European Union

Provisional implementation is to remain a unique exception, said EP leaders. Parliamentary oversight will start as soon as possible to adopt EP position before the end of the transition.

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

The 27 EU member states gave the green light on Monday (28 December) for the post-Brexit trade deal to go into effect on January 1, a spokesman said. Ambassadors from EU capitals met in Brussels to nod through the accord,...

The distribution of an initial 200 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech will be completed for the European Union by September, a spokesman for the European Commission said on Monday (28 December). “Distribution of the...

EU ambassadors of the 27 member states are meeting on Monday to provisionally apply the agreement, while top MEPs also discuss the way ahead for parliamentary approval.

Most EU member states began rolling out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 on Sunday, as a more contagious variant from the UK begins to spread on the continent.

Britain and Turkey are to sign a free-trade deal Tuesday, UK trade minister Liz Truss said Sunday, to "provide certainty for thousands of jobs across the UK in the manufacturing, automotive, and steel industries". The agreement is the fifth largest out of 62 bilateral trade accords Britain has signed since Brexit, after its deals with Japan, Canada, Switzerland, and Norway. Britain and Turkey did €20.7bn of trade in 2019.

Ethiopia must investigate and hold accountable gunmen who killed over 100 people in Ethiopia's Benishangul-Gumuz region last week, in what looked like "ethnically targeted violence", the EU foreign service has said. The Benishangul-Gumuz massacre comes amid other fighting in the Tigray region, further north, raising EU concern that Ethiopia is beginning to unravel. "Ongoing reports of non-Ethiopian involvement raise additional worries," the EU foreign service said, on the Tigray-region conflict.

British people arrested overseas on bogus charges have "no legal right to consular assistance", Sarah Broughton, the head of consular affairs at the British Foreign Office, wrote in a letter to the family of British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, obtained by The Times. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was jailed in Iran for sowing dissent. Broughton's letter had "profound implications for all British citizens travelling abroad," the British newspaper said.

Europe could boost biodiversity in its rivers by removing many of the "obsolete" dams, weirs, culverts, fords, sluices and other barriers, 1.2m of which have built up over time, according to EU-funded research by the UK's Swansea University. River-fragmentation in Europe was "much higher" than anticipated, the study found. "Free-flowing rivers are healthy rivers and barrier removal is a simple tool to restore fish species," one of the researchers said.

"In talking of a single currency, [the then European Commission president Jacques] Delors must have had a rush of blood to the head. We are not going to have a single currency," former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Irish taoiseach Charles Haughey in June 1990, newly published Irish archives show. "I am not handing over authority to a non-elected [EU] bureaucracy," Thatcher added, calling the EU a communist-type "politburo".

Turkey's decision, last week, to jail journalist Can Dündar for 27 years for "what is his fundamental right to freedom of expression" went in the "opposite direction" of EU human rights demands, the EU foreign service has said. It also urged Turkey to release philanthropist Osman Kavala from pre-trial detention and to free former opposition party leader Selahattin Demirtaş in line with judgements by the European Court of Human Rights.

China will overtake the US as the world's largest economy five years faster than previously expected due to pandemic fallout, according to British consultancy the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). China would leapfrog America in 2028, not 2033, as predicted one year ago, the CEBR said Saturday, because its economy is still growing 2 percent a year, while the US one will shrink by 5 percent this year.

This year's 10 worst weather disasters around the world cost 3,500 lives and caused insured damages worth $150bn (€123bn), international charity Christian Aid has said, raising the alarm on global warming. Just 4 percent of damages in poor countries were insured, aggravating humanitarian problems. "Whether floods in Asia, locusts in Africa, or storms in Europe and the Americas, climate change continued to rage in 2020," Christian Aid's Kat Kramer said.

Accelerating the transition to an ever more digital existence, the coronavirus pandemic has tightened tech giants' grip on billions of customers' lives.

A Chinese court handed a four-year jail to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak, on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said.

Climate policy will again take centre stage in 2021, with the European Commission expected to table a mammoth package of green laws in June, before the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow caps off a year packed with milestones for European climate policy in December.

The Parliamentary Elections in Kazakhstan to be held on 10 January 2020 should be anticipated with confidence despite the Covid-19 concerns, writes Jeroen Jansen.

EU countries on Sunday (27 December) embarked on a vaccination campaign to defeat the "nightmare" of Covid-19, with the first to be immunised expressing emotion after their jab and leaders hailing a milestone in the fight against the pandemic.

"I was a very regular girl, working in sales and marketing. No one in my family was politically active. There was no justice anywhere, but we all kept silent. For some reason, I started to feel angry about it."

EU diplomacy has changed from a man with a phone to "a very large ship", but growth in bulk came with loss of agility, French former diplomat, Pierre Vimont, said.