European Union

Eurotunnel is warning British citizens that they cannot travel through France by car from the UK without a "compelling reason" due to new coronavirus restrictions, The Guardian writes. "Following a French government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU," a Eurotunnel statement said.

A Russian court on Wednesday ordered the closure of Memorial Human Rights Center. It is the second major human rights group that was banned in two days. On Tuesday, Russia's Supreme Court banned the group's parent organisation, Memorial International. Both groups were outlawed for violating a controversial foreign agent law. Memorial International was founded in 1989 to document Soviet-era political repression.

Environmental degradation is pushing animals and plants to the brink of extinction, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The speed and scale has not been seen since dinosaurs died out 66m years ago. There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - 40,000 of which are "threatened with extinction" - the largest number ever recorded.

In January Italian representatives will elect the country's new president. All eyes are on current prime minister Mario Draghi, but other names are starting to circulate as well.

Germany's foreign minister will boycott Beijing's Winter Olympics on human-rights grounds, but the EU has a "cognitive split" on China, it said.

In the coming two years, The EU's biggest economy will likely miss its climate targets, co-leader Robert Habeck said.

From the Mediterranean to Minsk, from Covid to climate change, EUobserver has proudly broken original stories on the EU institutions in 2021 - under our ethos of 'Independent. Investigative. Influential.'

The EU's economic policy agenda for the coming year is packed with negotiations on the bloc's fiscal rules, tax policies, minimum wages, and financial regulations. Here is a comprehensive look at what is coming up.

Enlargement is stalled, and EU governments can barely agree on a common strategy to bring in the six membership hopefuls -- Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia.

France is intensively preparing for its EU presidency starting in January while working closely with Slovenia, whose stint at the helm of the EU is ending, French Ambassador to Slovenia Florence Ferrari told STA in an interview.

During its six-month EU presidency, Slovenia successfully led the process of adopting European legislation, but that has been somewhat overshadowed by concerns from Brussels about the rule of law in the country, analysts say.

US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin will speak on Thursday (30 December), the White House said, as Washington crafts a common response to Russia's military build-up on the Ukraine border with European allies.

The Belgian government reversed course on Wednesday (29 December) by allowing theatres to reopen after a court suspended their closure ordered a week ago to try to stem the surge in infections from the Omicron coronavirus variant.

Global COVID-19 infections hit a record high over the past seven-day period, Reuters data showed on Wednesday (29 December), as the Omicron variant raced out of control and governments tried to contain its spread without paralysing fragile economies.

France is seeing a "tsunami" of COVID-19 infections, with 208,000 cases reported over the past 24 hours, a new national and European record, Health Minister Olivier Véran told lawmakers on Wednesday (29 December).

BERLIN, Dec 29 (Reuters) – Germany’s ministers for foreign affairs and sports will not attend the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, spokespeople said on Wednesday, as Berlin liaises with its European allies on an overall diplomatic boycott. A foreign ministry...

Italian restaurant and club owners are seeking urgent government support due to increased cancellations prompted by a surge in coronavirus infections, they said in a statement on Wednesday, while Poland reported an all-time high in the number of deaths.

Hong Kong pro-democracy media outlet Stand News said Wednesday it will close after a police raid and arrests of seven current and former staff members, in the latest blow to the city's rapidly shrinking press freedoms.

It is crucial to complete the EU's enlargement to the Western Balkans and prepare the Union for further membership applications by interested European countries, writes Gašper Dovžan.

The German government will present draft legislation that protects disabled people or patients with pre-existing conditions if over-stretched hospitals are forced to decide who gets care. The decision is in line with a ruling by the constitutional court on Tuesday (29 December), which said that the constitution stipulates that people with disabilities cannot be discriminated against.