European Union

"Cooperation with Ukraine is essential and our solidarity should not be questioned", said European Parliament President Martin Schulz at the opening of "Ukraine week" on Monday evening. This 3-day high-level conference is bringing together MEPs, national and Ukrainian MPs to share experience on good parliamentary practice, law-making and representation.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

"Cooperation with Ukraine is essential and our solidarity should not be questioned", said European Parliament President Martin Schulz at the opening of "Ukraine week" on Monday evening. This 3-day high-level conference is bringing together MEPs, national and Ukrainian MPs to share experience on good parliamentary practice, law-making and representation.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

"Cooperation with Ukraine is essential and our solidarity should not be questioned", said European Parliament President Martin Schulz at the opening of "Ukraine week" on Monday evening. This 3-day high-level conference is bringing together MEPs, national and Ukrainian MPs to share experience on good parliamentary practice, law-making and representation.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

On 3 March, SEDE will hold an exchange of views with Jorge Domecq, Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency and Heinrich Brauss, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning, on EDA and NATO coherent responses to hybrid threats and challenges.
Further information
Draft agenda and meeting documents
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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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

This is the Tuesday edition of our Brussels Briefing. To receive it every morning in your email in-box, sign up here.

The British EU referendum campaign is barely a week old and it already feels like a war of attrition. For outsiders watching from Brussels, one of the most peculiar clashes is around the question of whether a vote to leave the EU actually means Britain will leave. It turns on arcane EU law – Article 50 of the EU treaty, the so-called exit clause – but it is high-politics. Will voters see an exit as a dangerous gamble, or a gradual withdrawal to a safer place? “A country invokes Article 50 to start exit negotiations, which would seem the obvious first step after a leave vote. But there is nothing mandating London pull the Article 50 trigger immediately, and some have suggested using the Leave vote to try to get better terms without an Article 50 break. The argument will run and run because, as often in politics, both sides rest their case on a kernel of truth.

The idea of “vote Brexit for a better EU deal” comes from theVote Leave campaign and some prominent Brexiteers, including for a brief but dazzling moment Boris Johnson, the London mayor. David Cameron tried to nix the concept by saying the British people “would rightly expect” an Article 50 exit to start “straight away” after a leave vote. That would start a two-year clock ticking on exit talks, opening the risk of British membership and trade arrangements ending overnight if talks turn hostile. The British prime minister added that to imagine other EU countries would negotiate a new UK membership deal was “for the birds”. He won support on Monday by Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, who said the what-if game on future negotiations was “insane”.

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A UK government paper on Monday followed up Mr Cameron’s salvo by explaining the divorce mechanics. Lots of uncertain scenarios are depicted – described by Mr Johnson as “baloney” – including a 10-year Brexit process subject to countless vetoes in Europe. But on Article 50, the paper just echoes Mr Cameron’s view of the public “expectation”. It did not say it must be invoked immediately. And nor did it say that Article 50 would cover every aspect of Brexit. Indeed it points out there would need to be a complex trade negotiation alongside and separate from the Article 50 divorce. (For the legal geeks, we have explained more in this annotated version of the Article 50.)

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EU relations with Azerbaijan are governed by the EU-Azerbaijan Partnership and Cooperation Agreement signed in 1996 and entered into force in 1999.

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Plans to turn the EU’s Frontex border agency into a common border and coast guard, which in emergencies could be deployed even without the approval of the country concerned, were presented by the Commission and the Dutch Presidency and debated by Civil Liberties Committee MEPs on Monday. MEPs also debated legislative proposals on systematic checks at external borders and a European travel document.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plans to turn the EU’s Frontex border agency into a common border and coast guard, which in emergencies could be deployed even without the approval of the country concerned, were presented by the Commission and the Dutch Presidency and debated by Civil Liberties Committee MEPs on Monday. MEPs also debated legislative proposals on systematic checks at external borders and a European travel document.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

When the European Council finally drew to a close on February 19, 2016, the deal to help secure the UK’s continued membership in the European Union (called the ‘Anti-Brexit’ deal in continental newspapers) was finally agreed. After years of discussions and months of negotiations, there was a deal, publically available. This document provides insight into the issues highest on the UK renegotiation agenda, and how the UK and its EU partners were able to reach a compromise. Analysing it from an environmental perspective reveals a number of surprises.

Firstly, this document does mention the environment. Looking back to UK calls for EU reform over the last twenty years, this should not be surprising. Hence, in the wake of the Danish ‘no’ vote to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the Major Government produced a ‘hit list’ of social and environmental legislation it wanted scrapped. In his 2013 Bloomberg Speech and in the discussions which ensued in the UK’s House of Commons afterwards, David Cameron identified environmental policies as an area in which the EU had gone too far. But when it came to the negotiation proper, the environment together with the Common Agricultural Policy — two usual suspects when it comes to UK-sponsored EU reform — were conspicuously absent.  Hence it is surprising in itself that the environment even gets not one, but four mentions in the text (although two of these refer to the “changing environment” – a reference to the economic, not the natural, environment).

