European Union

General : Our revamped Newshub aggregates social media updates from 751 MEPs, eight political groups and the Parliament itself to create a single unmissable page of Parliament news, which is constantly renewed. Read more on what it is, how it works and then visit to try it out for yourself.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : Our revamped Newshub aggregates social media updates from 751 MEPs, eight political groups and the Parliament itself to create a single unmissable page of Parliament news, which is constantly renewed. Read more on what it is, how it works and then visit to try it out for yourself.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

If you are reading this sentence then you must be curious to see how a country that is currently racked with political uncertainty, multiple regions seeking independence, a financial crisis, and both high public debt and unemployment can resolve its issues in the near future. Spain is suffering from ‘jobless growth’ and social and territorial cohesion cracking along the seams. While the DSM will not be the solution to resolve these issues, the future is clearly digital, driving e-commerce, online services and Spain’s growth potential.

After chairing a lunch discussion here at FleishmanHillard’s Brussels offices with leaders in the financial, consumer and government I was left with more questions than answers on if it was possible.

Let’s start with the facts. Economically it remains the 5th largest economy in the EU with its exports 3% higher than imports. According to the IMF, Spain’s expected GDP growth is set to outperform Germany and France in 2016. It was also earmarked by the Davos crowd in their Global Competitiveness Report to be in 10th place for having a world class infrastructure. Its public debt, unlike many EU countries, is dropping and there are signs that jobs (many short term) are returning back to the market with less people leaving the country looking for opportunities. But there is still a lot more room for improvement.

Some areas called out during the discussion included longer term investment in education and digital skills. Spain also needs to tackle the challenges being felt for cross border e-commerce. This includes problems of delivery often attributed with high costs, differing VAT regimes from country to country and ensuring there is a level of security that can increase consumer confidence. It would be safe to say this is not unique to Spain only but endemic across the EU.

Some felt that the DSM is too lengthy in its processes to tackle the issues Spain is experiencing. Many of the legislative processes will take several years before they are agreed and even longer to be implemented in each member state. There were calls for more urgency and more of a top down approach fast tracking specific legislative areas.

Clearly there was consensus in the room that DSM has a lot to prove to deliver results to Europe as a trading block helping it compete internationally. It will require massive coordination by local authorities throughout the 28 Member States as well in Brussels to ensure the goals of the DSM are not politicized and distorted.  Many pointed out the European Commission goals on key areas such as data flows, ecommerce geo-blocking, and cloud computing still remains unclear and definitions for each of those should be clarified before any legislative proposals are made. There was also concern on the changes to the upcoming legislative proposal for the DSM, as it makes its way through the European Commission, Council and Parliament.  But the rewards are also high with a professed €415 billion in growth and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

 

Ray Pinto

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  © Getty Images

There are three existential issues stalking the EU: the eurozone financial crisis, the migration crisis and a (potential) Brexit crisis after the UK’s EU referendum. Each one poses potentially acute but largely distinct challenges. But is there a risk of a “perfect storm” bringing these crises together?

Greece is facing the brunt of two traumas. While the threat of Grexit from the eurozone has receded, hard fiscal decisions remain, especially over pensions. The political consensus in Greece is extremely fragile. And the potential for a nasty backlash will increase if worst-case scenarios on Schengen and migration play out. In the event that northern Europe panics and closes Macedonia’s border (hardly an improbable scenario), the social and political burden on Greece will be immense.

Read more

Turkey plays a crucial role in the refugee crisis: not only is it hosting more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees but also most of the one million migrants who reached the EU last year passed through the country. MEPs have called on EU countries to deliver on the €3 billion refugee facility for Turkey. As the EU searches for the best approach to tackle the crisis, two delegations from the civil liberties and budgets committees travel to Turkey this week to assess the situation on the ground.
Committee on Budgets
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Turkey plays a crucial role in the refugee crisis: not only is it hosting more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees but also most of the one million migrants who reached the EU last year passed through the country. MEPs have called on EU countries to deliver on the €3 billion refugee facility for Turkey. As the EU searches for the best approach to tackle the crisis, two delegations from the civil liberties and budgets committees travel to Turkey this week to assess the situation on the ground.
Committee on Budgets
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 65 - Draft opinion on a new forward-looking and innovative future strategy on trade and investment
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 64 - Draft opinion Implementation of the 2010 recommendations of Parliament on social and environmental standards, human rights and corporate responsibility
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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

  © Getty

Once more to the breach, dear friends. Angela Merkel will be back in Turkey today for her second visit in five months. To put this in perspective, the German chancellor had been twice in five years before the migration crisis hit. And it is only five days since she last met Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish premier. This is urgent business.

Turkey is the lynchpin of Ms Merkel’s migration strategy and it is floundering. Even with rough seas, arrivals to Greek islands are still running at roughly 2,000 a day. With spring (and German state elections) approaching, there are just weeks left to avert a migration surge that forces Ms Merkel’s hand. That would leave November’s EU deal with Turkey – including bold promises of visa liberalisation and €3bn in funding – all but stillborn.

It took a while, but the penny has dropped in Ankara.

