The European Media Freedom Act is meant to protect the press from government overreach. But behind closed doors, a group of EU member states are threatening to block the new law over their demands for a blank check to use spyware for the purposes of “national security”.
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The European Media Freedom Act is meant to protect the press from government overreach. But behind closed doors, a group of EU member states are threatening to block the new law over their demands for a blank check to use spyware for the purposes of “national security”.
When Rosa Moussaoui found out her phone had been targeted by the infamous Pegasus spyware, she felt a sense of violence and intrusion. “It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions”, she said.
For Moussaoui, a journalist for French newspaper L’Humanité who investigates human rights abuses by the Moroccan government, the surveillance, though invisible and very hard to trace, created a tangible loss of trust by sources with whom “in most cases I’ve lost contact,” she told members of the European Parliament in March this year. While she continues to work as investigative journalist, being targeted by Pegasus has taken a toll. She felt more on edge during her work, and was worried about the people she spoke with.
But Moussaoui’s testimony, and that of other journalists from across Europe, seems to have done little to move the needle in convincing some EU players that journalists need more protection from abusive authorities.
Instead, EU countries are pushing to weaken rules meant to protect journalists from surveillance, a cross-border investigation shows.
“It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions."Internal documents obtained by Investigate Europe, Disclose and Follow the Money show that a group of governments – those of France, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, Sweden and Cyprus – have threatened to block talks with the European Parliament in a bid to justify the use of spyware on their computers and phones if their security authorities declare this to be a measure to “safeguard national security”.
The law aims to protect the independence of journalists from interference by governments and media owners – but now, countries and EU lawmakers are fighting over whether the regulation shall limit the use of spyware and other forms of surveillance by intelligence services.
“This is the most difficult part of the fight for this legislative text,” said Ramona Strugariu, a lawmaker from the liberal Renew Group and co-lead lawmaker for the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). After 15 months of negotiations between the member states in the Council of the EU, the European Commission, and the Parliament, the institutions must now agree on a joint text in the so-called trilogue negotiations.
Their next crucial meeting is scheduled for Friday, December 15, during which the EU brokers are hoping to strike a deal. Behind closed doors, negotiators for the Parliament and the Council have presented two fundamentally different positions on a central requirement for independent journalism: the protection of whistleblowers and confidential sources. This “is one of the basic conditions for press freedom”, the European Court of Human Rights declared in 2022. Without this protection, “the vital public-watchdog role of the press as guardian of the public sphere may be undermined”.
The European Media Freedom Act
The European Media Freedom Act was proposed by the Commission following outrage over reports of spying on journalists and members of civil society. In July 2021, the “Pegasus Papers” investigation revealed that the government of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán had used the Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of journalists who had produced reporting critical of the government. The European Parliament set up a special committee of enquiry into the issue and called for the sale of spyware to be banned until the exceptional cases in which the state is authorised to use it are clearly defined in law.
Subsequently, journalists in Poland, Greece, Spain and Bulgaria were also found to have been targeted by intrusive spyware – in most cases, the protection of “national security” was invoked as reason.
Meanwhile, the Commission’s proposal, published in September 2022, goes beyond addressing surveillance against journalists. It is meant to safeguard editorial independence of public service media, ensure fairness in state advertising and help to safeguard media pluralism. According to negotiators, the Parliament and member states are still struggling to reconcile their positions on most major points. As an investigation by Follow the Money revealed, the publisher’s lobby had a huge influence especially on member states’ positions.
In October, a large majority of EU lawmakers passed a text in Parliament that would set strict limits on the surveillance of journalists. According to Article 4 of the draft law, journalists could only be wire-tapped or investigated using spyware if this
is unrelated to the journalists’ professional activities; doesn’t affect or disclose access to journalists’ sources; is justified on a case-by-case basis to prevent or prosecute a serio