European Union

Jussi Halla-aho, the chair of the populist and nationalist Finns Party announced on Monday during a party webcast that he will not be seeking  re-election in the August party conference. However, the announcement was no surprise to the party’s inner...

Outgoing DUP leader Edwin Poots has suggested the Northern Ireland Protocol should be put to a referendum. “The post-Brexit arrangements are undemocratic and change the constitutional position of the North, and if they can’t be scrapped then a vote is...

White children from poor backgrounds have been let down by decades of neglect in the English education system, UK lawmakers have said in a report published on Tuesday that is set to reopen the country’s culture war. The report by...

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared the Commission’s approval of Austria’s €3.5 billion recovery plan in a press conference with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Austria will primarily invest the money in railways, broadband extension and ecological projects....

Without Turkey’s cooperation, the EU will not find a solution on the long-standing issue of migration, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said at a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. According to the draft conclusions of the EU Council...

The EU, US, Britain and Canada ratcheted up pressure on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko Monday (21 June) by imposing coordinated sanctions after the forced landing of a Ryanair airliner to arrest a regime critic.

Belarusian opposition leaders have broadly welcomed the EU's latest round of sanctions on regime henchmen, but some said they ought to have gone further.

Italian prime minister Mario Draghi said that the Euro 2020 final should be moved from Wembley Stadium in London to Rome, Deutsche Welle reports. The UK has seen a rise in coronavirus cases due to the spread of the 'delta variant', first identified in India. "I advocate that the final should not take place in a country in which the risk of infection is very big," Draghi told reporters.

The UN rights chief has called for action to recover from the worst global deterioration of rights she had seen, highlighting the situation in China, Russia, and Ethiopia among others, The Guardian reports. "To recover from the most wide-reaching and severe cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes, we need a life-changing vision, and concerted action," Michelle Bachelet told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council's 47th session.

The EU has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard. Those intercepted are then returned. Now Turkey has taken the lead, raising the stakes of possible leverage over the European Union as Ankara takes control of the route.

If the Europe Union doesn’t want an explosion in the amount of wood being harvested for “renewable heat”, it’s essential that the bugs in the Renewable Energy Directive are fixed, write Samuel Thomas, Dominic Scott and Dr Jan Rosenow.

The EU needs to move "as soon as possible" from a wait-and-see approach to a problem-solving strategy in dealing with enlargement and the Western Balkans, Slovenian Foreign Minister Anže Logar told EURACTIV in an interview about the priorities for his country's upcoming EU Council presidency.

A carbon tax on the fuel used to heat Europe's buildings is the most effective price signal to decarbonise Europe's building stock, which is in desperate need of renovation to meet the EU's climate ambition, writes Oliver Rapf.

Belgium's justice minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, has appealed to the public to ignore conspiracy theories around the death of Jürgen Conings, the heavily-armed soldier whose body has been discovered a month after he went missing after threatening to kill a high-profile virologist, The Guardian writes. Conings' aunt told local media she believed security forces had killed her nephew. "He wouldn't commit suicide," she said. "He was killed."

Sweden's parliament passed a vote of no confidence in prime minister Stefan Lofven on Monday, the BBC reports. A total of 181 of the 349 MPs voted in favour, with 51 abstentions. It is the first time in Swedish history that a prime minister has been ousted in such a vote. The social democrat leader has a week to resign or call a snap election.

Continuing to classify British TV and film as "European works" under the EU's audiovisual laws, which set quotas for platforms such as Amazon and Netflix, could "result in a disproportionate presence of UK content with the European" market, according to an internal EU document seen by The Guardian. The European Commission is doing an impact assessment on "cultural diversity", which could see the British industry lose its perks, it reported.

Iran's president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, has welcomed the negotiations with world powers aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal but said they must guarantee national interests, the BBC writes. Raisi promised he would not allow the talks in Vienna to be dragged out and also insisted that Iran's ballistic missile programme was "not negotiable". The nuclear deal has been close to collapse since the US abandoned it three years ago.

A report of the European Court of Auditors revealed on Monday that agricultural spending for climate action has failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming. In the period 2014-2020, more than €100bn were earmarked for climate change, but emissions from agriculture have not decreased since 2010. EU auditors called on the European Commission to assess the impact of applying the polluter-pays principle to emissions from agricultural activities.

EU data protection authorities on Monday called for a ban on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for automated recognition of human features such as faces, fingerprints or voices, in public spaces and in any context. Under draft AI regulation, technologies such as facial recognition could be used to search for crime victims or missing children. EU watchdogs also called for an "AI body independent from any political influence".

The Article 7 sanctions procedure was initially launched against Warsaw in 2017 by the EU Commission and triggered by the European Parliament in 2018 against Budapest. Now it is back on the table, after the pandemic.