European Union

The EU-US data protection framework, known as the “Umbrella Agreement” was backed by a large majority in the Civil Liberties Committee on Thursday morning. The deal will ensure high, binding data protection standards for data exchanged by police and law enforcement authorities across the Atlantic.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

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Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Diplomacy, development and defence should be the pillars of EU foreign policy, say Foreign Affairs Committee MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They call on member states to show more unity and trust, and to speak with one voice, so as to make the EU a global player. MEPs also advocate a more realistic strategy on Russia and a “less for less” policy towards countries that try to throw democracy into reverse.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Diplomacy, development and defence should be the pillars of EU foreign policy, say Foreign Affairs Committee MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They call on member states to show more unity and trust, and to speak with one voice, so as to make the EU a global player. MEPs also advocate a more realistic strategy on Russia and a “less for less” policy towards countries that try to throw democracy into reverse.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Diplomacy, development and defence should be the pillars of EU foreign policy, say Foreign Affairs Committee MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They call on member states to show more unity and trust, and to speak with one voice, so as to make the EU a global player. MEPs also advocate a more realistic strategy on Russia and a “less for less” policy towards countries that try to throw democracy into reverse.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

This is, of course, the big news from the past week. The whole Farage/Trump/ambassador thing is little more than a febrile combination of unwillingness to follow protocol, mutual back-scratching and intentional destablising, while the Autumn Statement simply underlines that no-one in government really knows what Brexit means.

But the resumption of legal contests – now in the Supreme Court – is arguably much more consequential.

As readers will recall, Miller and dos Santos saw a clear defeat of the government position in the High Court, with all judges strongly supporting the line that Parliament has to pass an Act to trigger Article 50 notification to leave the EU. The government has appealled, and now the case will be joined by the Northern Irish action that was defeated earlier in the month in Belfast, with additional representations from the Scottish executive.

As an appeal, the government is more or less bound to follow the same line of argumentation as before, which it appears to be doing, so there’s a priori not much chance they’ll win.

However, sources did indicate that the government has its fall-back in place, namely a “three-line bill” that would be almost impossible to amend: ‘bombproof‘, indeed.

One of the many things I’m not is a specialist on Parliamentary procedure, but I am very lucky that a couple of doors down from my office is Louise Thompson, who is such a specialist (and a very helpful colleague too). She pointed me to Griffith, the ‘seminal text’ apparently, who sets out the grounds for amendments. From this the following points are central.

Firstly, the key grounds of accepting amendments for debate (in this context) are, in rising order of seriousness, that: they don’t render all or part of the bill inoperative; they don’t delay the entry into force of the bill in England until a similar bill has passed in Scotland; they aren’t inconsistent with the bill as agreed by committee; and they aren’t relevant to the subject matter of the bill.

The first two grounds simply mean that an amendment to not invoke Article 50 wouldn’t be acceptable, any more than any effort to use Scotland to delay matters. This latter might come into play in the Supreme Court, if it decides that elements such as the Act of Union require Scottish approval and involvement (although this seems unlikely).

The inconsistency issue might matter more, although the government might be able to get to the committee stage with its text intact, especially if it’s as brief as indicated.

Thus the key test will be irrelevance. Assuming that the government draws the line as tightly as possible, then we’d expect the bill to be one with the title “to authorise the government to make notification under Article 50 TFEU”, ie nothing at all about the bigger process, only the very narrow triggering. The challenge to amenders would be whether they could add in any scrutiny powers for Parliament as part of that notification. At a first glance, the argument would have to run that the triggering power necessarily has to be linked to scrutiny, because of the wider consequences of notification, including the irreversibility of the process (which both the government and Miller have argued in their court submissions).

Which leads us to the second key point, namely that it is the chair of the committee who determines what is admissable, working on the advice of the clerk and the bill’s draftsman. Since we don’t know quite how this would be pitched, it’s not possible to be certain about who that chair would be, but the government would presumably want to have someone sympathetic to keeping the bill as proposed. Griffith does discuss at length the power of selection, but doesn’t provide a final answer on how definitive the chair’s power might be, beyond noting that “the chair is often wiser to yied” (p.82) to discontent in committee.

