European Union

Despite high unemployment in many parts of Europe, few Europeans look for work in another EU country. This is partly because of the difficulty of finding a job abroad. The European network of Employment Services (Eures) was launched in 1993 to help with this. On 25 February MEPs approved a proposal to strengthen the Eures network. Watch the video to find out what services Eures can offer.
Committee on Employment and Social Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Despite high unemployment in many parts of Europe, few Europeans look for work in another EU country. This is partly because of the difficulty of finding a job abroad. The European network of Employment Services (Eures) was launched in 1993 to help with this. On 25 February MEPs approved a proposal to strengthen the Eures network. Watch the video to find out what services Eures can offer.
Committee on Employment and Social Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Length of video : 229'
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Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of our new Brussels Briefing. To receive it every morning in your email in-box, sign up here.

There are 20 European ministers in Vienna today for one of the most extraordinary meetings of the migration crisis – and there have been some pretty extraordinary meetings.

Austria has convened nine countries along the so-called western Balkans migration route. That sounds reasonable enough. Foreign and interior ministers will be present from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Missing from the guestlist, though, is the main migrant entry-point (Greece) and the main destination-point (Germany). That is either a rather big oversight – or an act of mutiny.

It caps a week where the dominoes have begun to fall in south-eastern Europe. Austria’s renegade policy – imposing asylum caps while waving through Germany-bound migrants – has triggered other national responses down the line. Vienna is even considering deploying troops to the Macedonia border. It is shaping facts on the ground that are fast eclipsing the prospects for a “European solution”, if ever it were possible.

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EU and NATO coordination has started to tackle the refugee crisis and will be further deepened, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told MEPs and national MPs in the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

EU and NATO coordination has started to tackle the refugee crisis and will be further deepened, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told MEPs and national MPs in the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

EU and NATO coordination has started to tackle the refugee crisis and will be further deepened, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told MEPs and national MPs in the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

EU and NATO coordination has started to tackle the refugee crisis and will be further deepened, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told MEPs and national MPs in the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Concerns about the impact that a revised EU firearms directive could have on legal owners of guns in the EU, such as sport shooters, hunters, collectors and museums, were voiced by most MEPs in Internal Market Committee’s kick-off debate on the proposal on Tuesday. The draft revision was proposed by the EU Commission after the 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Length of video : 232'
You may manually download this video in WMV (2.6Gb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Presentation by Shingo Yamagami, Director General, Japan Institute of International Affairs
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of our new Brussels Briefing. To receive it every morning in your email in-box, sign up here.

Other than David Cameron’s deal renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU, the only major decision taken at last week’s Brussels summit was to hold yet another emergency summit on Europe’s burgeoning refugee crisis. With a regularly-scheduled summit already on the calendar for March 17, why would leaders need to reassemble again in the first week of March? According to several EU diplomats, the new gathering will be held at the request of Chancellor Angela Merkel because of a major political event happening in the interim: March 13 regional elections in three large German states.

Increasingly, those elections – in wealthy Baden-Württemberg; neighbouring Rhineland-Pfalz; and eastern Saxony-Anhalt – are being seen as referenda on Ms Merkel’s migration policy. And with UN figures showing refugee arrivals in Greece back up above 3,000 per day, there’s a good reason for the chancellor to be in a bit of a panic. Recent polls show the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party making significant gains in all three länder, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, where a survey published yesterday by the mass-market Bild newspaper had AfD at a stunning 17 per cent, ahead of the centre-left Social Democrats. In Baden-Württemberg, whose capital of Stuttgart is home to automaker Daimler, Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrats – who have dominated the state’s politics for decades – fell behind the Greens in the same poll. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says “it looks bleak” for the CDU in the region. In Rhineland-Pfalz, AfD has risen from nothing in the 2011 elections to 8.5 per cent.

The atmospherics have not been helped by events on the ground, which appear to be further radicalising the electorate. Last week, videos emerged of an anti-immigrant mob besieging a bus filled with migrants in the small town of Clausnitz, near the Czech border. That was compounded by another video showing police dragging a frightened boy off the bus as the mob raged outside. Just days later in Bautzen, another small town near the Czech border, onlookers cheered as a building meant to house asylum seekers burned to the ground. Much like the new year’s attacks in Cologne, the incidents have set off another round of German soul searching over just how welcome the country is to immigrants.

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Presentation by General Ramirez and General Pfrengle, Eurocorps
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP