The Constitutional Council gave the green light on Saturday to the LREM bill, adopted at the end of July, providing for compelling publishers and web hosts to remove so-called terrorist content within the hour.
The law imposes the removal of “terrorist content” online within the hour from all hosting service providers and introduces the possibility for national authorities to issue cross-border removal orders.
Refusal to comply with the withdrawal of this content is punishable by one year's imprisonment and a fine of 250,000 euros and can, in extreme cases, go up to 4% of the turnover of the digital platform.
The recourse of the Insoumis
In their appeal, the Insoumis considered that the text carried “a manifest attack on the freedom of expression and communication guaranteed by article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789”.
In its decision, the Constitutional Council considers that “the disputed provisions do not violate freedom of expression and communication” and “consequently judges them to be constitutional”.
The Sages stress in particular that terrorist content “constitutes abuses of the freedom of expression and communication which seriously undermine public order and the rights of third parties”.
The withdrawal order must also "include not only the reference to the type of content concerned, but also a sufficiently detailed motivation", welcome the Wise Men.
It is the Central Office for the Fight against Crime Related to Information and Communication Technologies (OCLCTIC), a service of the judicial police, which has been appointed to issue the withdrawal injunctions.