The picture that emerges from Griffith is that if there is careful drafting and a determined stance by the chair, then amendments will be very difficult to achieve. This, in turn, suggests that the government will have to be steely in this matter if it is to manage both remainers and hard brexiteers: it will be a key test of how much confidence the government commands in the house and (more importantly) in its party.

This matters because if amendments can’t happen, then the only active options open to remainers are to use the Lords (who are under warning about just this) to delay or amend, or to try and defeat the bill altogether.

Which brings us to Labour. Anyone reading All Out War, by Tim Shipman, will have been struck by the degree of indifference/incompetence/sabotage of the Remain campaign by the party leadership. Given the subsequent entrenchment of those same individuals – Corbyn, McDonnell, Milne – since the leadership contest, there is very little reason to suspect that Labour will put out any concerted effort to challenge – or even scrutinise – this bill. And without Labour, any Tory remain rebels will have a much weaker position.

 

UPDATE 1010:

Louise has now read this and came by to point out that this bill is likely to be heard by the House as a whole, rather than in one of the bill committees: as the Parliament page helpfully tells us, when this happens, it is the deputy speaker who chairs. This means that Paul Daly’s suggestion of PACAC chair Bernard Jenkin probably doesn’t fly, other issues notwithstanding, and that the selection process is out of government hands even more than otherwise, which might strengthen the hand of amenders.

 

UPDATE 1115:

Well, it’s nice to see people read this stuff, even if to point out my shortcomings. Uncivil Still notes that I’m using amendment rules for the third reading (i.e. after committee), when committee stage is more likely to see challenges. They also note here is the option in the second reading of a reasoned amendment, which allows for the denial of that second reading and the effective abandonment of the bill. Again, this brings us back to the final point, namely that without Labour playing ball with remain rebels, this doesn’t work.

BTW Louise is now checking with Parliament about which Deputy Speaker would chair the committee in the House, as no-one seems to know for sure.

The post Making an unamendable A50 bill – UPDATED appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On 28 November, SEDE will hold an exchange of views with Prof. Dr. Luis Simón, Research Professor, Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel on the possibilities offered by the Lisbon Treaty and its implications for the Common Security and Defence Policy.
Further information
Draft agenda and meeting documents
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Officials in Brussels have been working on plans to stop countries from demanding that companies keep data within national borders.

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General : Toni Erdmann won this year’s Lux Film Prize for its original way of depicting a father desperately trying to become closer to his daughter while at the same time portraying the cut-throat realities of major international corporations. “Films like Toni Erdmann only exist thanks to national and European subsidies because they give you a certain freedom,” said director Maren Ade after receiving the prize in Parliament today.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : Toni Erdmann won this year’s Lux Film Prize for its original way of depicting a father desperately trying to become closer to his daughter while at the same time portraying the cut-throat realities of major international corporations. “Films like Toni Erdmann only exist thanks to national and European subsidies because they give you a certain freedom,” said director Maren Ade after receiving the prize in Parliament today.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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The 18th EU-Ukraine summit is held on 24 November 2016 in Brussels. Leaders focus their discussions on reforms and visa liberalisation.

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For all the talk during the referendum campaign of the risk of Brexit to UK-EU police and intelligence cooperation, the issue now seems to have drifted from the headlines. But now Britain has voted to leave, what will be the real damage?

After the Lisbon Treaty came into force in December 2009, there was a four-and-a-half year period during which member states could announce a blanket opt-out from all former “third pillar” measures (covering police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). Member states could then, at any time, subsequently re-join and participate in chosen measures. The UK did just this, opting back into 35 of the 130 measures.

In these measures, there are consistent references to formal cooperation between member states; several – such as that relating to the creation of EUROJUST in 2002 – allow for an element of non-member state collaboration if relevant to the investigation or prosecution.

