On 2 July the Council adopted the position reinstating the voluntary scanning regime for private communications that expired in April. In the European Parliament, at second reading, 361 votes are needed to block it.
On 2 July the Council of the European Union adopted the first-reading position reinstating the temporary regulation known as Chat Control: a derogation from ePrivacy rules that allows messaging and email service providers to voluntarily scan users’ private communications for child sexual abuse material, within the framework of measures for child protection online. The previous derogation expired on 3 April 2026; the new text reinstates it without substantive changes until 3 April 2028, pending the permanent regulation against child sexual abuse still under negotiation between Parliament and the Council.
On 26 March the European Parliament had rejected the extension of the same regime by 311 votes against, 228 in favour and 92 abstentions, closing the first reading of the file. Since then voluntary scanning has operated without a legal basis: companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Snap had nonetheless announced their intention to continue detection activity – an activity that according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation now risks violating EU law.
The Council’s move shifts the file onto a different procedural track. The position adopted on 2 July passes to the Parliament for a second reading, where the rules are the reverse of the March vote: to reject or amend the text, an absolute majority of members is required – 361 votes; in its absence, the Council’s position is automatically adopted.
The calendar is tight. At the request of the European People’s Party, the chamber voted today, Tuesday 7 July, on whether to invoke the urgency procedure; if approved, the final vote is scheduled for Thursday 9 July, the last plenary session before the summer recess. “Normally, when Parliament rejects a text, the Council stops working on it. Now we are being forced into a second vote,” Green MEP Markéta Gregorová told Euronews.
For Patrick Breyer, former MEP for the Pirate Party and a long-standing critic of the file, this amounts to a procedural trick: as long as governments can extend by this route what he describes as “the convenient status quo of voluntary and indiscriminate mass scanning,” he writes, they have no incentive to accept the more targeted framework that emerged from Parliament.
The technical objections remain those raised throughout the negotiation: researchers Carmela Troncoso and Bart Preneel, along with more than 800 academics who signed open letters against the proposal, have warned that available scanning technologies produce “unacceptably high error rates.” The outcome now depends on the numbers in the chamber: without an absolute majority of 361 votes to stop it, the Council’s text becomes law.
