Five European justice ministers are concerned about ‘chat control’

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The justice ministers of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein have expressed serious concern about the European Commission’s plans to combat images of abused children on the internet.

In a joint letter that the German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann and the four other ministers have sent to their EU colleagues, it is stated that the fight against child sexual abuse on the internet is of great importance to them. However, the protection of the population against unjustified surveillance is a highly democratic asset. “From our point of view, the current draft regulation does not strike the right balance here and could possibly even be counterproductive for the protection of children,” says the letter, which is available to the German news agency.

In May 2022, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson presented a proposal for a regulation to combat the dissemination of child sexual abuse images. Critics use the buzzword ‘chat control’ for this.

Justice ministers refer to reports

The German government had already expressed great concern about the European Commission’s proposal in April. She especially rejects the so-called ‘chat control’, according to the statement that was coordinated between the ministries of family affairs, justice, home affairs and digital affairs. It reads: “From the point of view of the federal government, significant changes to the draft regulation are needed so that it can be approved from a German point of view.”

In their letter, the five justice ministers referred, among other things, to an assessment by the Council’s legal service and an impact assessment by the European Parliament’s research service. Both opinions had shown that far-reaching changes to the proposal were necessary.

“It is a proposal from the Commission, so it is primarily the task of the Commission to comply with the requirements that individual member states submit as declarations,” a spokeswoman for the Federal Interior Ministry said in Berlin on Friday. It is important that the federal government “excludes the use of measures that lead to a weakening or circumvention of end-to-end encryption through specific technical instructions in the draft regulation”. (SDA)

Source: Blick