Partial victory with a catch: EU Parliament temporarily defies chat control

The struggle for EU chat control in Brussels continues. After six months of intensive negotiations under the Cypriot Council presidency, Parliament's negotiators report substantial compromises in almost all areas of the planned regulation to protect children from sexual abuse online. However, behind the scenes, a power struggle over digital privacy continues, with legislative bodies increasingly resorting to unconventional means.

As the Parliament's negotiating team announced after the so-called trilogue on Monday, the negotiators could not agree again on core issues of Chat Control 2.0 – the mandatory and suspicion-independent scanning of private communication, even for encrypted messengers. According to the MEPs, they withstood the massive pressure from the member states and defended their red line against blanket mass surveillance.

Reportedly, the parties involved made progress on contentious issues such as future age verification. However, options for scanning encrypted chats for abuse material remain hotly debated. An agreement on the package is therefore postponed. The Digital Society Association considers this an important interim victory: The ongoing civil society protest is showing its effect.

Legal crowbar in the Council of Ministers

At the same time, a counter-offensive is forming in the Council of Ministers and within the conservative European People's Party (EPP). With a politically and legally highly unusual maneuver, proponents of surveillance are trying to bypass Parliament. The focus is on reactivating the already expired Chat Control 1.0.

This E-Privacy exception rule allowed tech giants to voluntarily search chats for abuse material. Since Parliament has already rejected a formal extension of this rule and the regulation has thus officially expired, EU governments are now resorting to a legal crowbar.

Because an expired regulation cannot formally be extended, the Council plans to rewrite the original legislative proposal. Instead of a simple deadline extension, a formally new law with identical content will be created in an expedited procedure. According to critics, this approach would not only effectively circumvent the EU Commission's right of initiative but also bypass inconvenient democratic control bodies. This trick would also eliminate the need for a new opinion from the European Data Protection Supervisor and an impact assessment of fundamental rights infringements.

Attempt to surprise before the summer break

To push through this new draft, governments in the Council are switching to turbo mode. Since Parliament has its last session before the summer break next week and will not reconvene until September, time is pressing. To shorten the regular process via a Council meeting, the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the EU Member States has put the topic on the agenda by written procedure. The draft is thus to be pushed onto Parliament's agenda for next week in an accelerated procedure to surprise the MEPs.

According to information from negotiation circles, the German federal government is among the driving forces behind this attempt. The statements by leading politicians from the SPD and CDU that indiscriminate chat control is taboo thus threaten to become completely irrelevant.

(wpl)