On behalf of the EPP, Manfred Weber (German), Frances Fitzgerald (Irish), Paulo Rangel (Portuguese) and Jeroen Lenaers (Dutch) wrote to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Tuesday 6 June, asking her to step up the EU’s efforts in the fight against cyberbullying.
Despite the Commission’s efforts, with initiatives such as the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) and the forthcoming Directive to combat violence against women, “in many Member States there are still no sufficient legal tools to fight these crimes”, they deplore.
MEPs are putting forward a series of proposals to help build a “comprehensive legal framework explicitly addressing cyberbullying with one decisive legal act at its core”. The political group had proposed a debate on online harassment at the May plenary session, calling for a law similar to the Irish ‘Coco’ law to be introduced in the EU (see EUROPE 13180/11). As Mrs Fitzgerald explained in our articles, Irish legislation goes further than the provisions contained in the proposed Directive aimed at combating gender-based violence, by referring, for example, to “the responsibility of company directors and owners” (see EUROPE 13173/1).
Not only would MEPs like the EU to agree on a single definition of cyberbullying, they also recommend “streamlining scattered legislative measures in one comprehensive act, codifying existing provisions and criminalising all relevant practices of online abuse across the EU”.
At the same time, they are asking the Commission to strengthen the rights of victims by allowing them to claim damages from both platforms and users, to obtain a waiver of anonymity and to invoke the digital nature of the harassment as an aggravating factor before a criminal court.
Finally, they would like to see a European strategy dedicated to cyberbullying and better data collection on these offences.
The letter: https://aeur.eu/f/7cm (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)