The European Parliament’s rapporteur on the interim legislation allowing Internet platforms to derogate from the e-privacy directive (on the confidentiality of private communications) in order to track down child sexual abuse material, Birgit Sippel (S&D, German), wants to limit this possibility to 1 year, rather than 2 years (until mid-2026), as proposed by the Commission at the end of November (see EUROPE 13318/3).
This interim regulation should therefore expire on 3 May 2025 rather than 3 August 2026, she suggests in her draft report published on Wednesday 17 January.
The MEP also proposes that grooming should no longer be included in this voluntary search for material, and specifies the type of information that the internet giants should report (type and number of data items processed, number of cases of abuse, number of complaints lodged via the platform’s internal mechanisms or before the courts, and the success of these procedures, etc.).
Her draft report will be presented to the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties on 29 January.
This interim legislation should make it possible to continue the current derogation from the e-privacy directive in order to carry out this voluntary search for material. It expires in August 2024.
The Member States are stalling over the highly controversial regulation proposed in May 2022 by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, on the removal of online child sexual abuse material, which is intended to replace this derogation in the long term.
“As European Parliament, we have worked very hard to develop a position on the permanent Child Sexual Abuse regulation that strikes the right balance. Unfortunately, the Council does not seem equally determined to come up with a position on their part. Therefore, we are now forced to extend the interim regulation due to the lack of action by the Council,” Ms Sippel reacted to EUROPE on January 18.
But “the EP is very clear: this interim regulation is supposed to be a temporary solution and must not become a permanent solution in disguise,” she warns.
Recognizing that action is needed to avoid a legal vacuum, “we must ensure a continuous strong protection of fundamental rights and review justifications when there are shortcomings regarding proportionality”, adds the MEP.
“Therefore, our draft report directly reacts to the results of the implementation report (published in December by the Commission, EUROPE 13280/11) and therefore excludes 'grooming' from the scope of the provisional regulation, since the report could not provide data on its effectiveness in combating child sexual abuse”.
“We have also added a template to harmonize the reporting of cases and facilitate the examination,” specifies Ms Sippel, who hopes that these new guarantees and limitations will put positive pressure on the Council of the EU to adopt quickly the overdue settlement of 2022.
While welcoming his German colleague’s report in a press release, MEP Patrick Breyer (Greens/EFA, German) remains highly critical of this ‘voluntary’ tracking work.
“Instead of adopting the European Parliament’s new approach to more effective, court-proof child protection without mass surveillance, EU Commissioner Johansson wrongly insists on destroying the digital privacy of correspondence, playing for time and hoping to manipulate critical states”.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/afv (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)