The European Parliament voted on 10 July to send a revived child sexual abuse material scanning law to EU member states, breathing new life into a measure many critics had hoped was finished. The temporary extension, valid until 2028, allows tech companies to continue voluntarily scanning unencrypted communications and flagged content for child sexual abuse material.
Parliament rejected the same measure in March 2026 by 311 votes to 228; the original law then expired on 3 April. The European People’s Party responded by requesting an urgent procedure on 17 June, forcing a second vote under rules requiring an absolute majority of 361 MEPs to reject any text. On 10 July, 314 voted against and 276 in favour, with 17 abstentions: the measure failed to reach the 361 threshold needed for outright rejection, and passed by procedural default.
The Parliament did adopt two amendments explicitly excluding end-to-end encrypted services from scanning, both clearing the absolute majority threshold at 369 and 362 votes respectively. End-to-end encrypted platforms including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are therefore formally exempted. Signal president Meredith Whittaker had previously said the app would quit the EU rather than break its encryption.
The file now goes to the Council of the EU, which has until roughly 9 October 2026 to accept or reject the Parliament’s amended version.
The Right Found the Strongest Available Frame
The bill’s revival shows that some arguments remain extremely hard to resist in Brussels even when the legal and civil-liberties concerns are serious.
EPP chief Manfred Weber and four European Commissioners personally pressured lawmakers in the days before the vote, and Parliament President Roberta Metsola had urged EU leaders to “move on” with the legislation at the June summit. The fight was not presented as surveillance against privacy in equal terms; it was presented as whether lawmakers were prepared to remove the legal tools used to detect crimes against children.
Europol director Catherine De Bolle had warned that allowing the scanning law to lapse was “vital for the protection of children.” Once that frame dominates, critics have to spend most of their energy proving they are not indifferent to abuse before they can make any privacy case at all.
The encryption carve-out reflects exactly that pressure. It gives supporters a way to claim that private communications remain protected whilst preserving broad scanning permissions elsewhere. But the Council’s own Legal Service had warned as recently as 10 June that even the narrowed scheme sits uneasily with Article 7 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which protects private communications.
For conservatives, the procedural victory was enough to claim momentum. For critics, the method of achieving it was the more alarming development.
The Real Dispute Never Went Away
The vote shows that the underlying European argument has not been resolved.
The core tension remains unchanged: supporters say platforms need legal certainty to detect and report child sexual abuse material; opponents say even voluntary scanning regimes create precedents for mass inspection, function creep and weakened trust in private communication. A scanning regime does not have to break every private message to change the structure of digital trust. It only has to make large-scale inspection seem normal, provisional and politically untouchable.
The bill is significant not because it settles the child-protection question, but because it demonstrates how difficult it is for Europe to reject surveillance once the right moral emergency is attached to it. Conservatives did not win the privacy argument. They found a way to outrun it again, on the last sitting day before summer recess, using a procedure that counted absent MEPs as votes in favour. The permanent “Chat Control 2.0” regulation is still being negotiated. That battle will be harder to decide by procedural default.
Temporary Rules Have a Way of Staying Alive
The revived law is still not the final word. Member states now have until October to decide whether to accept the Parliament’s amended version, and the broader permanent regulation is not resolved.
But the immediate lesson is already clear: in European politics, controversial digital laws rarely die cleanly. They return in narrower, softer or more tactical forms until resistance weakens or procedural conditions shift in their favour.
That is what conservatives achieved here. They turned a defeated-looking proposal into a live legislative file again by exploiting the calendar, the procedure and the emotional power of child-protection politics simultaneously. The bill may still change shape.
But the political principle behind it has survived: when privacy and child protection are forced into direct collision, privacy keeps having to defend itself from the back foot, and Europe’s conservatives know it.
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