Group claims ineffective laws around online harassment 'means perpetrators often go unpunished'

Victims of online harassment are left without justice, while perpetrators go unpunished, due to the absence of effective laws, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties has warned.

The ICCL has called for an amendment to the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act (NFOAPA) to outlaw the creation and/or sharing of private sexual images without consent.

The proposal is contained in a submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality, which is to consider legislative changes to combat incidences of online harassment such as so-called ‘revenge porn’, ‘upskirting’, and ‘downblousing’.

However in its submission to the Committee, the ICCL said it takes issue with the term ‘revenge porn’.

“This isn’t pornography, it’s abuse. It is therefore better to describe these categories of offences as ‘image-based sexual abuse’ to describe non-consensual creation and/or distribution of private sexual images,” the ICCL submission states.

It said that while NFOAPA covers harassment, its language is not always directly transferable to cases of online harassment.

The group said: “The requirement that harassment consist of ‘persistently following, watching, pestering, besetting or communicating’ means the prosecution have to prove a pattern of harassment. This opens a lacuna in the law whereby individual acts of harassment can’t be prosecuted effectively.

“The absence of effective laws criminalising online harassment means the perpetrators often go unpunished and victims are left without protection or justice."

It has also raised its concerns about the widespread use of CCTV to deter crime, and specifically referred to the tragic case of journalist and activist Dara Quigley, who took her own life after CCTV footage of her naked was shared and viewed online approximately 125,000 times.

The footage had been held by An Garda Síochána.

The ICCL has called for measures that would “sanction egregious image-based sexual abuse by law enforcement officials”.

"Nobody has ever been held accountable for this appalling violation of Dara’s privacy,” ICCL’s information and privacy rights programme manager Elizabeth Farries, said.

ICCL said: "It’s not clear that the legality, necessity and proportionality required to justify CCTV’s threat to privacy and data protection rights, together with closely associated rights, are met.

“Given the questions around the effectiveness of CCTV in deterring crime, ICCL questions whether its widespread use is necessary.

“ICCL is concerned that the more data that is captured by use of both public and private CCTV exposes individuals, and, as demonstrated by Dara Quigley’s experience, in particular marginalised individuals, to the risk that the data captured will be shared online."

The ICCL also said it was firmly against the introduction of facial recognition technology in policing in light of issues experienced by women and women of colour in other jurisdictions. It warned against “blanket monitoring by companies or State actors” and anything that could curtail rights to privacy and freedom of opinion and expression.