On 9 July 2026, Parliament considered in second reading the temporary extension of an ePrivacy derogation. The rejection motion obtained 314 votes in favour, 276 against and 17 abstentions, without reaching the required 360 votes; Parliament subsequently adopted amendments.

The Essentials

  • On 26 March 2026, Chat Control is rejected by 314 votes against 276; on 9 July, the same numerical result produces the opposite effect: the text is adopted.
  • In urgent procedure at the European Parliament, the threshold for rejecting a text rises to 361 votes, that is the majority of members, regardless of the number present.
  • The EUDI Wallet, whose mandatory deployment is scheduled for December 2026, rests on the same identification infrastructure as that provided for by Chat Control.
  • A majority of elected representatives opposed to a text may not constitute an effective refusal if the procedure redistributes the voting thresholds.

Two Identical Votes, Two Opposite Results

In March 2026, the vote is direct. In second reading, simple majority is not sufficient to reject or modify the Council’s position; an absolute majority of Parliament’s members is required. On 26 March 2026, the rejection of the proposed extension was adopted by 311 votes to 228, with 92 abstentions. This is the ordinary functioning of a deliberative assembly: whoever has more votes wins.

On 9 July 2026, Parliament considered in second reading the temporary extension of an ePrivacy derogation. In second reading, Parliament must gather the absolute majority of its members to reject or modify the Council’s position; this requirement does not, in itself, stem from the urgent procedure. Parliament indicated a threshold of 360 votes for this vote. The rejection motion obtained 314 votes in favour, without reaching this threshold; Parliament subsequently adopted amendments.

The urgent procedure exists to accelerate the adoption of texts deemed pressing by a qualified majority of the assembly. The absence of Parliament’s action in second reading can lead to approval of the Council’s position; urgency does not by itself lead to adoption by default, and on 9 July Parliament voted on amendments. The procedure shifts the burden of proof without neutralizing opponents.

The rejection motion obtained 314 votes in favour and 276 against, without reaching the required threshold. Parliament subsequently adopted amendments.

The Concrete Obligations of Chat Control

The text of 9 July concerns a temporary derogation authorizing voluntary detection activities, amended by Parliament to exclude end-to-end encrypted communications. No primary source shows that it imposes client-side analysis or that scanning occurs on the device before encryption. The text of 9 July does not establish that the content of encrypted communications is made accessible before encryption.

The text’s supporters emphasize its objective: combating the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), a documented and serious problem. The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) regularly reports the increase in the volume of such material circulating on encrypted platforms. The purpose of the text is not in question.

The 314 parliamentarians from the first vote and legal specialists in digital law contest the mechanism adopted. This analysis cannot be attributed to the text amended on 9 July 2026, which excludes end-to-end encrypted communications. A client-side filter does not distinguish innocents from the guilty before operating: it monitors the entire stream to extract a fraction.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) issued several critical opinions on previous versions of the text, considering that generalized surveillance was disproportionate to the objectives pursued. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) formulated analogous reservations. These opinions are not binding.

The Infrastructure Shared with the EUDI Wallet

The timetable adds a dimension that the debate on Chat Control has scarcely integrated. Member States must provide at least one EUDI Wallet by the end of 2026, but no primary source shows a common identification infrastructure between the EUDI Wallet and the ePrivacy device or “Chat Control”.

Primary texts provide for neither a common EUDI reference framework nor the necessity for it for reports. The EUDI Wallet is designed as a trust system for civil and administrative transactions. It also constitutes a potential entry point for communications surveillance.

This architecture creates a dual infrastructure whose future uses are not entirely constrained by current texts. A system designed to simplify access to public services can serve other purposes if legal safeguards evolve. The question of who controls digital infrastructure precedes that of regulating uses.

The Choice of Urgent Procedure

The procedural choice must be named for what it is: a political decision. The urgent procedure was requested on 1 July 2026 by a political group; the primary sources examined do not allow this request or its support to be attributed to the European Commission. This calculation proved correct: it was verified.

The urgent procedure is not illegal. It is provided for in Parliament’s rules of procedure. Its intensive use on texts with high impact—digital, internal security, surveillance—is, however, a documented trend over several legislatures. It allows acceleration of the adoption of sensitive texts by reducing the time for opposition mobilization and by imposing a rejection threshold that structured minorities struggle to cross.

The 314 votes were not sufficient to reject the Council’s position, but the final vote resulted in an amended position, notably on end-to-end encryption. Their position is recorded in the archives, without legal effect. This mechanism has already produced this result in the past, but rarely with such a visible gap between the raw figure and the effect produced.

