Today, the EU Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) voted in favour of its recently presented compromise on the EU Commission’s proposed “Regulation on laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” (in short, CSAM Regulation). With this compromise, the lead EU parliamentary committee imposes clear limitations on the proposed chat controls and opposes the weakening of end-to-end encryption.
Alexandra Koch-Skiba, Head of the eco Complaints Office, comments on the latest developments of the CSAM Regulation:
“Today’s vote is a clear rejection of efforts to introduce extensive chat control and therefore far-reaching scanning and to undermine any form of end-to-end security technology. This is an important signal for the trilogue negotiations!
“While we can see that the adjustments to the regulation proposed by the EU Civil Liberties Committee in terms of limiting chat controls are a step in the right direction, inaccuracies and problematic provisions persist in other areas of the draft regulation. It is essential that these are ironed out in the trilogue. The focus of the regulation must be on combatting the sexual abuse of children, and must remain so. Expanding the regulation to include age verification requirements in relation to adult content websites or renaming the planned EU Centre as the ‘EU Centre for Child Protection’ threatens to increasingly dilute the regulation.
“It is also crucial that the important role of the hotlines in the Member States and the INHOPE network is adequately recognised. The hotline network must be a cooperation partner and key player in the CSAM Regulation.”
It is still unclear as to when the so-called trilogue negotiations with the EU Commission and EU Council can begin, because while the EU Commission is sticking to its controversial regulation text, the state representation in the EU Council has not yet reached a consensus on a position.