Secondly, environment is mentioned in relation to competitiveness – as part of “Section B” on competitiveness of the UK-EU deal as well as in the annexed European Council declaration on competitiveness. This, in itself, is not surprising. Recent British efforts to increase EU action on ‘red tape’ decried the economic cost of environmental action (e.g. the 2013 Business Task Force report pushed for a reform of REACH, and opposed the proposed soil directive). Similarly, at EU level, talks of REFIT and an ever greater focus by Team Juncker on better regulation has been interpreted as pitting the environment against competitiveness (and favouring the latter) by European environmental NGOs in their highly successful #NatureAlert campaign. No, what is surprising is that the environment figures in a rather positive light in this document:

 UK-EU deal (p.15)

At the same time, the relevant EU institutions and the Member States will take concrete steps towards better regulation, which is a key driver to deliver the above-mentioned objectives. This means lowering administrative burdens and compliance costs on economic operators, especially small and medium enterprises, and repealing unnecessary legislation as foreseen in the Declaration of the Commission on a subsidiarity implementation mechanism and a burden reduction implementation mechanism, while continuing to ensure high standards of consumer, employee, health and environmental protection.

Competitiveness declaration (p. 30)

The European Council urges all EU institutions and Member States to strive for better regulation and to repeal unnecessary legislation in order to enhance EU competitiveness while having due regard to the need to maintain high standards of consumer, employee, health and environmental protection. This is a key driver to deliver economic growth, foster competitiveness and job creation.

So, what does this deal mean for the future of EU environmental policy? These EUCO conclusions confirm that, even when talking about environmental policy in a rather positive tone, EU governments are talking about its achievements in the past tense – it is about “continuing to ensure” and “maintain[ing]” “high standards”. It is not about raising standards and policy expansion. High environmental standards are caveats to the better regulation surge – not an alternative policy agenda. While this may alleviate concerns about the fate of the environmental acquis (i.e. the rules already in place) it does nothing to alleviate concerns about the EU’s capacity for increasing its ambition in the future. This is particularly problematic for areas in which the EU is already falling behind – with regard to biodiversity, where its current policies fall short of its objective to halt biodiversity loss by 2020, and with regard to climate change, where the surprisingly ambitious Paris COP21 deal means EU climate policies are not currently strong enough to deliver on the Paris pledge.

 

The post A surprising deal? Cameron’s ‘reformed EU’ & the environment appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

At its meeting on 3 March, SEDE will have an exchange of views with Brigadier General Dominique Laugel, Mission Commander of EUMAM RCA on preparing the armed forces of the Central African Republic for the security challenges of tomorrow. The discussion will focus on the results achieved by EUMAM RCA under its current mandate and its future direction in the light of the still challenging security situation in the Central African Republic.
Further information
draft agenda and meeting documents
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

This is the Monday edition of our Brussels Briefing. To receive it every morning in your email in-box, sign up here.

Schäuble, right, with World Bank president Jim Yong Kim at the G20 in Shanghai this weekend

Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, last week called for leading economies to “go bold” in tackling the looming threat of a global slowdown, saying that “there has to be action on all fronts.” Instead, a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations that concluded at the weekend produced an 11-point statement that was notable as much for what wasn’t in it as for what was.

Ever the budgetary hawk, Germany’s Wolfgang Schäuble – under pressure at home to maintain a balanced budget in the face of huge new spending demands thanks to the refugee crisis – moved quickly at the meeting in Shanghai to bury any idea that the G20 might agree on a coordinated stimulus package through greater public spending. Instead, the communiqué ministers adopted prescribes a medicine that’s much more palatable to Mr Schäuble but politically difficult to administer: pushing ahead with labour-market and competitiveness reforms.

Given Berlin’s struggles within the eurozone to repel repeated pushes from Italy, Portugal, and most recently Spain, for more flexibility in the bloc’s budget rules, the last thing Mr Schäuble wanted was for the most powerful nations on earth to signal that it’s time to open the purse strings. “Thinking about further stimulus just distracts from the real task at hand,” Mr Schäuble said. “If you want the real economy to grow there are no shortcuts without reforms.”

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Read the Restricted report about EUNAVFOR MED (Wikileaks), Brussels, 28 January 2016
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Dear Dr. Turke good morning,
according to your request I need to underlined that the number are not fixed but changeable due to the situation. We can normally count on around 160 people in the Operational Headquarters (OHQ) in Rome and around 60 personnel acting for the staff of the Force Commander on board ITS CAVOUR (the flagship).
The total of EUNAVFOR MED personnel is around 1460, depending on the assets involved.
On the occasion I invite you to follow us on our website (www.eeas.europa.eu/eunavfor-med)and the related social media.
Regards.

Antonello de Renzis Sonnino

(EUNAVFOR Med logo)
CAPTAIN Antonello de Renzis Sonnino
Spokesperson and Chief of Media Cell

Tag: EUNAVFOR MED

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EU Ministers of European Affairs, Industry, Research and related areas meet in Brussels on 29 February 2016 to adopt conclusions on the single market strategy for services and goods focusing on support to SMEs and innovative businesses and services. They are also addressing the situation of the steel industry and starting discussions on the circular economy strategy.

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