Citizen Protest Halts Chat Control; Breyer Celebrates Major Victory for Digital Privacy
www.patrick-breyer.de
In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU's controversial Chat Control regulation today after facing massive public pressure. This blocks the required majority in the EU Council, derailing the plan to pass the surveillance law next week

…again. If it sounds familiar it’s not just you. But they’ve been back on “undecided” shortly after. Let’s hope this is the actual final decision.

    • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
      10·
      15 hours ago

      I believe that the point of the Czechia situation was that it was a modification to the constitution; this will have a higher bar to change than would be the case for simply enacting an ordinary law. The idea was to entrench the status quo behind the bar for constitutional modification.

      kagis

      Looks like it’s a 60% supermajority in each legislative house:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Czech_Republic#Amending_the_Constitution

      With reference to the provision of the article 39, paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which states that “for the enactment of a constitutional act, 3/5 of all deputies must agree, and 3/5 of senators present”, changing the constitution is a more difficult procedure than changing an ordinary statute, making it an entrenched constitution in the typology of constitutions. Despite the tradition of entrenched constitutions throughout Czech history, some voiced the opinion, during the preparation of the Constitution of the Czech Republic, that this one should be flexible.

      So to produce such an effect, if there are laws that would prohibit bans on end-to-end encryption, say, those laws would need to be constitutional law or similar in an EU member state where such a law has a higher-than-ordinary bar to change.