1

At a joint meeting of the Committee on Digitalization, Innovation, and Modern Technologies and the Committee on Children and Youth, the government’s draft bill on the protection of minors from pornography is currently being reviewed

2

The Ordo Iuris Institute has flagged the need for amendments since work on the bill began, and today it presents detailed recommendations on the draft.

3

The government’s draft bill contains no definition of pornographic content, which violates the principle of legal certainty; as many as 17 entities, including Poland’s Ministry of Justice, have called for such a definition to be added.

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The bill’s scope should cover only websites where pornography constitutes a significant part of the content, and the regulations should be supplemented with provisions on payment services.

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The age-verification method envisaged raises systemic risks, which could be addressed by drawing on the solutions found in France’s SREN law.

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Today, a joint session of the Sejm’s Committee on Digitization, Innovation and Modern Technologies and Committee on Children and Youth Affairs is holding a reading of the Polish government’s draft bill on protecting minors from access to pornographic content on the internet. The Ordo Iuris Institute has signaled the need for amendments to the bill since work on it began, and today it presents its detailed recommendations. The most important of these are set out below.

Main Findings

  • The government’s draft bill, published in 2026, undoubtedly gives effect — at the level of the drafters’ declared intentions — to the constitutional principle of protecting children from violence, cruelty, exploitation, and demoralization (Article 72 of the Polish Constitution). At the level of detailed regulations, however, it should be supplemented with the solutions indicated below.
  • The absence of a definition of the term “pornographic content” in the government’s draft bill violates the principle of legal certainty. A precise definition of this term, referring directly to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, should therefore be added to the bill. As many as 17 different entities that took part in the public consultations and opinion-giving process, including the Ordo Iuris Institute, called for such a definition to be included in the act; Poland’s Ministry of Justice has also appealed for this.
  • The scope of entities affected by the proposed act should be precisely defined so that it covers only those websites for which “pornographic content constitutes a significant part of the content of the site to which the domain leads.” In its current form, the bill contains no such safeguard, which poses a risk to the normal functioning of portals and social media platforms where pornographic content occasionally appears.
  • In its current form, the bill overlooks an important aspect of how the pornography industry operates — namely, payments for broader access to pornographic content. It should therefore be supplemented with regulations on payment services, modeled on Article 9(2) and (3) of the citizens’ bill.
  • The bill should provide for the establishment of a Council for the Protection of Children from Online Pornography, or a similar body — a social co-regulator that would constitute a civic component of the system for preventing minors’ access to pornographic content.
  • The way the age-verification obligation is formulated in the bill gives rise to two categories of systemic risk, independent of the dispute over the definition or scope of the act: the risk of entrenching the European digital identity wallet as a universal access tool, and the risk of creating a profile of the user’s activity. The response to these risks should be to add to the bill elements of the French system found in the SREN law (2024).

See also:

Source of cover photo: iStock

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