On Tuesday 9 April, the European Commission presented the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties with a positive initial assessment of the new European regulation on the removal of terrorist content online, which has been in force for 18 months, based on a report published in mid-February (see EUROPE 13350/12).
Through its representative Olivier Onidi, the Commission explained to MEPs who still needed convincing that the safeguards provided for in the regulation in terms of fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression, had worked.
“There is no evidence that this regulation has infringed individual freedoms”, he explained, noting that no legal action had been taken by any web host or service provider against removal orders.
Regulation 2021/784 requires Member States to take measures to combat the dissemination of terrorist content. The main measure is an injunction to remove or block access to this content, issued by the competent authority designated by each Member State to the content hosting providers. They are then required to comply with the injunction as soon as possible and within one hour of receiving the injunction.
Hosting providers must also do their part to combat the dissemination of such content, in particular by taking specific measures and providing the public with a transparency report on the measures taken. The regulation also provides for the sharing of information with Europol, particularly when death threats are made. According to the Commission, nine such cases have been reported to Europol.
At the end of December, the Commission reported that 349 orders to remove terrorist content had been issued by the competent authorities in six Member States (Spain, Romania, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria). On Tuesday, the German Greens/EFA MEP Patrick Breyer questioned the effectiveness of the regulation, given that no cross-border removal orders have been issued and that material that has been removed may reappear on another channel.
According to the Commission’s representative, this “shows that we have been able to have legislation that very precisely targets the scope of content”. Although few injunctions have been issued to date, this also shows that service providers and content hosts are taking initiatives of their own accord to prevent this material from being put online.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/bnx (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)