As planned, on Friday 19 December the European Commission presented a new two-year extension of Regulation 2021/1232 on a “temporary derogation from certain provisions of Directive 2002/58/EC as regards the use of technology by providers of interpersonal communication services (...) to combat the sexual abuse of children online”.
More specifically, it is a derogation from certain provisions of the ePrivacy Directive to combat online child sexual abuse.
Under this derogation, which was due to expire in April 2026, platforms such as WhatsApp, Messenger and other content and private messaging service providers can voluntarily detect child sexual abuse content. With this new proposed extension, these players will still be able to do so until 3 April 2028.
The interim regulation is a temporary solution that will allow these voluntary activities to continue until a new permanent European regulation comes into force. In this case, it is the proposed regulation in 2022 on the removal of such content online, which has just been approved by the Council of the EU and still has to be negotiated in trilogue (see EUROPE 13760/11).
The EU Council’s aim was to ensure these providers could still detect or report cases of child sexual abuse on their platforms, in the absence of a legal framework after April 2026.
In any case, the future Cypriot Presidency of the EU Council would like to move quickly on this extension decision, and possibly obtain an agreement from the EU Council as early as January. It has also scheduled three trilogues at this stage, in addition to the technical meetings: on 26 February, 4 May and 29 June.
The European Parliament rapporteur on the previous extension of this derogation from the e-Privacy Directive, Birgit Sippel (S&D, German), had made no secret in recent months of her refusal to approve a further extension.
Link to the proposal: https://aeur.eu/f/k41 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)