Negotiators on the regulation on the removal of terrorist content are close to an agreement, but have not yet been able to finalise the dossier at their 5th trilogue on Thursday 29 October.
“We were very close [to an agreement], and I think that the next meeting, scheduled in 2 weeks, could be conclusive”, a source involved in the negotiations told EUROPE on 30 October.
According to another source, the discussions focused almost exclusively on cross-border removal orders for terrorist content, i.e., a removal request issued by an authority in one Member State to a service or hosting provider in another Member State.
This is very controversial in the European Parliament in that it undermines the authority of the country in which the service is located and Parliament has campaigned for that authority to have a say in this withdrawal order from another Member State. According to two sources, a possible compromise has emerged and would consist in giving this authority the right to challenge the withdrawal order through a silent procedure.
The content in question would be blocked within 1 hour, as provided for in the flagship measure of this regulation, and that authority would have a period of 24 hours in which to challenge and thus express its explicit refusal. Without reaction, the withdrawal order would therefore be considered uncontested; the service or hosting provider would also have this period of time to contest the withdrawal order itself.
Parliament, which at one stage argued that the decision to withdraw should be decided by the authority of the country where the host is located, was unable to accept this compromise on Thursday and has yet to hold internal consultations, says the office of Polish MEP Patryk Jaki, the ECR rapporteur on the dossier, which nevertheless expressed confidence that the Parliament groups will be able to support the idea.
For the EU Council, it is in any case imperative to maintain the speed and effectiveness of this withdrawal order in order to quickly deactivate violent and terrorist content; this is in particular what France hammered home following the attack in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on 16 October.
The EU Council is therefore now expected to submit a revised text on the subject of withdrawal orders to Parliament.
On the other outstanding issues, Parliament and EU Council may have reached agreement on specific or proactive measures to prevent the dissemination of terrorist content: platforms should be able to choose which measures (automated filters or others based on human monitoring, for example) they want to implement, but an authority would have the right to impose them if the action is not effective. Automated filters will not be a mandatory measure from the outset.
For the Greens/EFA group and German MEP Patrick Breyer, other issues remain problematic, such as the exclusion of journalistic, artistic or educational content from the regulation, as he explained in a video on Twitter aimed at mobilising civil society against a deal he also sees looming.
But the Polish rapporteur’s office does not agree with this argument. He considers that broad protection has been given to such content, the use of which is linked to freedom of expression, and argues that this point has been settled.
Other issues remain problematic for the Greens/EFA, such as the independent nature of the authority issuing withdrawal orders and the question of penalties for companies.
As a reminder, the Commission proposal dates from September 2018 (see EUROPE 12095/14) and Parliament adopted its position in April 2019 (see EUROPE 12231/8). The rapporteur at the time was the British Daniel Dalton (ECR). (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)