The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Centre on a petition seeking a ban on pornographic websites on the ground that their contents were the root cause of all crimes, especially offences against women and children.

A Bench of Justices B.S. Chauhan and J. Chelameswar acted on the petition filed by advocate Kamlesh Vaswani, who pointed out that almost every day, there were reports of rape and that the rapists belonged to all ages, castes and religion. “In some cases, the accused disclosed to the police that they had watched pornography on mobile phones before committing the rape,” he said.

The petitioner said pornography material was easily downloaded from websites and sold in CDs, DVDs or chips and the Centre had the power under the existing laws to block these websites.