Euobserver.com

A Polish court has ordered two eminent historians, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, to apologise to a Polish woman for "defaming" her late uncle in a book saying he had given up Jews to Nazis. The ruling could chill Holocaust research, academics feared, amid wider EU concern the right-wing Polish government wielded political control of judges. Germany, also Tuesday, charged a 100-year old man for 3,518 murders at concentration camps.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has promised new sanctions on Russia in ongoing fallout from his "humiliating" trip to Moscow.

The UK will require passengers arriving from countries where worrying coronavirus variants are spreading to pay for 10 days of quarantine in hotels, while rule-breakers will face heavy fines or jail terms, under tighter restrictions from next week, Reuters reports. "Anyone who lies on the passenger locator form [...] will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years," UK health secretary Matt Hancock told parliament.

The European commission published on Tuesday the redacted contract signed with the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-GSK last September. This is the third contract that has been made public, after CureVac's and AstraZeneca's deals. "Transparency, accountability and building trust with institutions and citizens are a key commitment of our work," said EU health commissioner Stella Kyrirakides. Three of the early purchase agreements signed between the EU executive and vaccine-developers remain confidential.

A baby born in Spain to a same-sex couple from Bulgaria and Gibraltar is at risk of statelessness, reports Reuters. Bulgaria has refused to provide the child with a birth certificate and citizenship due to the parents' sexual orientation. The case was heard at the European Court of Justice on Tuesday. "It's caused us a lot of upset. This discrimination feels very personal and has shocked us," said the mother.

In an open letter to EU institutions, Reporters without Borders say they have observed around 400 cases of journalists being arrested for "covering massive, peaceful protests against president Alexander Lukashenko's fraudulent reelection." They add that at least 62 cases of physical violence against journalists have been registered since 9 August and 11 journalists are currently jailed. The letter urges the EU to increase sanctions on Belarus and support independent media.

While all governments are seeking to secure vaccines as fast as they can so they can open up their economies, so far only Hungary's Viktor Orban has chosen to break with the EU's vaccine strategy.

MEPs have condemned the near-total ban on the right to abortion in Poland, following the entry into force of the country's Constitutional Tribunal ruling - which makes 98 percent of all abortions carried out annually in the country illegal.

The World Health Organisation team that visited Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus has dismissed a theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory, while giving some credence to China's focus on the possibility of transmission via frozen food, The Guardian writes. Peter Ben Embarek, head of the team called this theory, spread by Donald Trump, "extremely unlikely" and not "a hypothesis we suggest implies further study."

Kazakhstan has been lobbying the European Parliament to scupper a vote on human rights, as it attempts to gain international standing. But most political groups will move ahead to pass a resolution naming victims of the regime.

If you want to measure how powerful Europe is, ask its neighbours.

Convening citizens' panels and conducting multi-level debates on various policy topics in the timespan of one year, and under social-distancing restrictions, will be either impossible, or will boil the Conference on the Future of Europe down to a mere window-dressing.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told MEPs Tuesday he would propose a list of Russian names to blacklist over the jailing of opposition figure Alexei Navalny. "I will put forward concrete proposals using the right of initiative that the high representative [for foreign affairs] has," Borrell said, referring to new EU human rights sanctions. He indicated it would be by the next EU foreign ministers' meeting on 22 February.

German economy minister Olaf Scholz offered to spend €1bn of German taxpayers' money to subsidise US liquid gas imports last year, if the then US president Donald Trump quashed Congressional sanctions against Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Scholz did it in a letter to Trump's treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, dated August last year, and published by German green NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe Tuesday, amid heightened EU-Russia tensions.

Russia's TurkStream pipeline with Turkey to south-east Europe, which began work in January, has seen Bulgaria and Greece get almost all their gas via the new route this year, instead of via Ukraine, as before, according to UK energy consultancy Platts. Bulgaria received some 6.4 billion cubic metres via Ukraine last year, and "almost zero" this year. Russia is also building a pipeline to Germany to bypass the pro-Western Ukraine.

Britain called on Monday for a reset in relations with the European Union and the "refinement" of a Brexit deal covering trade with Northern Ireland, Reuters writes. Relations between Brussels and London strained by years of bruising Brexit talks took a turn for the worse last month when the EU threatened to use emergency measures to stop coronavirus vaccines going into Northern Ireland.

The EU and UK, backed by the US, have called for an emergency session of the UN human rights council in Geneva Friday to discuss the coup and anti-coup protests in Myanmar, amid fear the new military junta could turn to violence. "We must respond urgently to the plight of the people in Myanmar and the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation there," Julian Braithwaite, the UK's ambassador in Geneva, said.

Russia has cast doubt on EU top diplomat Josep Borrell's account of his "tense" talks in Moscow, as more than 70 MEPs called for his resignation.

EU foreign relations chief Josep Borrell voiced "strong concern" about China's "treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, in particular in Xinjiang" in a videoconference with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi Monday. Borrell also "underlined the EU's strong bonds with the US", amid China-US trade and military tensions. Wang complained about "disinformation" on China's treatment of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, despite credible reports of mass-scale forced labour and rape.

Germany's largest lender, Deutsche Bank, will no longer do business with outgoing US president Donald Trump-affiliated entities, according to reports in the New York Times and Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, on Tuesday. The move comes after Trump incited a lethal riot in the Capitol last week. A bank spokesman declined to comment to EUobserver for "legal reasons". The bank has reportedly loaned the Trump Organization $340m [€280m].