(Brussels) Child protection versus protection of private life: EU states appeared divided on Thursday over a regulation intended to combat the dissemination of images and videos of a child-criminal nature, which could still be subject to long talks.
Presented in May 2022 by the European Commission, this legislative project aims to counter the proliferation of images and videos of sexual abuse of children, and the solicitation of children by child criminals, by requiring online messaging platforms and services to detect and then report such content.
After a debate by Interior Ministers in mid-June, the ambassadors of the Twenty-Seven noted on Thursday during a meeting in Brussels a persistent absence of consensus.
“It appeared that the required qualified majority would simply not be achieved,” according to a Belgian diplomatic source, whose country holds the presidency of the Council of the EU until the end of June.
“The item has been removed from the agenda and consultations will continue calmly,” she continued, stressing that the text remained “a high priority.”
Hungary, which will hold the rotating presidency of the EU from July 1, will be responsible for resuming work in order to arrive at a common position of member states on the text, before starting talks with the European Parliament to finalize it.
Currently, the detection of child criminal content by platforms is done on a voluntary basis, which is largely insufficient given the scale of the problem, believes the EU.
The provider would then be required to automatically analyze the content of communications via this service.
In November, the European Parliament amended the proposal to limit the scope of these surveillance injunctions to users suspected of such actions, and excluding end-to-end encrypted communications from these detection obligations.
According to the Commission, in 2022 the Meta group detected more than 6.6 million images or videos relating to sexual abuse of children involving a user in the EU on Messenger and Instagram, and closed 2.3 million user accounts in connection with child sexual exploitation.