Read more

MEPs approved on 3 February Parliament's position on the Trade in Services International Agreement (TiSA), which is currently being negotiated by the EU and 22 World Trade Organisation partners. Read on for more on the agreement and check out our infographic explaining TiSA.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

The quest for oil markets abroad can be seen as an attempt by US companies to find higher prices and profits and avoid bankruptcy, since the current low price of oil, resulting from OPEC's strategy of oversupplying the market, is making shale-oil production in the US less and less profitable. The impact of potential US oil exports on the European Union's energy security is expected to be limited in the short term. The oil market is oversupplied, prices are depressed and are only expected to increase slightly if OPEC and other producers agree to stabilise production, and Europe can find alternative suppliers easily. These now include Iran, which has the world's fourth-largest reserves of oil, since sanctions were lifted in January following the nuclear deal. The US ban on natural gas exports is still in force. Should it be removed, as part of a TTIP deal or under changes to domestic law, the US has the potential to become a net gas exporter. However, as the US can get higher prices on Asian markets and as both the US and the EU have limited LNG infrastructures, the EU is an unlikely destination for large LNG imports from the US in the short run. Europe can obtain gas from a plethora of suppliers, now including Iran, which has the world's second-largest reserves of gas. The long-term outlook is more promising, as US LNG export capacities are expected to rise significantly in the coming decade and EU Member States may decide to diversify supplier countries and routes, under the European Energy Security Strategy, rather than allowing short-term commercial interests to prevail.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

• The question they can’t answer: What does ‘leave’ mean?

Here’s a question for you. Would you move home without knowing what your next home looks like? No, me neither.

But that’s what those campaigning for Britain to leave the EU are expecting you to do – vote to end our membership of the EU without knowing what we’d have instead.

The problem LEAVERS have is that they simply don’t know, and for sure they can’t agree.

As a result, two rival, irreconcilable ‘leave’ campaigns have been launched. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, supports one (Leave.EU) and UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, supports the other (Vote Leave).

(*Update: and now there is yet another ‘Leave’ campaign called Grass Roots Out – more proof that the ‘Leavers’ cannot agree on their vision(s) of Britain after Brexit)

And as confirmed by the Financial Times, the ‘leave’ campaigns are in disarray.

On the one hand, Mr Farage wants to curtail immigration and stop EU migrants coming to Britain. On the other, Mr Carswell wants to promote a Singapore-style model for Britain, open to capital and migration.

Instead of Britain leaving the EU, these two prominent members of UKIP seem to be putting the case for leaving each other.

Or as the Financial Times put it this weekend;

“It is not just a matter of discordant personalities. Out campaigners have struggled to unite around a single vision of what Britain’s post-Brexit trading arrangements would look like.”

And this is the core problem for the LEAVERS – their Achilles heel. Explained the FT:

“They have also failed to provide a convincing explanation of how leaving the EU would give the British greater control over their destiny and improved economic prospects. This is not surprising because none of the models that is mooted for a future outside the EU is convincing.”

Some Eurosceptics are proposing the same model for Britain as Norway – but to participate in the EU internal market, Norway has to agree to EU rules, without any say in them.

Another option favoured by some Eurosceptics is for Britain to strike trade deals on a country-by-country basis. But, as the FT points out, that would mean British businesses having to pay higher tariffs to trade internationally.

As the Financial Times asserted:

“When it comes to these models – and others – the problem is that Britain moves from being a rule-maker to rule-taker.”

If Eurosceptics can’t even agree among themselves what it would mean for Britain to leave the European Union, it seems a bit rich to expect that voters will know. They don’t know, because the LEAVERS don’t know.

On this basis, I can’t recommend anyone to vote to leave. Our membership of the EU is not that bad; and the options for leaving (whichever one you might choose) are not that good.

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Other stories by Jon Danzig:

• My vote for Europe
  
• The end of free movement to and from Europe?
• Wrong answers on Question Time
• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

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The post What does Brexit look like? Nobody knows appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This post was first published in NBXMain in October 2015

Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are international crimes and, since 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) can investigate individuals accused of having committed acts of that nature. From 2017, under certain circumstances the ICC will also have jurisdiction in relation to the crime of aggression. These are the four international crimes recognised in the Statute of the ICC. There was a time, however, when scholars, international bodies and even some government officials spoke about a possible fifth international crime: Ecocide.

Ecocide was a crazy idea promoted by a bunch of visionary/loony academics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Aware of the fact that human action was causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem, they argued that humanity as a whole could be considered to be the victim of premeditated forms of aggression against the environment.

The idea could have remained an exercise of academic engineering had it not resonated, even if mildly, in international political discourse. Most famously, the then Prime Minister of Sweden, Olaf Palme, said in his opening address of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on Environment:

”The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention.” 

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 1970s, the environment became part of the ongoing conversations held at the International Law Commission (ILC) in relation to the Code of Crimes Against Peace and Security of Mankind. Yet, mysteriously ecocide was dropped from the agenda in the mid-1990s (find out more details here).

It cannot be by chance that this happened precisely when deliberations on the Statute of the ICC were coming to an end (they were completed in 1998). States were only willing to let the ILC play with the notion of ecocide to the extent that enforceability remained weak. Governments were not ready to eliminate safe havens and to let independent bodies judge individuals for the commission of crimes against the environment.

As it stands now, international law sanctions the intentional damage of the environment in wartime situations, and trans-boundary ecological damage can be a source of state responsibility. However, partly due to its blurry definition but especially because of the lack of support from key international actors (mostly Western European states), ecocide never got to the point of development of the prohibition of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ecocide disappeared from the policy and legal agenda nearly two decades ago. For now, it still is the international crime that could have been but never quite was.

In recent years, there have been attempts to resuscitate ecocide under new frames, connected to indigenous struggles and climate change. Time will tell if, as a normative project, ecocide performs better in this second life. However, considering the failure of the first attempt, and the growing mistrust on the ICC and international justice in general, one must remain cautious. Unless sudden changes revolutionise international politics, the Earth will remain unprotected in international criminal law in the foreseeable future.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Koldo Casla

@koldo_casla

The post Ecocide: the international crime that could have been but never quite was appeared first on Ideas on Europe.