European Union

While armed conflicts are on the rise around the world, Paris launched a new strategy for prevention, resilience and sustainable peace in developing countries, on 13 June. EURACTIV.fr reports.

Main agenda items, approximate timing, public sessions and press opportunities.

The Council transposed into EU law sanctions adopted by the United Nations imposing a travel ban and an asset freeze on six human traffickers operating in Libya.

Coreper endorsed, on behalf of the Council, a mandate for negotiations on two regulations establishing a framework for interoperability between EU information systems in the area of justice and home affairs.

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.