Jim O’Callaghan, Ireland’s Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, at the press conference of the informal meeting of EU home affairs ministers in Dublin, July 2026. Photo: Council of the EU, © European Union, 2026 (cropped).
On 7 July 2026 the Irish presidency sent the 27 delegations a note on the outcome of the fifth trilogue on the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, Chat Control 2.0, and on the next steps. It is document 11501/26, seven pages, and it sits in the Council’s public register. Until today this site dated the sixth trilogue from internal minutes published by netzpolitik.org on 2 July. The Council’s own note says the same, in its own words, and a little more.
What it says
The fifth trilogue of 29 June “brought significant progress by reaching provisional agreement on almost all the provisions of the proposed Regulation with the exception of detection”. Closed, according to the note: the scope of the regulation, risk assessment and mitigation measures, removal, blocking and delisting orders, and the requirements for national authorities. Age verification is out: the co-legislators “agreed that this Regulation was not the place to regulate age verification”. Voice messages stay within the scope of the regulation but are excluded from detection.
On detection, the one open question, the note records the Parliament as “ready to discuss the building blocks on detection, as proposed by the Cyprus Presidency in May 2026, conditional to the protection of end-to-end encrypted communication and to the respect for the prohibition of a general monitoring obligation”, and as willing to accept “the coexistence of detection orders and own-initiative searches, if a targeted approach and necessary safeguards were applied”. The technical teams were told to look for landing zones inside that frame. The note names no member state.
The dates
Technical meetings on 10 and 18 September prepare “the sixth trilogue scheduled on 29 September 2026 at the Council premises”. The counsellors of the 27 governments meet on the file on 14 September. Two days after the trilogue, on 1 and 2 October, justice and home affairs ministers meet in Luxembourg; the file is not on the draft agenda the Council published in June (document 10983/26), so anything the negotiators bring back would reach ministers under any other business.
What it changes in the record
The date of the sixth trilogue now rests on the Council’s own document rather than on leaked minutes alone. The Chat Control Tracker, Where the 27 governments stand and Who decides, by name were updated today with the note, the technical meetings and the ministers’ meeting of 1 and 2 October. The article on what the 29 September trilogue can decide was corrected: it gave 8 and 9 October for that meeting. The positions of the 27 governments do not change; the note does not speak for any of them.
Record notes are short, dated entries: one document, what it says, what it changes on this site. Sources: Council of the EU, presidency note to delegations, document 11501/26, 7 July 2026, public register; draft agendas for Council meetings during the Irish presidency, document 10983/26, 25 June 2026; Justice and Home Affairs Council, 1 and 2 October 2026, Council meeting calendar.
