The Belgian Presidency of the EU Council will in turn attempt to obtain a general approach on the regulation on the removal of child sexual abuse material from the Internet, on 4 and 5 March, at a formal Council meeting of the EU’s Home Affairs ministers, as it has planned in its work schedule.
Presented in May 2022 by the Commission (see EUROPE 12950/5), this regulation quickly proved controversial because of the orders to detect illegal material that it imposes on content providers and hosts, including private messaging and communications services.
The Spanish Presidency of the EU Council, which has tried several times to put the issue on the agenda of a formal EU Council, has not proposed a compromise text since October, due to a lack of progress in its bilateral consultations with the Member States.
The provisions on protection orders are particularly sensitive for Germany, which proposed in October that they be removed from the regulation in order to move forward. In any case, Belgium wants to make it a priority and at the end of the year regretted the deadlock in negotiations.
It also warned, according to internal EU Council documents revealed by Netzpolitik, that negotiations would be difficult with the European Parliament, which acquired its mandate in November (see EUROPE 13292/10).
And these negotiations will not only be difficult on the draft regulation, on which the European Parliament has placed greater restrictions on detection orders. The same will apply to the temporary legislation (the derogation from the e-privacy directive) proposed by the Commission at the end of November, in the absence of agreement on its regulation.
This temporary legislation will allow these platforms to continue to search for child sexual abuse material content on a voluntary basis until 2026.
The EU Council adopted this temporary legislation on 20 December (see EUROPE 13318/3), but according to Netzpolitik, Belgium is expecting complex discussions with the European Parliament, which had already had difficulty accepting the first derogation from the e-privacy directive to authorise the tracking of such content by platforms.
At the end of December, European Commissioner Ylva Johansson reiterated the need for the EU to adopt this new regulation. This followed the presentation of a report on interim legislation published on 19 December, in which the Commission concluded that these derogations were effective (see EUROPE 13318/4).
A first EU Council working group on law enforcement is scheduled for 19 January.
Link to the Netzpolitik article (in German): https://aeur.eu/f/aad ; and the Commission’s report: https://aeur.eu/f/aab (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)