Trilogue meetings between the EU Council and the European Parliament on the Regulation on the removal of terrorist content online resumed on 24 September and will continue on 29 October. Further meetings at technical level will take place on 1 October and again on 13 October, the bureau of Patrick Breyer (Greens/EFA, Germany) told EUROPE on 29 September.
A parliamentary source from Renew Europe confirmed the resumption of this work, which had been blocked by the pandemic (see EUROPE 12487/18). Parliament’s legislators felt that the security conditions were not met for videoconferencing. Discussions and work have nevertheless resumed remotely, with the possibility of seeing each other ‘face-to-face’, says Mr Breyer’s office.
As a reminder, this regulation aims to order web platforms to remove terrorist content online within an hour and provides for the use of automatic filters. The Regulation also provides that a Member State’s authority is competent on the territory of another country where the platform with the illegal content is hosted.
Finland’s Presidency of the EU Council tried, without success, to reach an agreement before the end of 2019. It is now the German Presidency that will try to do so before the end of its term of office.
“We are nearing the end of the negotiations, so each meeting is more decisive than the last”, writes Patrick Breyer on his blog.
According to an EU Council document of 3 July on the state of play, the two parties, the EU Council and Parliament, were trying to find common ground on this cross-border competence (a “red line” for Member States who believe that the removal measure would lose its effectiveness without this aspect) and on the “specific” measures to replace, at least semantically, the proactive measures, which could cover the use of automatic filters, which the Greens/EFA MEP and other defenders of digital rights see as Internet censorship.
Link to the documents: https://bit.ly/344bauG (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)