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Thank you Minister Sarkozy and Minister Perben for co-hosting this meeting. I thank France for the invitation for me to brief its G8 colleagues today. As the host country of INTERPOL's General Secretariat, France has continuously provided INTERPOL with great support and as INTERPOL's Secretary General, I wish publicly to thank France for this support.

My remarks will reflect the extraordinary potential that an international child abuse image database centrally located has for protecting our children from sexual exploitation and abuse.

Today, I will provide you with statistics and graphic illustrations of why you should support an implementation study coordinated by the UK's National Crime Squad for the maintenance of an international child abuse image database at INTERPOL to fight sexual exploitation and abuse of our children over the Internet. This entire evaluation process has been very carefully undertaken since Italy first offered to be the host country for such a database.

INTERPOL as the world's largest international police organization has an important contribution to make in this G8 initiative. We currently have 150,000 individual and non-duplicated images transmitted over the Internet and related to the sexual abuse of children. Just a year ago we had less than 100,000 of such images.

INTERPOL currently has an estimated 20,000 images of individual child victims in our database. As recently as 2 years ago, we had only 10,000.

The identification of each child in these images is important because it permits the child to be rescued from further abuse and because it saves investigators thousands of hours of duplicative research.

Today we have 177 child victims identified while two years ago we only had 30 child victims identified. This represents almost a 6 fold increase in two years.

Similarly, the identification of the perpetrator or abuser is important because it permits his arrest and incarceration, thereby preventing additional children from being sexually abused or exploited by him.

An international computerized database of child abuse images housed at INTERPOL would be fast and cost effective. It currently takes only seconds to determine whether or not there is a match in our system of 150,000 images of persons and backgrounds viewed in the photos.

Moreover, an international database would permit us to exploit an individual country's investigation. For example, in Operation Landslide, the US Postal Inspection Service identified over 350,000 subscribers who had paid 29.95 dollars per month to get access to images of sexual exploitation via the Internet. In just 5 months of operation, this company generated 5.5 million US dollars of revenue.

Based on files received from the US Postal Inspection Service, INTERPOL identified 70,000 individuals living in 60+ countries who had subscribed to get images of sexually exploited children via the Internet. (This 70,000 figure does not include the US and Canada). INTERPOL organized and sent subscriber information to the 22 countries that had legislation making illegal the possession of images of sexually exploited children. We congratulate the 12 countries that already have executed more than 5,000 searches and arrests in connection with this case. The investigation continues.

In conclusion, the G8 can help protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation over the Internet by continuing with this initiative. If you decide that an international database of child abuse images should be located at INTERPOL and are prepared to find the appropriate funding, INTERPOL would be happy to expand its current database and 3-person team that has produced tremendous results. We can integrate this initiative into our current effort to connect all of our Member Countries to a 24 hour a day/ 7 days a week state of the art global communications system.

Together we can help protect innocent children from sexual exploitation and abuse over the Internet.

Thank you very much.