Anybody who looks at this material is going to be horrified, and yet the people who want it are people whose interest is engaging in sexual activities with children

Doreen Waters

However, he was found guilty of two charges of possession of child pornography for hundreds of photographs of naked boys discovered at his Vancouver apartment.

Experts say the case challenges Canadian definitions of pornography and what should be protected as art.

The court ruled that Sharpe's work, which detailed men having sex with boys, showed some literary skill and was therefore protected against anti-porn laws in the same way as sexual fantasies written by authors such as the Marquis de Sade.

Literary greats

In his ruling, Supreme Court Justice Duncan Shaw said that prosecutors had failed to prove that Sharpe's series of books promoted sex with children.

Sharpe, a retired Vancouver resident believes sex between adults and children should be legal and it was the second time he has challenged Canada's pornography laws in court.

We have been led to believe this is simply an artistic merit case. It is not. It is the depiction of children being raped and tortured

Renata Aebi, Alliance for the Rights of Children

As part of the trial university professors were called in to give expert assessment of Sharpe's work. They compared his books to the works of Charles Dickens and James Joyce.

But another expert said Sharpe's work was childish and crude and a psychiatrist who works with sex offenders said his writing was among the most violent he had ever read.

Freedom of expression

Mr Shaw ruled that while the stories were "by almost any standard, morally repugnant," they showed Sharpe was "a writer who seeks to express himself in a manner that has literary merit".

Sharpe's lawyer Paul Burstein hailed the acquittal as "a great victory, not only for Mr Sharpe, but for artistic and literary freedom in Canada".

Sharpe said that he was been fighting an unnecessary law that is vague and unreasonably restrictive of freedom of expression as protected under Canada's Constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"Up to 1993 there was no such law. There was no problem. There was a bunch of activists began pressuring the government to do something, but where was the problem?" Sharpe said.

Dismay

The Vancouver police detective who investigated Sharpe disputed the stories' literary value.

"Anybody who looks at this material is going to be horrified, and yet the people who want it are people whose interest is engaging in sexual activities with children," Detective Doreen Waters said.

Children's rights groups have expressed dismay at the decision.

"We have been led to believe this is simply an artistic merit case. It is not. It is the depiction of children being raped and tortured... that constitutes a violation of children's rights," Renata Aebi of the Alliance for the Rights of Children said.

Sharpe faces up to 10 years in prison for possessing the illegal photographs and he will be sentenced on 2 May.