Euobserver.com

The Macedonian parliament ratified on Wednesday an agreement signed last Saturday with Greece that ended a 27-year dispute of the name of the country. The main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party boycotted the vote. Under the deal, the country will be named 'North Macedonia' and will renounce irredentist claims on the Greek Macedonia region, but a Macedonian language and ethnicity will be recognised by Greece.

The European Commission on Wednesday (20 June) adopted counter-measures in response to US steel and aluminium tariffs Brussels deems illegal. The EU will begin charging import duties of 25 percent on selected US products, such as jeans and motorbikes, starting Friday. The EU will put duties on €2.8bn-worth of US products, some chosen to target the states of Republicans who are facing elections in November.

The European Commission said Wednesday a "real driving emissions" (RDE) test for CO2 to help prevent cheating would take years to develop. "To think we can move from one day to another to an RDE test, that is not going to happen, that is not going to be possible," the commission told MEPs at a discussion about new reduction targets for cars. MEP Miriam Dalli proposed such a test.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker had called a pre-summit "informal working meeting" in Brussels on Sunday to discuss migration and asylum, the issue currently preoccupying both the German coalition government in Berlin and the new Italian government. The commission did not immediately specify who would attend, although it was thought to include Germany, France, Italy and Spain, plus incoming and outgoing EU presidencies - Bulgaria and Austria.

The European Commission on Wednesday ordered Luxembourg to recover €120m from the Engie group, after finding the country broke state aid rules by allowing French energy company to effectively pay no tax by treating some transactions as both debt and equity. Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said "Engie paid an effective corporate tax rate of 0.3% on certain profits in Luxembourg for about a decade. This selective tax treatment is illegal."

Europe's choice is between unplanned, reactive, fragmented, ineffective migration policy and planned, regulated, documented movements of people, writes International Rescue Committee chief David Miliband.

EU institutional negotiators on Tuesday (19 June) reached an informal agreement on reforming Eurodac, a database that contains the fingerprints of asylum seekers. It means the age for obtaining fingerprints and facial images of minors will be lowered from 14 to 6 years, in a move that has generated controversy among some NGOs. The deal still needs approval from EU states and the European parliament before becoming law.

Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel and France's president Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday signed a joint declaration that offers concessions by both camps in terms of migration and the setting up of a eurozone budget.

EU member states should no longer have any "unjustified restrictions" that bans companies from storing data in another EU country, negotiators from the European parliament, European commission, and member states agreed Tuesday evening. "Data localisation restrictions are signs of protectionism for which there is no place in a single market," said EU digital commissioner Andrus Ansip in a statement. The actual final text of the legislation is not yet public.

European Commission, European Parliament, and national governments negotiators have agreed that by 2030 the EU's energy use should be 32.5% more efficient, a more ambitious target than agreed at an EU summit in 2014. They also concluded talks on a separate piece of climate legislation which would state that the EU would have zero net emissions "as early as possible" - more vague than the 2050 target parliament wanted.

Italy's interior minister Matteo Salvini said on Tuesday that he was not backing down from a controversial proposal to have a census of Roma people in Italy. "I'm not giving up, I'm going straight on. The Italians and their security come first," he announced on Facebook. Noemi Di Segni, president of Italy's union of Jewish communities, said the proposal recalled fascist race laws in the 1920s and 1930s.

The European Parliament's committee on legal affairs votes on Wednesday on the proposed article 13 of the digital single market copyright directive which would oblige internet services to proactively filter uploads in order to remove copyright infringements. "The damage that this may do to the free and open internet .... could be substantial," warned prominent internet luminaries including Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales in an open letter .

The Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has said it will not wait until Friday, to hear a verdict of European legal experts on human rights, before going ahead with its bill curtailing NGOs who work with migrants.

Swedish nationalists have gambled on an in/out referendum to win votes in Europe's next big election, amid signs of new boldness in the far right.

German and French leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron agreed on Tuesday to defend together the idea of a eurozone budget to boost investment and increase convergence between euro countries. After meeting near Berlin, they said that this budget could be put in place by 2021 but gave no detail on a possible amount. But Merkel added that reducing banking risks was needed before the banking union can be deepened.

Draft conclusions of the EU summit seen by this website suggest setting up "regional disembarkation platforms", possibly in countries near Libya, to separate asylum seekers and economic migrants.

The EU Court of Justice will not be asked if Britons living in the EU will automatically lose their citizenship after the UK leaves the bloc.

A draft conclusion of the upcoming EU summit, seen by Reuters, says the European Union will agree to look at creating "regional disembarkation platforms" where the fate of asylum requests will be decided, possibly in areas around north Africa. "Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys."

The General Court of the EU ruled on Tuesday that French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has to pay back €298,500 to the European Parliament over fake assistant jobs. Judges said that Le Pen, who was an MEP until last year, failed to prove that activities of her assistants paid by the EU parliament between 2010 and 2016 were "linked actually, directly and exclusively to her mandate."

The European Commission's infringement procedures against EU states that - according to the commission - are failing to uphold car emissions legislation, remains ongoing for now. A spokeswoman told EUobserver that the commission needed time to assess Germany's €1bn fine for emissions fraud against Volkswagen, handed out last week. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the UK have until 17 July to respond to 'letters of formal notice' related to Dieselgate.