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Britain Tightens Laws For Online Suicide Sites

Posted on: Wednesday, 17 September 2008, 15:35 CDT

The British government said it is amending its 1961 Suicide Act to make sure people are aware that Web sites promoting suicide are illegal. 

The move comes amid concerns that people seeking information about suicide may actually come across more sites that promote the act than those that offer support.

Although illegal under the Suicide Act, there have not been any prosecutions of website owners who operate such sites.

The updated law will clarify that the Act applies to online Web sites, and will assist Web service providers police the sites they host.

However, Britain’s Justice Minister Maria Eagle said there was no "magic solution" to provide online protecting to the vulnerable.

"Updating the language of the Suicide Act, however, should help to reassure people that the internet is not a lawless environment and that we can meet the challenges of the digital world,” she told BBC News.

"It is important, particularly in an area of such wide public interest and concern, for the law to be expressed in terms that everyone can understand."

Ms Eagle said she hoped the changes would be enacted by next year, but cautioned there are "inherent difficulties" with monitoring "suicide websites" based in other countries.

A British Medical Journal report in April cited a study in which researchers looked for suicide-related Web sites using four different web search engines.  They found the top three hits were all pro-suicide, which led them to call for anti-suicide web pages to be prioritized instead.  An outright ban would have been unworkable, they said.

However, Anthony Langan, the support service's public affairs manager, called the new law "a strong step" towards improving Internet safety. 

"The next step must be to understand how and why people use the internet to find out about issues like suicide, and develop our services in response to the results," he told BBC News.

Paul Kelly, trustee of the charity Papyrus, which aims to prevent youth suicide, said updating the law was a welcome move,  and would encourage ISPs to be more active in removing illegal content.

He called on ministers to make it harder for websites to publish content that promotes suicide.  

"In practice it's very easy to encourage others to take their own lives and it's very unlikely they are going to be prosecuted in a court of law," he told BBC News.

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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