The temptation to circumvent majorities through procedure is not a European specialty. But it takes a particular form in supranational institutions, where procedural arbitrations are less visible than in national parliaments and less exposed to immediate public debate.

The Capacity for Refusal as a Test of Supranational Democracy

A democracy functions if its mechanisms allow two things: adopting collective decisions and refusing them. The capacity for refusal is often less well-equipped than the capacity for adoption, because institutions structurally tend to favour action over blocking. In supranational systems, this asymmetry is reinforced by the distance between elected representatives and voters and by the complexity of procedures.

What happened on 9 July 2026 illustrates an extreme case of this asymmetry. The issue for the coming years is whether correction mechanisms exist and can be activated.

Several paths are open. The first is judicial: the text can be challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union on the basis of fundamental rights, notably the right to privacy guaranteed by the Charter. The CJEU has already annulled directives on massive data surveillance, the Data Retention Directive in 2014, and Privacy Shield in 2020, when it found the infringement of rights disproportionate. This precedent is not a guarantee, but it indicates a possible trajectory.

The second path is legislative. A regulation is directly applicable in Member States; it does not need to be transposed like a directive. Several of them, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and a few others, expressed substantive reservations during negotiations. Partial transposition or transposition contested by national constitutional courts would create fragmentation of applicable law, making the text difficult to apply uniformly. Germany in particular has a solid jurisprudential tradition in the protection of private communications, anchored in the Basic Law.

The third path is internal regulatory: the European Parliament’s rules of procedure can be amended. A sufficiently large group of parliamentarians could pursue a revision of the conditions for using the urgent procedure, by limiting its use to texts that do not affect fundamental rights or by requiring an explicit vote to activate it by qualified majority. This path is slow and politically difficult, but it is the only one that addresses the mechanism rather than its effects.

The fourth path is political: the 2029 European elections will allow parties that voted against the text to make the issue a focus in national campaigns. The clarity of the 9 July vote, 314 against, text adopted, is a rare pedagogical argument. It says clearly, without intermediary, what the procedure allows to be done to a majority of elected representatives.

The 2028-2030 horizon is when several of these dynamics could converge or diverge. If the CJEU invalidates the text, the debate resumes on clear bases. If national transpositions fragment application, the text remains on paper but without uniform effect. If the revision of the rules of procedure succeeds, the procedure loses its potential for circumvention. These scenarios are not mutually exclusive.

What remains in all cases is a question about the perceived legitimacy of the supranational legislative system. Confidence in European institutions rests partly on the conviction that votes of elected representatives produce predictable effects. When the link between the result of a vote and its legal effect becomes opaque, it is this conviction that erodes, regardless of the content of the text in question.

The Scope of the 314 Votes for the Next Vote

The vote of 9 July 2026 leaves a useful trace, precisely because it is clear. One can explain to any citizen what happened in two sentences, and that citizen will understand. This clarity is a political resource.

It can serve two distinct things. First, to document how a procedural mechanism can produce a result contrary to the expressed will of a relative majority, and to bring this documentation into public debate on the reform of institutions. Second, to organize mobilization so that the threshold of 360 votes is reached at a future second reading vote.

In March 2026, Parliament rejected the extension of a temporary ePrivacy derogation, not the permanent regulation for combating child sexual abuse online. It has 314 parliamentarians who voted against in July, knowing that it would not be enough. Their names are public and their groups are identifiable. Gathering 46 additional votes at a vote requiring 360 votes is less a matter of converting new elected representatives than of mobilizing abstainers and absentees.

Supranational democracy is young, its procedures are complex, and its relationship with citizens remains fragile. But it also produces documented votes, accessible archives and amendable rules of procedure. The vote of 9 July 2026 does not close the debate on Chat Control. It shifts its terrain.

Sources

  1. Whaller Legal Blog – Chat Control, messaging surveillance, 9 July 2026: https://blog.whaller.com/2026/07/09/chat-control-surveillance-messageries-2026/
  2. European Parliament – official results of the vote of 26 March 2026 (Chat Control legislative file)
  3. European Parliament – official results of the vote of 9 July 2026 (urgent procedure)
  4. European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) – opinion on previous versions of the Chat Control regulation
  5. European Data Protection Board (EDPB) – opinion on encrypted communications surveillance
  6. eIDAS 2 Regulation – mandatory deployment of the EUDI Wallet (Official Journal of the European Union)