Euobserver.com

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday urged Greek authorities to release 276 unaccompanied migrant children detained in police cells and detention centers across the country, saying the move was all the more urgent due to the coronavirus pandemic, Ekathimerini reports. "The prime minister should act on his pledge to protect unaccompanied children and make sure that hundreds of vulnerable children are freed from dirty, crowded cells", HRW said.

Gyorgy Bakondi, a security aide to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban on Tuesday, said the government does not recognise last week's ruling by the European Court of Justice on four asylum-seekers stuck in a transit zone on the Hungarian-Serbian border. The court demanded their release and described it as detention. "The government does not accept the ruling of the EU's top court...about the transit zones," said Bakondi, in a statement.

British negotiator David Frost has said the EU is offering the UK a "relatively low-quality trade agreement", Reuters reported. "Overall, at this moment in negotiations, what is on offer is not a fair free-trade relationship between close economic partners, but a relatively low-quality trade agreement coming with unprecedented EU oversight of our laws and institutions," reads the letter sent to his counterpart Michel Barnier on Tuesday.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country's highest court ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications, Deutsche Welle writes. The ruling said non-Germans are equally protected by Germany's constitutional rights, and that the current law lacked special protection for the work of lawyers and journalists.

Ostend, a city on Belgium's North Sea coast, plans to make reservation of a place on the beach this summer mandatory, De Standaard writes. "We have made the calculations. On the busiest beaches there will be a system of reservations", Bart Tommelein, mayor of Ostend said, adding "only this way we can do crowd-control". How the reservation system will work in detail is not clear yet.

"When you are the CEO, at the end of the day, you are the only one to be responsible, no one else," EU single market commissioner Thierry Breton told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a live-streamed debate Monday, referring to Facebook's routine publication of dangerous fake news on the pandemic. "At the end of the day, it will be Mark who will be responsible and nobody else," Breton added.

A group of 11 EU states have agreed a roadmap for how to do summer holidays in Europe. EU nations ought to open borders phase-by-phase, coordinate measures, prioritise safety, and ensure people can get back home afterward, according to a joint statement Monday by foreign ministers from Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Malta, Slovenia, and Spain. All EU countries currently have different travel rules in place.

Data privacy commissioner Ulrich Kelber said any use of WhatsApp was prohibited in federal ministries and institutions, even if some had resorted to using it during the current pandemic, Deutsche Welle writes. In a letter to branches of the federal government, Kelber said that bodies must respect, and not neglect, data protection "even in these difficult times." "Just by sending messages, metadata is delivered to WhatsApp every time," said Kelber.

Germany is to reopen its internal EU borders from 15 June, its foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has said. "We hope that on June 15 we will be able to replace the general travel warning with travel advice," he said Monday. People should remain careful and everybody should not start travelling at once, he added. This year's holidays "won't have much to do with the [past] vacation[s] you've known," Maas said.

A French court, the Council of State, has ruled French authorities must let religious worshippers start going back to church eight days from Monday. It said that since France had permitted gatherings of 10 or more people for social reasons, the church ban was "disproportionate in nature" and caused "damage that was seriously and manifestly illegal". France has had one of the strict lockdown regimes in Europe.

Belgian intelligence has confirmed it had investigated potential Chinese espionage in Malta's EU embassy, as MEPs seek answers.

German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron proposed on Monday a recovery fund of €500bn to support the sectors and regions in the EU most affected by the coronavirus crisis.

Child sexual abuse online is more sought-after by criminals as more children are online at home, the EU's law enforcement agency warns. The economic crisis following the pandemic could also strengthen well-established criminal networks.

Professionals most in need, not national hoarders, should get the first shots of any future coronavirus vaccine, the EU's medicines regulator has said.

The new EU pact on migration is set for publication sometime in June. Final tweaks are still underway as commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson says she remains cautiously optimistic on finding a solution to the most pressing issues.

One country has been largely successful in combatting the coronavirus, particularly given the past 10 years - Greece.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is dipping in the polls after dithering over the coronavirus lockdown and has now expelled one of its most prominent extremists, Deutsch Welle reports. Andreas Kalbitz, leader of the party in the state of Brandenburg, and the second-most prominent member of the hardcore faction of the party, was ejected because he failed to declare former membership of a neo-Nazi organisation.

The European Commission on Monday said carbon emission platforms could start applying to host sales of permits in the European Union emissions trading system (ETS) from 2021, reports Reuters. Auctions will be held on behalf of 25 EU member states plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. The auctions take place on the European Energy Exchange (EEX) platform.

The Dutch airline company KLM has decided to increase the value of vouchers for cancelled flights by 15 percent, De Standaard reports. The European Commission re-affirmed last week airlines need to pay back cancelled tickets if people request it. KLM fears it cannot refund all tickets, and hopes people will prefer vouchers with a higher value over an immediate cash refund.

Spanish transport minister Jose Luis Abalos said on Monday his country aims reopen its borders from late June to resume tourism. "From late June, we'll start the tourism activity, I hope (…) We must make Spain an attractive country from the health point of view," he told TVE broadcaster. Tourism accounts for over 12 percent of Spain's GDP with more than 1.5 million people employed in the sector.