European Union

The standoff over the rescue boat, which is now heading to Spain, is part of a wider politically toxic narrative against refugees and migrants and a symptom of EU failures to reform asylum laws.

Italy will not ratify the free trade agreement with Canada as it does not sufficiently protect the country's food specialties, Italian Agriculture Minister Gian Marco Centinaio said in an interview on Thursday (14 June).

Unless the world economy undergoes "rapid and far-reaching" transition, the average global temperature increase will reach 1.5°C by 2040, according to a leaked draft version of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quoted by Reuters on Thursday. The EU and most of the world's countries agreed in 2015 in Paris to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. The draft said national pledges made in Paris were not enough.

Mandate of Bulgarian presidency unclear after government changes in Italy and Spain.

Both the examples of Greece and Italy test the limits of a system with inherent weaknesses that feeds internal gaps, strengthens deficits and debts in the European South, and surpluses in the European North respectively.

The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment says that levels of carbon monoxide can be twenty times as high when using a different measurement system.

The European Commission has defended its plans to overhaul its foreign spending budget, promising that it would deliver a large increase in aid spending and ‘eliminate bureaucratic barriers’.

Greek prime minister will face on Saturday a motion of no-confidence tabled by opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Mitsotakis said that the agreement reached by Tsipras this week with Macedonian prime minister Zoran Zaev, over the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's name and its claims over northern Greece, was "a bad agreement with an unacceptable national concession: for the first time, Greece recognises a Macedonian ethnicity and language."

As the tenth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers approaches, politicians can finally sigh with relief - Europe is out of the woods. For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Europeans have a positive opinion on the situation of their national economy (49% versus 47%), according to a Eurobarometer published on Thursday (14 June).

A court in Hungary on Thursday sentenced four human traffickers (one Afghan, three Bulgarians) to 25 years in prison for their roles in the 2015 case in which 71 migrants suffocated to death in a truck found on a motorway in Austria. They were found guilty of being part of a criminal organisation, human smuggling, and murder. Ten other defendants also received prison terms. The verdicts can be appealed.

At a meeting next week, eurozone finance ministers and the IMF are expected to agree on new cash, debt relief measures, and a monitoring mechanism to ensure that Greece can live without international aid for the first time since 2010.

Malta is to join the European Public Prosecutor Office (EPPO), an office established in 2017 to investigate EU fund and VAT fraud. In a letter to the European Commission, Maltese justice minister Owen Bonnici said Thursday that EPPO was "a major development for safeguarding the economic interests" of the EU. The commission will now launch the procedure to have Malta join the other 20 states taking part in EPPO.

The European Central Bank (ECB) will end its bond-buying programme, also known as quantitative easing (QE), at the end of the year, president Mario Draghi announced on Thursday. The ECB will continue to buy €30bn of bonds each month until September, then will reduce the amount to €15bn until the end of December. The programme started in March 2015 to inject cash into the eurozone economy.

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Relations between Hong Kong and the EU are based on a high-level annual meeting called the Structured Dialogue between the EU and the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSARG). The tenth Structured Dialogue took place in November 2016 in Brussels. 

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The use of palm oil as fuel should disappear in Europe by 2030 under a reform of the bloc’s renewable energy laws agreed this morning after all-night negotiations.

Following a string of far-right political successes barely a year before the next European elections, regional and local representatives have called on the EU to urgently act on migration, an issue that has quickly come back to the top of the political agenda.

Two separate letters, signed by MEPs across the political spectrum and former Polish leaders, demand that the Commission take swift action to halt a controversial judiciary reform in Poland, already closely watched by Brussels for fears that it threatens the basic democratic rules.

The EU is about to agree a shared military industry fund which will give billions to arms companies and exacerbate the global arms race. Presented as a key step to strengthen the EU, instead, it enshrines renewed prevalence of national interests in a hard-security context, writes Laëtitia Sédou.

In 2030, 32% of the EU's energy should be from renewable sources, the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council agreed on Thursday. Negotiators reached a compromise in behind-closed-doors discussions. The 32% goal is higher than the "at least 27%" target agreed by EU leaders in 2014. The parliament had wanted 35%. EU climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said it will help the EU meet its Paris agreement promises.

Written by Christian Salm,

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On 14 June 2018, the 21st FIFA World Cup opens with the Russia versus Saudi Arabia match in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow – the first time that Russia hosts what is the most important tournament for national football teams. Despite some calls for a political boycott due to Russian governmental policy under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, there was little speculation that the tournament would not go ahead as planned. However, there were some calls for a political boycott of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. For example, a group of 60 Members of the European Parliament (EP) from five political groups and 16 European Union (EU) Member States signed an open letter calling on EU governments to boycott the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia due to the authoritarian and anti-western path of the Russian President.

In fact, debates in the EP on how to react to major sporting events in host countries with a poor track record of human rights have history. At the ends of the 1970s, the EP discussed policy action with regard to the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina and the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. The Argentinian World Cup, occurring around two years after the Argentinian military right-wing coup and its violent repression of critics, was described then by many sports and political observers as the most political in FIFA’s history to date. The 1980 Summer Olympic Games, the first to be held in a socialist country, unleashed a hitherto unprecedented boycott by 60 countries, in protest against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

In the case of the 1978 World Cup, the EP held a public hearing, funded by the then Socialist Group, intended to help move forward investigations into human rights violations and the disappearance of around 100 European Community citizens in Argentina. Victims of the Argentinian military regime and representatives of Amnesty International gave evidence to the public hearing. On the basis of the declarations made during the public hearing, the EP adopted a resolution on 6 July 1978. The resolution requested ‘the Foreign Ministers of the Member States meeting in political cooperation, the Commission and the Council urgently to take all appropriate measures to bring about an improvement in the situation as regards the respect of human rights and democratic freedom in Argentina’.

Two political developments, in particular, influenced the conditions and perspective for the EP’s considerations on the right course of policy action towards the Olympics in Moscow in 1980. First, after a period of détente, the international situation deteriorated following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979; and second, the USSR began a wave of repression against protagonists of human rights. This included the arrest in January 1980 of the academic Andrei Sakharov, a symbolic figure for the human rights movement and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. Members of the EP expressed deep concern that Sakharov’s arrest and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan were a threat to international détente and peace. As a consequence, the EP adopted a resolution in mid-January 1980, which stated: ‘The European Parliament calls on the Governments of the Nine [the European Community Member States at that time] to express abhorrence of Soviet oppression and aggression by advising their National Olympic Committees to ask their teams and individual athletes not to take part in the Olympic Games in Moscow’. The resolution followed United States President Jimmy Carter’s ultimatum of mid-January 1980 that the US would boycott the Olympic Games if Soviet troops had not withdrawn from Afghanistan by 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 20 February 1980.

Then, as now, the protection of human rights was one of the EU’s fundamental values. The EP saw raising public awareness of human rights violations in Argentina and the Soviet Union as a moral responsibility, at a time when both countries gained high public attention as hosts of these major sports events. A more recent example is a public hearing in Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights of February 2014, which focused on the situation of migrant workers in the construction of football stadiums for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. This and other EP public hearings, as well as the above-mentioned open letter calling on EU governments to stay away from the 2018 World Cup in Russia, follow a tradition that originated in EP debates and policy action regarding the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

Read also: ‘Major sporting events versus human rights: Parliament’s position on the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina and the 1980 Moscow Olympics‘.