At the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council on December 12, the Netherlands will abstain from voting on the Regulation on Combating Online Child Sexual Abuse (CSAM Regulation). Minister Van Weel of Justice and Security announced this in a letter to the House of Representatives.
In early 2022, the European Commission proposed to monitor all chat messages and other traffic from citizens. For end-to-end encrypted chat services, this should be done via client-side scanning. This would inspect all messages from all citizens, including those who are not suspected of anything.
Last October, the House of Representatives passed a motion calling on the government to vote against these European proposals. The minister added that the government does not support proposals that mandate detection through client-side scanning. Van Weel also referred to the advice of the AIVD, which considers the deployment of client-side scanning within the context of the detection order too great a risk to digital resilience.