Five of the chosen measures related to the Schengen agreement. One of these – covered in Schengen Article 40 – is particularly pertinent for police cooperation as it allows for continued surveillance of suspects when they move between countries affected by the Schengen agreement.

During her time as home secretary, Theresa May’s department wrote that ‘the loss of Schengen Article 40 would have an impact upon the ability of UK law enforcement to carry out operational activity overseas. While Article 40 is not the only way for UK requests for continued cross-border surveillance, it is the most effective.’

The paper further stated that the UK could pursue “police to police” international letters of request (ILOR) bilaterally, but this was deemed to be slower and less effective than Article 40, and ‘does not cater well for ongoing surveillance’. By opting back into these kinds of measures in 2014, the UK was able to reap the benefits of EU cooperation on the continent and of intelligence-sharing without an obligation to integrate further.

Brexit has the potential to affect this favourable situation for the UK, negatively impacting formal cross-border intelligence-sharing in an interconnected world that is more susceptible to transnational organised crime. A particular risk for police and judical cooperation in the forthcoming Article 50 negotations will be whether EU countries and the UK will be legally bound to give each other formal assistance in intelligence and operational requests. If they are legally bound, the UK will continue to get the best of both worlds. If not – a situation that currently seems more likely – the UK
will be stuck with something similar to the cumbersome case-by-case ILORs – with British requests given a lower priority than legally-bound Article 40 requests from other EU countries.

IMAGE CREDIT: Kirill_M/Bigstock.com

The post The UK must retain its EU police cooperation appeared first on Europe’s World.

Plenary sessions : Progress in deciding how the Paris climate agreement is to be applied by its 197 signatory countries and the “Marrakesh Action Proclamation”, approved last week at the UN climate change conference (COP22) in Morocco, was debated on Wednesday morning with EU climate action and energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete and with Slovak State Secretary Ivan Korčok, representing the Council Presidency.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plenary sessions : Progress in deciding how the Paris climate agreement is to be applied by its 197 signatory countries and the “Marrakesh Action Proclamation”, approved last week at the UN climate change conference (COP22) in Morocco, was debated on Wednesday morning with EU climate action and energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete and with Slovak State Secretary Ivan Korčok, representing the Council Presidency.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

In the eyes of most Europeans, the EU is cold and remote. “Nobody could ever fall in love with the Single Market,” warned Jacques Delors in the late 1980s, when the pioneering Commission president was at the height of his popularity and making the single market a reality.

There’s little love of any sort for the EU nowadays. The Union plumbs new depths of distrust and antagonism. To survive and flourish, the EU must become more directly relevant to the people of Europe – and there is a way to do it.

An EU-wide unemployment benefit system has been mooted since 2012, if not before. Earlier models have been refined into one that looks feasible.

But while the details are important, the key point is a bigger one: the need to rebrand the European Union as a caring organisation rather than an arrogant and unfeeling bureaucracy.

“To survive and flourish, the EU must become more directly relevant to the people of Europe”

Youth unemployment is widely seen as symptomatic of the EU’s failure to deliver the economic benefits it promised. It’s an unfair criticism: job creation policies to overcome mismatches and speed young people into work are defined at a national level – and often locally. But as we all know, in politics, perception is everything.

And that’s why a European benefits scheme is a good idea. It would be a high-profile sign that the EU is recovering the spirit of solidarity between member states that is currently in full retreat. Another reason – more complicated, but fundamentally more important still – is that it would move social policy back near the top of the EU’s agenda.

Saving the euro is vital, and a European benefits scheme would be a first step towards the fiscal integration the eurozone needs. It would also focus attention on Europe’s huge but overlooked demographic problem. By the middle of this century there will be only two working-age Europeans per pensioner (down from a four-to-one ratio today). Social protection will fast become the hottest political challenge of all time.

The latest European unemployment benefits model comes from a German research outfit – the state of Baden-Württemberg’s Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). Its approach would be to harmonise national systems and pool relevant national budgets to create common levels of benefits.

