The material is made all over the world but held on servers in the Netherlands where there are greater digital freedoms

The majority of online child sexual abuse material is hosted in the Netherlands, where greater internet freedoms have made the country a hub for illegal websites, figures show.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has said that 90 per cent of URLs for child abuse content are in Europe, the majority in the Netherlands. The material is made all over the world but held on computer servers in the Netherlands.

In Britain the IWF is responsible for identifying and removing such content from the internet. The watchdog’s annual report found that hundreds of babies were subjected to the worst abuse.

Eighty-nine per cent of images analysed last year were hosted in Europe, with 71 per cent of the images around the world hosted in the Netherlands,