BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rafał Lew-Starowicz graduated from the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science of the Warsaw University. Currently, he works at the Office of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, where he is responsible for the Team for Preventing Discrimination of Children and Youth in Electronic Media, appointed by the Government Plenipotentiary for Equal Treatment.

The Team consists of representatives of nearly 70 institutions, businesses, and NGOs dealing with the problem, as well as representatives of the electronic media market. Previously, within the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, he coordinated the activities of the Team for Preventing Children’s Exposure to Media Violence.

He also dealt with these problems in his community work, as a councillor in the Warsaw local government. He is the author of several publications on safe use of the Internet and computers by children. Currently, he is working on his PhD thesis at the Academy of Special Pedagogy, based on comparative research of the system for protecting children against online risks in Poland and in other countries.

He is a member of the Advisory Board of Pan European Game Information (PEGI), PEGI Enforcement Committee – a European classification system for computer and video games – and the Consulting Committee of the Polish Safer Internet Centre.

30 September, Wednesday, 14.30 - 16.30

Parallel session: Law enforcement session
Presentation topic: New legislative proposals to combat child abuse images online

The idea behind the legal changes that the Polish government passed in 2009 was to adapt the Polish law to the framework decision of the Council dated 22 December 2003 (on counteracting sexual abuse of children and child pornography), to allow Poland to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber Violence (which was opened for signing in Budapest on 23 November 2001 and entered into force on 1 July 2004) and the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (opened for signing in Lanzarote on 25 October 2007). Poland has signed both the aforementioned conventions.

On 11 September 2008, the Government’s Proxy for Equal Treatment appointed, in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, a team of advisors, whose main task is to counteract discrimination of children and youths in electronic mass media due to their age. This task is to be implemented by means of close cooperation with all Polish institutions that have so far been dealing with this issue, by implementing the relevant changes to the Polish law and by expanding international cooperation.

The changes that have already been introduced to the Polish penal code allow the courts to convict people who produce, with the help of computer technology, pornographic materials with the participation of a minor, which materials hardly differ from real pictures. They also allow the courts and prosecutors to secure evidence in the form of hard drives, computers or CDs and DVDs with child pornography, even if the owner of electronic equipment is not granted the status of a suspect.

Additional proposals of change are currently in the final phase of the parliamentary processing procedures, and are aimed at introducing penalties for recording and storing materials of pornographic character with the participation of a naked person without his/her consent (for instance with the help of a video camera in a mobile phone), penalizing grooming of minors on the Internet (in all types of chat room and forums), as well as allowing the police to take advantage of instigation in order to identify a person committing a crime – to improve the efficiency of counteracting pedophilia.