The construction of the money laundering offence: An exploratory study on the foundations of EU criminal provisions

• In Event: The Future of EU Criminal Policy

Abstract

The debate on to what extent online speech should be limited or at least moderated when hateful or harmful has fully reignited. Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed chief of efficiency of the Trump administration, attacked the European Union for requiring social media platforms to act against forms of harmful content, including hate speech. This is the consequence of a recent EU regulation, the Digital Services Act (DSA), requiring platforms, including social media, to act against illegal content. The DSA itself does not stipulate what constitutes illegal content. This is defined both by national provisions criminalising certain types of content and EU regulation on forbidden content.
During the last ten years several EU norms in different regulations and directives have been enacted to criminalise certain forms of speech, including child sexual abuse images, terrorist speech, non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and inciting violence against persons based on their race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. However, calls to provide for an overarching definition of what constitutes illegal speech and in particular hate speech has not materialised. The European Commission proposed in 2021 to include hate speech in the list of Eurorcrimes from the principled approach of fighting racism and xenophobia. This abstract will focus on the question whether developing EU criminal law regarding illegal speech should not be approached from another angle, namely the effectiveness of the DSA on the one hand and freedom of expression on the other. The research starts from a mapping-perspective of overlapping regulation on speech and free speech to discern whether the effectiveness-principle is relevant to bring harmony in the current cacophony of illegal online speech regulations.

Author

• Sanne Buisman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam