Denmark reportedly shelves Chat Control, sends warning for future

Denmark, currently holding the European Council presidency, will no longer push for an EU law requiring the mandatory scanning of electronic messages, known as Chat Control, the country’s justice minister said.

Earlier in Denmark’s presidency, EU lawmakers already postponed a vote on the controversial Child Sexual Abuse Regulation after Germany said it would vote against Chat Control, a contentious measure designed to protect children online.

The measure is hated by most online privacy activists since the provision would mean that online platforms could be served with mandatory child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection orders, including services protected by end-to-end encryption.

Germany, though, stepped in to publicly oppose Chat Control. The country’s leaders argued that it could be abused to monitor all citizens’ private chats, and since Germany has the swing vote in the Council, the measure immediately vanished from the table.

Now, after getting tanked by the Germans, the Danes are apparently giving up. The country’s justice minister Peter Hummelgaard told reporters that Copenhagen will stop pushing for Chat Control implementation – and support voluntary CSAM detections instead.

“This will mean that the search warrant will not be part of the EU presidency’s new compromise proposal, and that it will continue to be voluntary for the tech giants to search for child sexual abuse material," Hummelgaard said.

However, Denmark is concerned that if no agreement is reached even voluntary scanning won’t be in place anymore once the current legal scheme that enables it runs out in April 2026. That’s why the country wants to discuss a possible compromise.

“Right now we are in a situation where we risk completely losing a central tool in the fight against sexual abuse of children,” Hummelgaard said. “That's why we have to act no matter what. We owe it to all the children who are subjected to monstrous abuse.”

Activists disagree. They say Chat Control, incompatible with how encryption works, would open the door to mass surveillance of EU citizens.

Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, said earlier Signal would rather leave the EU market than comply with the potential new regulation, adding that protection of children is just a “guise.”

Former MEP for the German Pirate Party and digital rights jurist Patrick Breyer has called the new approach “a triumph for the digital freedom movement and a major leap forward when it comes to saving our fundamental right to confidentiality of our digital correspondence.”

Still, he sees fundamental problems remaining. According to Berger, private messages are still surveilled en masse by private service providers such as Meta, Microsoft, or Google, for example, so “the new Danish proposal requires substantially more work.”

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