I can’t see how this would survive a challenge under the HRA, after all they are proposing to infringe two, possibly three, human rights articles and only have a clearly biased piece of junk to show as evidence in support of their arguments.

It may be that they will squeeze this past the Joint committee on human rights, no doubt much arm-twisting is going on, but that still leaves the courts and they must know that the first conviction under this law will be appealed on human rights grounds.

Is their plan to let this happen and just throw their hands up in mock despair at the courts interpretation of human rights again?

If it is then we must be sure to remind all, loudly, about the underhand tactics and downright lies told by Government about this law.

In fact I believe that the repeated use of the, laughable, ‘Rapid evidence assessment’ is a clear case of the government deliberately misleading parliament.

No reasonable person could think that it is a fair and unbiased document or, that by commissioning well established anti-pornography campaigners to author the report, the government were doing anything other than trying to stack the deck in their favour.

This is far worse than the lies and distortion over this mad law, this is a deliberate and planned betrayal of the democratic process, a concerted attempt to undermine parliament and the charge must be made against this government.

The Government have swapped the purely subjective definitions of “appears to risk serious injury” etc for the equally subjective “explicit or realistic”. Scenes in films like Saw and Hostel are “explicit” and “realistic” even though entirely fictitious. Also the amended law still would make possession of clips of such scenes illegal if, in someone else’s opinion, you had them “for sexual arousal”.

They are also maintaining their “we know it when we see it” definition, but who is going to download images they find “grossly offensive”? Not many people I’d think. So who is going to make the determination (and how) that the law has been broken and charges should be brought?

I can already see the possibility of a messy divorce/ custody case where one partner accuses the other of having “grossly offensive” imagery in order to gain an advantage in Court.

Is that what this law was designed to do? I very much doubt it, but this is just one of the many unintended consequences of a proposed law that should never even have got this far if it wasn’t for a few moralising and self-serving Ministers.