Lithuania is one of few countries that retain a full ban on pornography. Sexting has been assumed to fall under the category, but a recent court case has cleared up the regulation.
In March, the Lithuanian Supreme Court issued a ruling, specifying that sending nude pics to one’s partner should not be considered distribution of pornography, but instead be seen as something falling under the right to privacy.
The court was considering a case where a man was given a 2,500-euro fine for an intimate video shared with his girlfriend.
“The situation was that this person was convicted for sending footage of his penis to his girlfriend,” Iveta Jarašiūnaitė, a lawyer, has told LRT RADIO. “The footage showed a third person performing oral sex on this man.”
The man appealed the decision and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
“The court said that sending visual material with pornographic content from one partner to another, where the information is exclusively related to them and is intended for their personal use, is part of the right to privacy of those persons,” says Jarašiūnaitė.
Curiously, the court rejected the man’s plea to cancel his conviction and the fine, arguing that the footage contained another person who was not shown to have given permission to share the footage.
Strict rules
Lithuania has some of the strictest laws on pornography, notes Jarašiūnaitė.
The Criminal Code currently provides penalties for the production (with intent to distribute), acquisition, and distribution of pornography. The punishments range from community service, a fine, restriction of liberty to imprisonment for up to one year.
This also included messages with sexually explicit images and videos sent to one’s partner. “Of course, in practice, sending a photo would not result in a prison sentence, but it was a punishable offence,” says Jarašiūnaitė.
According to her, the police would not check people’s phones for sexts. Usually, if a person was investigated for something else, the police could come across sexual messages accidentally.
Recipients of sexual messages would rarely go to the police, she adds, since “most don’t even know it’s a crime”.
According to Jarašiūtė, when it comes to legal bans on pornography, Lithuania is in one company with countries like Belarus, Iran, Syria, and Egypt. In most European countries, she adds, pornography is fully or partially legal.
The current Criminal Code was adopted in 2003. Back then, Jarašiūtė notes, Lithuania was a more conservative society and there was no technology for sexting.
However, even though the law prohibits the “acquisition of pornography”, one is not in danger of getting fined for watching pornography online, the lawyer reassures, since “it’s on foreign websites, not Lithuanian”.
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