At its plenary session in Strasbourg on Tuesday 13 June, the European Parliament approved by a large majority the Interinstitutional Agreement on the two texts enabling electronic evidence to be requested. The MEPs approved the regulation on evidence orders by 433 votes to 157 with 34 abstentions, and the directive on legal representatives by 438 votes to 152 with 34 abstentions. The European Parliament and the Council reached agreement on this package after eight interinstitutional meetings last November (see EUROPE 13074/15).
Under the terms of the agreement, the Regulation establishes an order for the production of electronic evidence, while the Directive requires service providers, whether inside or outside the EU, to designate a legal representative or a specific establishment responsible for receiving and processing orders for the production of evidence.
In addition, the law maintains the mandatory 10-day deadline for responding to a production order, but offers the possibility of reducing it to 8 hours in the event of a duly established emergency. A system of notifications will be established and the executing State will have 10 days, or 96 hours in an emergency, to raise the grounds for refusal. In this case, the service provider must refrain from transferring the data and the issuing authority will withdraw the request.
MEPs also took care to establish that, in most cases, authorities requesting sensitive data must inform the authorities of the target country in order to guarantee transparency.
After the vote, the text’s rapporteur, Birgit Sippel (S&D, German), said: “This is a major step forward for cooperation between law enforcement agencies in the Member States and service providers”. She also assured the House that the European Parliament had “ensured that fundamental rights are protected”, for which she had been thanked by the shadow rapporteur, Moritz Körner (Renew Europe, German), during the debate preceding the vote on Monday 12 June.
The EPP Group’s shadow rapporteur, Nuno Melo (Portuguese), welcomed “a significant step forward in the fight against crime and terrorism in our daily lives”, via Twitter. On the other side of the political spectrum, Sergey Lagodinsky (Greens/EFA, German), also a shadow rapporteur, deplored: “The package adopted today is a step backwards for freedoms! Journalists’ data will be made available without restriction if the government so wishes”. And for Cornelia Ernst (The Left, German), “this new instrument can be misused” against “dissidents” at a time when several “authoritarian governments” are being established in Europe.
After final approval by the EU Council, the texts can be published in the Official Journal of the EU and enter into force twenty days later.
To read the texts adopted: https://aeur.eu/f/7gt (regulation); https://aeur.eu/f/7gu (directive) (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)