11 July 2026 - 1:00pm
On Thursday, the European Parliament “adopted” the extension of Chat Control 1.0. This is the temporary suspension of the EU’s ePrivacy rules that allows tech platforms to mass-scan citizens’ private communications, ostensibly to detect child sexual abuse material. “Adopted” is placed in quotation marks here because the word implies something that conspicuously failed to happen: a majority of MEPs voting in favour. In fact, 314 MEPs voted to reject the text, against 276 in favour. And yet it passed anyway.
This was made possible through a procedural sleight of hand worthy of Brussels at its most cynical. The file was rammed through under an “urgency procedure”: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola unilaterally reopened a dossier that MEPs had already rejected in March, and the Council conveniently bounced it back at the start of the summer recess, when securing attendance is hardest. Rejecting it a second time would have required not a simple majority but an absolute one: 360 votes. The law was therefore approved despite a majority of MEPs voting against it. The regulation will now remain in force until April 2028, buying time for negotiations on its even more ambitious successor, Chat Control 2.0.
As German MEP Fabio De Masi noted following the vote, Chat Control is a “legislative zombie” — a measure the European Parliament has rejected multiple times, revived again and again until the desired outcome emerges. This episode should give pause to those who insist that the EU’s democratic deficit could be cured by handing more power to the European Parliament. Here is that very institution’s president working with the Council to resurrect a file the Parliament itself had buried. If this is how the Parliament operates, empowering it further would only deepen this democratic deficit, lending a thicker veneer of legitimacy to what remains, at bottom, an executive-bureaucratic machine that treats votes as obstacles to be engineered around.
Defenders of the outcome point to a supposed silver lining: an amendment from the liberal Renew group excluding from the law’s scope communications to which end-to-end encryption “is, has been, or will be applied”, such as WhatsApp messages. Some MEPs have hailed this as a glimmer of hope, and it likely helped peel off enough votes to prevent outright rejection. But the amendment sits in flat contradiction with the entire logic of mass scanning, which is precisely why the Council, where the file is led by interior ministries with little appetite for privacy niceties, is widely expected to strike it out when the package lands on its desk in the coming three months. It’s a fig leaf, in other words, designed to be removed further down the line.
The re-elected Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) President Svenja Hahn called the vote “a disgrace”, warning that it “opens the door for mass surveillance of all private communication” and that “the surveillance of private chats pushed by EU states is a threat for our freedom and democracy.” Lyudmyla Kozlovska of the Open Dialogue Foundation placed it in a broader pattern of “a sweeping power justified by an urgent-sounding purpose, then quietly normalised” — first financial privacy, then travellers’ data, now messages. The real battle, she noted, comes in September over Chat Control 2.0.
And that is the point. Chat Control was never really about children. This scanning of private correspondence — something no one would tolerate if applied to paper letters — does little to catch actual predators, who operate on the dark net, while drowning police in false positives. By Swiss federal police estimates, some 80% of machine-flagged content is not even illegal. What it does build is permanent infrastructure for total surveillance, ripe for function creep and abuse, atop mandatory age verification that would end online anonymity for whistleblowers, journalists and dissidents alike. Former MEP Patrick Breyer put it best last year: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine.” That machine has now cleared another hurdle.
Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.
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