Euobserver.com

Belarus has threatened to halt transit of EU goods via its territory after Europe's recent economic sanctions. "First: not a step inside the Belarusian market; second: not a step through Belarus ... the same should be done with the Germans. Let [them] supply their products to China and Russia through Finland or Ukraine," Belarus president Aleksander Lukashenko said Tuesday, Reuters reports. He also jailed a political opponent for 14 years.

The European Commission unveiled on Tuesday its Renewed Sustainable Finance Strategy - with a commitment to improve the sustainability expertise of financial advisers. The EU executive also published a legislative proposal for voluntary EU green bonds' standards. Bonds can be used in long-term projects, aligned with the so-called EU taxonomy. However, NGOs have raised concern over the possibility of labelling gas and nuclear energy as "green" investments.

Dutch MEP Malik Azmani said the EU Commission should not have approved Slovenia's national Covid-19 recovery plan without prime minister Janez Janša appointing the prosecutors.

Leaked documents revealed "limited progress" in talks on revising the controversial Energy Charter Treaty - triggering renewed calls from activists to pull out of the agreement, seen as a stumbling block to a clean-energy transition.

Neither Commission nor EU leaders have reacted to the Austrian government's amorphous fight against "political Islam". Their silence is deafening over French president Emmanuel Macron's controversial draft 'separatism' bill. Or Social Democrat-led Denmark's legislation relocating asylum seekers to third countries.

Could the Green Deal, the European Climate Law, the Just Transition Fund tackle illegal deforestation, arsons, water, air and soil pollution, traffic of ozone-depleting substances and protected species, poaching, overfishing etc.? The answer is clearly 'no', we need a prosecutor.

Taxpayers rather than polluting corporations pay for clean-up operations in Europe due to lax regulation, the European Court of Auditors, an EU financial watchdog, said Monday. "Polluters need to pay for the environmental damage they cause ... Up to now, though, European taxpayers have far too often been forced to bear the costs that polluters should have paid," the court's Viorel Stefan said, after a study of 42 clean-up projects.

"It is in the European Union's very own interests to drive the [enlargement] process forward here," in the Western Balkans, German chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday in a video-summit on the region. French president Emmanuel Macron said he "very clearly" supported enlargement, while EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said she wanted to "accelerate" it. Enlargement is currently stuck due to a Bulgarian veto and ongoing Kosovo-Serbia enmity, however.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is the only EU leader in a new report on 37 national heads who are "press-freedom predators", according to French NGO Reporters Without Borders. Orbán "has steadily and effectively undermined media pluralism and independence since being returned to power in 2010," the NGO noted. Belarus, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria's leaders also made the list, which was last updated five years ago.

Germany has lifted its ban on British tourists and said those who are fully vaccinated will not need to quarantine either. It reclassified the UK, along with Portugal, Russia, India, and Nepal, despite concern over the 'Delta variant' of coronavirus spreading there. The UK, also on Monday, said it would lift all restrictions, including mask-wearing, from 19 July, but France has voiced wariness of an EU fourth wave of infections.

EU Council president Charles Michel pledged solidarity to Lithuania in Vilnius on Monday after 560 migrants crossed the border from Belarus last weekend. "Belarus authorities are using irregular migration to try and put pressure on the EU," he said, after Minsk started flying in refugees and pushing them into Lithuania in reaction to EU sanctions. More than 1,200 migrants recently crossed, compared to fewer than 50 in a normal year.

Most EU countries, including Hungary, have voiced solidarity with LGBTIQ protesters in Georgia after a violent mob halted their Pride march on Monday.

Just eight of the 27 EU states have transposed a landmark EU law against plastic waste, which entered into force this weekend, into national legislation, according to the European Commission on Monday, Reuters reports. Even these adopted "bare-minimum requirements", green NGO Zero Waste Europe said. The law bans single-use plastics in straws, plates, cutlery, and cotton-bud tips. It also calls for 30 percent recycled plastic in drinking bottles from 2030.

French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel held a mini-summit by phone with Chinese president Xi Jinping Monday, to discuss "international trade, climate protection, and biodiversity" as well as the pandemic and "regional issues", Merkel's office said. It did not mention China's attacks on its Uighur minority or Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, which recently prompted EU sanctions and Chinese counter-sanctions, ruining prospects of a new China-EU investment treaty.

French exporters of champagne to Russia will have to change their labels, replacing "champagne" with "sparkling wine", after a new Russian law entered into force last week, allowing only Russian producers to use the term "champagne" - which EU origin-labels associate with the French region of the same name. Moët-Hennessy, one French producer, suspended sales this weekend, but promised to resume them with new labels despite the extra cost.

After she questioned if Viktor Orbán government's restrictive asylum rules were compatible with EU rules, judge Gabriella Szabó was not given an indefinite mandate. She thinks it is because her request went against the government's interests.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, for the first time European citizens consider climate change as the single most serious problem facing the world, a new Eurobarometer survey has found.

The Five Star Movment crisis has arisen from the clash between comedian Beppe Grillo, co-founder of the party, and presumed saviour Giuseppe Conte. Grillo, accuses Conte of a power-grab, while Grillo is criticised for acting like an "authoritarian father."

Only days after what some considered to be a detente between the Spanish government and pro-independence Catalans, ex-Catalan politicians and their associates tied to the independence movement have been charged millions of euros for the misuse of public funds.

Two years on from the European Parliament elections, in which the populist rightwing failed to deliver the earthquake some predicted, the parliament will likely soon become the home of a new Frankenstein far-right alliance of illiberal populists.