Belgium, (Brussels Morning Newspaper) Empowering adolescents and strengthening the EU governance of digital media are among the urgent actions required to tackle the digital determinants of adolescent wellbeing. On this topic, the European Union is on the verge of becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to mandate electronic communication service providers to detect and report child sexual abuse online (CSA) and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The European Commission adopted a proposal for a Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse last May 2022. This came after multiple calls from the European Parliament, notably in the Resolution of 26 November 2019 on children’s rights on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the rights of the child, initiated by the Child Rights Intergroup.
As is often the case with ground-breaking pieces of legislation that introduce novelties, the proposal on the table is drawing a great deal of attention from all over the world and triggered a heated debate and fervent criticism from digital rights activists.
This proposal will replace Regulation 2021/1232 on a temporary derogation from certain provisions of Directive 2002/58/EC as regards the use of technologies by providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services for the processing of personal and other data for the purpose of combating online child sexual abuse.
The Temporary Derogation sparked a heated debate in the European Parliament, which dragged the negotiations well beyond the original deadline set on December 2020, when the Electronic Communication Code entered into force, effectively prohibiting online services providers to detect and report CSAM in online communication services.
As a result, the number of child sexual abuse reports to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children plummeted in the period between December 2020 and July 2021 – when the temporary derogation was adopted, as Meta and other major electronic communication services providers switched off their tools to detect CSAM.
MEP Hilde Vautmans, Co-Chair of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights and Renew Europe negotiator in the EU regulation to prevent and combat child
sexual abuse, delivered a keynote speech at the high-level panel on the need for EU regulation to tackle child sexual abuse material online on 20 March 2023 organized by the European Child Sexual Abuse Legislation Advocacy Group (ECLAG). The high-level event also featured keynote speeches from MEP Javier Zarzalejos, Rapporteur of the file, and actor and philanthropist, Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Thorn, and a panel discussion with experts, including Mié Kohiyama, co-chair of the EU Survivors Task Force, co-founder of Brave Movement France.
“The wounds child sexual abuse online leaves are hard to heal and they will never heal until we ensure that the images are taken down and removed from the internet forever. It is crucial that we hold the online world and its users accountable to the same responsibilities that we fight for offline. For far too long, we have been complacent with the enormous power giant tech companies hold in our daily lives. We have silently accepted our powerlessness before algorithms in exchange for alleged freedom, in exchange for privacy protection.”- said MEP Vautmans.
“People are afraid to discuss the EU law [Proposal for an EU Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse] because they do not understand the technology to detect such content. This proposal can be ground-breaking for both privacy and the fight against child sexual abuse material online. It is a moment for we should all come together and have a real conversation about the technologies, putting aside all the political rhetoric and the political debate for vote jockeying”. – said Ashton Kutcher, co-founder, of Thorn.
The clock is ticking and we are running out of time as the lapse of the Temporary Regulation is looming ahead, weighing in as a Damocles sword. If the Regulation is not adopted before next 3 August 2024, when the temporary derogation will expire, electronic communication services providers will again be confronted by legal uncertainty and will therefore be forced to switch off the tools to detect CSAM on their networks.
“As European Parliament, we have a moral obligation to follow up on the Commission’s legislative proposal, presented in May 2022. We have learned through the staggering increase of sexual child abuse material online, that voluntary measures are not enough, however. There have also been some concerns about privacy protection with regard to the legislative proposal. We strongly believe the proposal on the table contains sufficient privacy protection safeguards. Privacy and the protection of children are both fundamental rights, and they can indeed go hand in hand.” – concluded MEP Vautmans.