“A European benefits scheme would be a sign that the EU is recovering the spirit of solidarity”

Quite apart from the scheme‘s public relations value, its authors claim significant economic advantages. They reckon it would help smooth out the disparities between regions suffering from the uneven impacts of unemployment, and in the longer term would cushion the asymmetric shocks that have been a feature of the eurozone crisis.

Not everyone shares this view. Critics of the idea raise the ‘moral hazard’ question and ask whether it wouldn’t encourage weaker eurozone countries to keep on delaying reforms. They also argue that the wider benefits system could serve as a magnet to ‘benefits scroungers’ – and so encourage even more joblessness.

But the bottom line is, of course, the potential cost to the eurozone’s richer northern countries. Led by Germany, they are already opposed to proposals for eurozone bonds to help tackle sovereign debt problems.

So on the face of it, the unemployment benefits scheme stands no chance at all. But that is to ignore populist Euroscepticism – a far greater threat to the European project.

If the benefits scheme could be presented as a more human face of the EU, as well as a means of breaking the deadlock over the eurozone’s future, then maybe it has a future. That would offer Berlin an opportunity to refute the notion that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, it “knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing”.

Related content

• Friends of Europe: Ten ideas to make Europe more relevant to its citizens
• Europe’s World: Protect and survive, by Luuk van Middelaar
• Debating Europe: Can apps like BlaBlaCar and Deliveroo help cut EU unemployment?

IMAGE CREDITS: CC / FLICKR – Tax Credits

The post Euro-dole: A German initiative that Berlin doesn’t welcome appeared first on Europe’s World.

Nearly a year on from the Paris Agreement, the European Union is developing its own 2030 “climate and energy package” to meet its commitments – notably to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% compared to 1990 levels. Climate policy is an area of real “shared competence” for the EU, and the UK has played an active role in shaping it for the last decade. So what are the implications of Brexit for the EU, and for international climate negotiations more broadly?

Britain’s credentials in this area are strong. With the Climate Change Act of 2008, the UK took a pioneering role by adopting the first legally-binding climate change target in the world – with an 80% emissions reduction target by 2050 (again based on 1990 levels). The UK was the catalyst for cooperation between the more progressive EU member states on this issue, building the so-called “green growth coalition”. In 2014, the UK was the only major member state that pushed for a tougher EU climate target for 2030. It’s open to speculation as to whether the “at least 40%” goal could have been agreed without British advocacy.

Brexit is set to weaken the green growth coalition, make climate talks more difficult, and shift the power balance in favour of countries opposing an ambitious climate policy.

So far, it’s unclear how the UK will commit to burden-sharing after Brexit. Sectors included in the Emission Trading System (ETS) are regulated at EU level, but emissions reductions from the sectors are covered by its partner policy, the “Effort Sharing Decision”, which is the responsibility of member states. They define and implement specific national policies to meet the targets set for 2020. The European Commission’s “Effort Sharing Regulation” proposal, published on 20 July, foresees binding emissions reductions for member states from 2021 to 2030 – and the UK’s target in non-ETS sectors is set at a 37% reduction from 2005 levels.

Brexit also raises a question mark over ratification of the Paris Agreement. The timeline for the United Nations’ global stocktaking summit in 2018 will be negatively impacted. The UK was instrumental in gaining the support of the Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in the vote for emissions reduction commitments. Which country will step up to play that mediator role? Which member state will push for timely implementation? Will climate laggards such as Poland, which is pushing for a change in the burden-sharing arrangements before ratifying the Paris Agreement, gain greater influence?

“Brexit could open a window of opportunity for a transition to renewable energy that favours low-carbon technologies and more ambitious energy-efficiency efforts”

As a result of Brexit, the EU will lose a decisive proponent of European energy market integration – a topic that inspires great scepticism from a significant number of member states. Some national governments still consider security of supply to be better ensured by closed national markets and national energy utilities. It’s undeniable that in eastern Europe there is a strong will to maintain national state control of the energy sector.

