The European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, called on the European Parliament on Thursday 17 September to support draft interim legislation to counter the “unintended effects” of the new Electronic Communications Code (see EUROPE 12557/13).
Effects that will prevent companies from fighting online child pornography, she explained, as the online presence of child pornography hosted on European servers has increased during the health crisis.
“This is a temporary solution pending a long-term solution that I will present by June 2021”, she added. In July, the Commission announced a proposal for 2021 on the removal of online child pornography, requiring Internet companies such as Facebook to remove this content within a certain time limit, as it had proposed for terrorist content (see EUROPE 12535/1).
The European Commission justifies this proposal by the entry into force of the new Electronic Communications Code, which will bring messaging services such as Gmail, Skype, WhatsApp and Messenger into the scope of the e-Privacy Directive 2002/58 in December. However, this directive does not contain an explicit legal basis for the voluntary processing of data to combat child pornography.
The Commissioner, who will also need the EU Council’s endorsement, received some support on Thursday, with the EPP pointing out, for example, that Member States are already currently in breach of the 2012 legislation on child abuse.
But voices in the GUE/NGL were raised to preserve “the personal lives of Europeans”, said Anne-Sophie Pelletier (France).
German MEP Patrick Breyer (Greens/EFA) has been warning for some time about what he sees as the perverse effects of this interim legislation. “The planned filtering of private communications is counterproductive, disproportionate and threatens our security and privacy on the Net”. “Confidentiality and encryption” are, on the contrary, the means to protect minors “against the interception and misuse of private recordings by paedophiles”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)