Meeting on Tuesday, 8 April, as the Law Enforcement Working Party (Police), Member States’ experts took note of the new compromise proposals that the Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU submitted on the draft regulation on removing online child pornography content, but they have reportedly made no further progress towards an agreement.
Many of them reportedly continued to express reservations without the discussion going into detail about the proposals at this stage.
At the beginning of the year, the Polish Presidency had proposed that the text’s rationale be drastically changed and that the voluntary detection of content be made permanent (see EUROPE 13571/11) in order to bring positions closer together, whereas the European Commission’s initial draft aimed to make this practice compulsory for web hosts and content providers. This time, it proposed, in its text dated 4 April, deleting part of the additions that the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU had introduced, which are associated with the controversial provisions on content detection orders, namely the categorisation of risks – services no longer being categorised according to the level of risk.
The definition of encryption has also been simplified and has become the following: “This Regulation shall not be interpreted as prohibiting, weakening, or circumventing end-to-end encryption, implemented by the relevant information society services or by the users. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent providers from offering end-to-end encrypted services.”
A precautionary provision has also been added on voluntary detection, which must not be general and indiscriminate, and the provisions relating to voluntary detection have been further integrated into the text. Once again, it thus clarifies that none of the provisions in the regulation should be interpreted “as amounting to any obligation for providers to detect child sexual abuse on their services. It should only be possible to conduct detection on a voluntary basis.”
A definition of the audio material covered by this regulation has also been added (“voice communication that allows users of interpersonal communications services to interact with each other”).
The previous compromise abolishing compulsory detection had antagonised those in favour of a firm response, who had supported the EU Council’s work up to that point.
Member States are now expected to be asked to provide their written comments to the Polish Presidency.
Link to the compromise: https://aeur.eu/f/gbv (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic with Anne Damiani)