we were successful in that objective. Article 7 of the convention requires that programmes should not be indecent or contain pornography. This is also reflected in article 22 of the draft directive, which places on broadcasters a responsibility to ensure that they do not transmit programmes which might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors, in particular those that involve pornography or gratuitous violence.