But Britain has not been uniformly supportive of progressive green policies. The scrapping of ambitious and nationally-binding targets for renewable energy in the EU’s 2030 Energy and Climate Policy Framework bore the signature of the UK government, as did the rejection of an efficiency target. Brexit could open a window of opportunity for a transition to renewable energy that favours lowcarbon technologies and more ambitious energy-efficiency efforts. Britain has often aligned with the Visegrád countries in calling for non-discriminatory energy and climate targets with regard to the choice of low-carbon technologies.

This quest for “technology neutrality” allowed room for the further exploitation of nuclear power and coal in conjunction with carbon capture and storage (CCS) solutions. Both of these technologies are perceived as risky, even among the general public in the Visegrád countries; opinion polls suggest that renewables and energy efficiency are the preferred options for the future. There are further open questions regarding controversial technologies, including the possibility of fracking in the UK, to ensure security of domestic energy supply.

Britain’s renewables sector is likely to become more vulnerable, as the UK is the largest beneficiary of allocations from the European Investment Bank (EIB). In 2015, the UK received around 35% of the €3.6bn that the EIB granted for renewable-energy and energy efficiency projects worldwide. Overall, the EIB has lent Britain around €7.8bn – and it should be noted that only member states can be EIB shareholders. It’s possible that the UK could, in the future, play a role similar to that of Norway, which is part of the single European electricity market through membership of the European Economic Area. If so, Britain would still have to comply with the EU’s renewable energy quotas and energy efficiency targets, but without the political power to influence those standards.

“The UK was instrumental in gaining the support of the Visegrád countries in the vote for emissions reduction commitments”

There is greater uncertainty over how the UK’s new energy policy will develop if it no is longer required to meet the EU’s targets. Although Britain’s goals have historically been more ambitious than the EU’s joint target, British climate action may drop down the policy agenda, as the targets established through national legislation can simply be overturned in Britain’s parliament.

Britain’s exit could trigger a more ambitious EU transition to renewable energy, but the speculation that Germany will drive this effort forward seems unfounded. It is unlikely that the Energiewende (“energy transition”) policy of the Merkel government will be exported, especially if one considers the new amendments to the German Renewable Energy Sources Act. Energy generation from conventional fossil sources is still high in Germany, and the feed-in tariff system, once the motor of renewables’ rapid growth, is to be replaced by a more market-based auction system. This favours large companies and holds back the further engagement of small-scale actors that are the driving forces of the Energiewende.

For pessimists, the future means a weakened climate policy agenda and implementation in the UK, a struggling ETS, and active policymakers becoming passive “policytakers”. Even optimists see only the Commission and national governments “muddling through”, looking for new windows of opportunity to make progress, especially in the areas of renewable energy policy and energy efficiency.

IMAGE CREDIT: Zoom-zoom/Bigstock.com

The post A new climate for Europe’s energy policy? appeared first on Europe’s World.

Plenary sessions : Fraud involving VAT on goods exported to other member states costs EU tax payers an estimated €50 billion a year. The European Commission has come up with an action plan to clamp down on VAT fraud and update current VAT rules that have been left unchanged since 1993. MEPs debate the action plan on Wednesday 23 November and vote on it the following day. Read on to find out more about Parliament's position and watch our video for an explanation of how VAT fraud works.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plenary sessions : Fraud involving VAT on goods exported to other member states costs EU tax payers an estimated €50 billion a year. The European Commission has come up with an action plan to clamp down on VAT fraud and update current VAT rules that have been left unchanged since 1993. MEPs debate the action plan on Wednesday 23 November and vote on it the following day. Read on to find out more about Parliament's position and watch our video for an explanation of how VAT fraud works.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plenary sessions : The German-Austrian-Romanian co-production “Toni Erdmann” has won the 2016 European Parliament LUX Prize, President Martin Schulz announced at a ceremony in the Chamber in Strasbourg on Wednesday. The film explores a complex relationship between a father and daughter in contemporary corporate culture.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP