Pornography and the European Convention on Human Rights

I'm pleased to say that my article 'Pornography and the European Convention on Human Rights' has been published in the academic journal Porn Studies.

Porn Studies is an innovative new journal, edited by Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, and is the first scholarly periodical dedicated to the study of pornography. 

In this, its third issue, the editors have assembled a collection of five articles that focus on the regulation of pornography.

The editors, in their Editorial to the issue, write:

The ‘need’ for regulation [of pornography] has been argued elsewhere and is not the primary focus in this issue. Instead our contributors look to the current state of affairs in particular locales. Our first double issue was a bumper one, in comparison this issue contains just five articles and they are long – exceeding our usual word count – but the nature of their discussions, in laying out the particular interests in regulation or legal precedents meant that longer pieces were necessary to detail the discursive constructions of the problems of porn and its regulation. Our five articles examine the performances of regulation which are local, national and transnational in scope, they examine the discursive constructions of zoning in Albuquerque; the very micro deliberations and justifications of the UK case of regulating Video on Demand; the prohibitive yet also productive nature of classification requirements in Australia; the historical and contemporary arguments over pornography in Iceland; and the ways in which access to or production of pornography are interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights. 

My article examines the ways in which the Court and former Commission have dealt with complaints relating to pornography, and pays specific attention to ECHR jurisprudence under Articles 3, 8 and 10.