Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online

The Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online is a group of Ministers of the Interior and Justice of 54 countries: the 28 European Union member states and Albania, Armenia, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Georgia, Ghana, Israel, Japan, Kosovo, South Korea, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Serbia, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States. It was launched on 5 December 2012.

Participants in the Global Alliance have submitted commitments to undertake concrete actions in the immediate future to reach the four key policy targets. These commitments also include a detailed baseline, providing an overview of actions they already undertook. The choice of actions for reaching the overarching goals is left to each country. Participants produced progress reports on the actions they committed to, on the occasion of the Second Ministerial Conference, in September 2014.

Policy targets

The Global Alliance's policy targets are:

• enhancing efforts to identify victims and ensuring that they receive the necessary assistance, support and protection;
• enhancing efforts to investigate cases of child sexual abuse online and to identify and prosecute offenders;
• increasing awareness among children, parents, educators and the community at large about the risks;
• reducing the availability of child pornography online and the re-victimization of children.

Operational goals

The Global Alliance's operational goals are:

• Increase the number of identified victims in the International Child Sexual Exploitation images database (ICSE database) managed by Interpol by at least 10% yearly;
• Establish the necessary framework for the criminalization of child sexual abuse online and the effective prosecution of offenders, with the objective of enhancing efforts to investigate and prosecute offenders;
• Improve the joint efforts of law enforcement authorities across Global Alliance countries to investigate and prosecute child sexual abuse online;
• Develop, improve, or support appropriate public awareness campaigns or other measures which educate parents, children, and others responsible for children regarding the risks that children's online conduct poses and the steps they can take to minimize those risks;
• Share best practices among Global Alliance countries for effective strategies to inform the public about the risks posed by online, self-exploitative conduct in order to reduce the production of new child pornography;
• Encourage participation by the private sector in identifying and removing known child pornography material located in the relevant State, including increasing as much as possible the volume of system data examined for child pornography images; and
• Increase the speed of notice and takedown procedures as much as possible without jeopardizing criminal investigations.