- Denmark has reintroduced the draft scan law of child sexual abuse in dispute (CSAM) on the first day of its EU presidency
- Chat’s proposal call could be adopted as soon as October 14, 2025
- The proposal has not been attracting the necessary majority since May 2022
Denmark began its EU presidency on July 1, 2025 and, among their first actions, the legislators quickly reintroduced the controversial scan invoice of child sexual abuse (CSAM) to the upper part of the agenda.
After being considered by critics as a chat control, the bill aims to introduce new obligations for all messaging services operating in Europe to scan user chats, even if they are encrypted.
However, the proposal has not been attracting the majority necessary since May 2022, being the presidency of Poland the last to renounce said plan.
Denmark is a firm defender of chat control. Now, the new rules could be adopted as soon as October 14, 2025, if the Danish presidency manages to find a midpoint among the members of the countries.
Chat control has returned, what we know so far
The Danish Parliament has not yet revealed the content of the new commitments. At the time of writing this article, we know that another meeting is scheduled by the end of this week (July 11), and legislators are expected to deliberate in the bill on October 14 (see page 31 of the agenda).
We also know that among the objectives of the Danish presidency of the EU, there is a commitment to “focus on strengthening the skills to use digital development for the application of the law by combating serious crime, while adding the misuse of new technologies for criminal or harmful purposes,” says the Denmark program.
The so -called chat control aims to stop the propagation of CSAM content online scanning all communications, especially encrypted. Over the years, however, the proposal has seen some turns and turns as defenders of privacy, technologists and even politicians expressed concerns.
Experts worry that these new obligations undermine encryption protections. Encryption is a technology that WhatsApp, Signal, Protonmail and even the best VPN applications use to stir users’ messages in an illegible way, avoiding unauthorized access and guarantee that chats remain private.
According to their first version, all messaging software providers should perform indiscriminate scanning of private messages to search CSAM, the so -called ‘scan of the client side’. The proposal found a solid violent reaction, and the European Court of Human Rights ended up prohibiting all legal efforts to weaken secure communications encryption in Europe.
In June 2024, Belgium proposed a new text to aim only photos, videos and URL shared with the user’s permission. This version did not satisfy the members of the industry or voted to the EU members due to their coercive nature. According to the Belgian text, users must give their consent for the shared material to be scanned before being encrypted to continue using functionality.
🇬🇧🚨 Under the Danish leadership, #ChatControl will be adopted as soon as October 14! (p. 31) The decisive factor is Germany: neither conservatives nor socialists have still declared the digital privacy of correspondence and safe encryption as a red line.July 1, 2025
Fast progress until February 2025, Poland tried to find a better commitment making the scan of volunteer encrypted chats instead of mandatory and classified as “prevention.” While experts found this version as an “important progress”, they still regretted the risk of mass surveillance and, ultimately, legislators failed to attract the necessary majority.
Then we could expect the Danish text to find a commitment that attracts most of the country’s members.
According to the former Eurodiputa for the German Pirate Party, Patrick Breyer, Denmark, it is crucial that he manages to convince Germany of his proposed text. The new government has not yet taken a position at the time of writing.
However, what is certain is that the controversial draft CSAM scan law is far from being the only proposal that threatens the encryption in Europe.
In the last of these efforts, on June 24, 2025, the EU Commission published the first step in its Protectu strategy, which sought to allow the agencies of the law to decipher their private data by 2030.
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