In the coming days, the Hungarian EU Council Presidency will find it difficult to establish a common position among member states’ government representatives on the EU Commission’s hotly contested draft for a regulation on online surveillance under the banner of the fight against child sexual exploitation. abuse. Last month, the Netherlands considered supporting, or at least abstaining from, the presidential motion. That would have raised questions about the blocking minority against chat control, according to which four member states with at least 35 percent of the EU’s population can block approval of a dossier. But on Tuesday the government in The Hague made clear that it still did not see itself in a position to vote for the initiative.
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Hungary Suggested in SeptemberLimiting controversial disclosure orders to known depictions of abuse. Evidence of stalking (grooming) of children via the Internet should be excluded, along with the discovery of new photos or videos. Originally, the Spanish Council leadership at the time had made this effort a year earlier. The Hungarian approach still seems to enjoy greater support than its predecessors. Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel from the right-wing liberal VVD But now it was announced in the Parliament: Hungary also did not adequately take into account the Government’s concerns about the protection of fundamental rights in the areas of privacy and telecommunications confidentiality, as well as the security of the digital space. We will therefore not support the Council’s planned general direction.
Dutch spies don’t want control over chat
End-to-end encryption must remain possible, the Dutch executive stressed. Client-side scanning of “child pornography” directly on end devices, which is still within the scope of regulation, would represent a “huge security risk to the digital resilience of the Netherlands”. First, the Dutch Secret Service Rejected draft regulationBecause “the introduction of a scanning application on every mobile phone” with the associated infrastructure to evaluate the collected data would be a complex and widespread system that would pose risks to digital resilience. Opposition party Groenlinks-PVDA also issued a warning open letter from tuesday Together with civil society organisations, we provide a targeted, evidence-based approach that protects privacy and effectively tackles child exploitation. However, the proposal on the table is based on untested technology. This is likely to weaken encryption and enable authoritarian regimes to engage in mass surveillance.
In late September, hundreds of scientists warned with very similar arguments that the current draft made only minor changes compared to previous versions and that fundamental problems, such as the weakening of reliable encryption, remained. Hungary nevertheless decided on this project Agenda of Standing Representative Committee A meeting of the Council (Korpar) is scheduled for Wednesday, with the Ministers of Justice and Interior to prepare the relevant decisions on 10 or 11 October. In previous attempts, Germany, Sweden and Austria, among others, had declared that they could not agree on the text. Poland also followed this line, but is no longer one of the decisive opponents.
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Monitoring document in EU Council: No deal again on chat controls
