The Danish Presidency of the European Union has revived the “Proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” by presenting it for discussion at the European Council. The original draft bill can be found here but the text is currently being mediated by diplomats of EU member-states.
Malta’s MEPs are opposing it. There was an article by the Times of Malta about the bill here.
The bill is technology neutral and does not ban end-to-end encryption. Even if the EU bans end-end- encryption it would never be able to enforce such a law. End-to-end encryption software and tools are freely available online.
The bill introduces a new legal measure called “detection orders” (Article 10) which obliges large online platforms to apply EU-approved software and tools unto the platform to search for illegal content of pedophilia. This measure is being crticised as being potentially too intrusive as it may also intrude into the private chats of online users.
The European Union has very legitimate reasons to propose this bill. In the past ten years, but even more in since the Covid-pandemic there has been an exponential rise of illegal child-sex abuse content upload unto platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The rise in illegal child-sex abuse content became very pervasive and also public as it seeped into popular culture from relatively big online accounts.
The EU is adding a new layer of surveillance to mitigate this widespread illegal practice. However, the EU could have also addressed this problem by encouraging member-states to enforce existing rules and increase budgets of child and sex-crime police units instead of adding a new bureaucratic layer of surveillance that can be potentially abused by illiberal governments.
Feature image is Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard who is advocating for the said EU bill.
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