It will be possible not to go to jail for distributing intimate videos – the decision is up to the parliament
11 November 17:56
The Verkhovna Rada may finally try to decriminalize porn: a revised draft law has already been registered. This was announced by MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.
According to him, the revised version is more conservative, but a compromise.
“After more than a year of discussions with the committee and the working group, I am pleased to announce that a compromise has been reached. Although we had some emotional battles, I am pleased to see the chairman of the working group, Vladlen Neklyudov, and members of the Law Enforcement Committee as the second co-author. I am grateful to all 28 MPs who signed the draft law. The list includes both liberal colleagues and those with more conservative views, but everyone agrees that the article should be decriminalized,” the MP wrote in Telegram.
Yaroslav Zheleznyak also spoke briefly about the agreed changes.
“We are simply amending Article 301 of the Criminal Code so that adults will not be imprisoned for 3-5 years for filming and distributing intimate videos. Criminal liability will remain only for:
– non-consensual porn (revenge porn, deep fake)
– extreme porn (violence, animal, necrophilia)
– porn with children and distribution among children (we are going to toughen it up).
To avoid the temptation to manipulate: pimping, involvement in prostitution, and human trafficking also remain criminal offenses. Even because of this, we decided to postpone the discussion on Article 302 to the second reading,” the MP explained.
He also personally addressed respected journalists to emphasize the following:
“This is not ‘legalization of porn’ – it is legalized, and we have been collecting millions of taxes from the same OnlyFans for a couple of years now. This is the ‘decriminalization of porn’. So that people don’t get thrown in jail for storing content or massive “secret purchases” are not made from webcams. And at the same time, now under Article 301, you can be punished even for storing nude photos on your personal phone,” Yaroslav Zheleznyak wrote.
A brief Ukrainian history of porn decriminalization
In July 2022, a proposal to legalize eroticism and porn in Ukraine was created on the Electronic Petitions website. Within a month, it had gained the required 25,000 signatures, so President Volodymyr Zelenskyy instructed Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to work on the issue. But the matter did not go further.
In mid-August last year, MPs in the Verkhovna Rada initiated the collection of signatures for a bill to decriminalize the use of pornographic materials that do not pose a public danger.
on August 18, a draft law on the decriminalization of pornography in Ukraine was registered in parliament. It was initiated by 25 MPs at once.
In September of the same year, it was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Law Enforcement for consideration.
And after more than a year of discussions with the committee and the working group, the initiator of the bill, Yaroslav Zheleznyak, announced that a compromise had been reached
Arguments in favor of decriminalizing porn
The expediency of decriminalizing porn is described in the explanatory note to the draft law. It emphasizes, in particular, that the decriminalization is aimed at actions that “do not pose a public danger,” and this should strengthen the protection of privacy. It also provides examples in favor of such a decision that have not lost their relevance today.
Example 1: In July 2023, the Novi Sanzhary District Court of Poltava Oblast sentenced a woman who sent her husband intimate videos via Telegram. A forensic artistic examination found that both videos were pornographic. The prosecutor did not provide information about the sale of the content, so this may indicate that the correspondence was simply personal domestic communication. However, the accused entered into a plea agreement with the prosecutor. Already on July 10, the court found the woman guilty of committing a criminal offense under Part 2 of Article 301 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The fine amounted to UAH 34 thousand.
Example 2: OnlyFans, a subscription-based content platform dominated by “adult content,” was one of the first to register in Ukraine as a payer of the so-called “Google tax.” In the first half of 2023, the company accrued USD 928.2 thousand of VAT. USD of VAT and paid about UAH 34 million to the Ukrainian budget. It is important to remember that since Ukraine cannot use donor funding for defense, almost all of its own budget revenues go to the army. Nevertheless, as the explanatory note notes, law enforcement agencies and courts continue to prosecute, in particular, for OnlyFans content, which is taxed.
