Tuesday
28th Mar 2023
Polish abortion rights activists Justyna Wydrzyńska was last week sentenced for giving abortion pills to a 12-week pregnant woman. She will appeal. But with a court stacked by politically-appointed judges, her chances of overturning it are slim.
The bitter dispute over the so-called 'child protection' law, a red line for the Viktor Orbán government, could also influence the outcome of negotiations on unblocking EU funds for Hungary.
Every year, neo-Nazis come together to pay tribute to Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, from Benito Mussolini to Rudolf Hess, Ante Pavelić, Hristo Lukov, and of course Adolf Hitler, in events that have become rituals on the extreme-right calendar.
More than five million people in the EU have been unemployed for more than a year. Lack of skills or education is not always the reason or the solution they need, says a proposal for an EU Job Guarantee.
In many EU member states, access to services is dependent on successful refugee status determination. Until then, asylum seekers may not be able to get housing, education, or jobs and can also face significant barriers to receiving psychosocial support.
A tsunami of court cases in the US, coupled with EU plans to restrict toxic PFAS 'forever chemicals' pose a growing risk for investors.
It is no easy thing to restrict thousands of chemicals used in daily products and manufacturing for some 70 years — but this week the EU opened public consultations on two proposals to do just that.
The EU must back the UN's Human Rights 75 initiative at the end of the year to rekindle the spirit of the original declaration made in 1948 — and also demand a similar recommitment from all its 27 members.
The European Parliament proposes prioritising decent working conditions, a new framework for economic governance, with a strong social dimension, and new instruments to measure social inequalities.
The European Commission has delayed publishing its proposal to revise the Reach regulation, a key part of the European Green Deal's chemicals strategy. Centre-right political pressure, backed up by corporate lobbying, seems to have been behind the decision to delay.
MEPs' call for a directive includes three essential points: coverage above the poverty line, better accessibility, and adequacy, so they reach everyone who is entitled to receive this support.
'The EU's rules for public procurement are broken. They pave the way to a race to the bottom for working people,' warns the European trade federation representing seven million workers in the service sector
A Polish activist is facing up to three years in prison for helping another woman obtain an abortion — it is the very first case in Europe where an activist is charged with helping to access abortion care.
In Lithuania, Denmark, Slovenia, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and Romania, the design of national tax systems leads to an 'inactivity trap' among second-payers (mostly women) above 40 percent.
"There are a lot of rural areas in Sweden and we must be able to secure people's right to healthcare and access to water, food and medicines. At the same time, we must protect the workers' right to daily rest."
While president Joe Biden has made the creation of "good-paying, union jobs" a priority, the European Union is pursuing deregulatory policies more akin to those of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Messaging apps are an inescapable fact of life — it therefore comes as surprise that Ursula von der Leyen, claims that the EU's freedom of information law does not cover her text messages. The New York times is challenging that.
As states increasingly outsource tasks to consultancies, this 'consultancy culture' contributes to the phenomenon of staff leaving the public sector for the private sector, only to return to the public sector as private consultants.
As the EU is heading towards a bloc-wide law strengthening rights of platform workers, Paris hopes to avoid the future directive by introducing collective bargaining between gig-workers' representatives and the platforms.
Policies have a strong impact, argues EIGE director Carlien Scheele. But gender equality is improving by a snail's pace. And more women in decision-making also mean more backlash.
More pay-transparency equals more tools to close the gender pay-gap. A historic step in the EU, but still with room for improvement.
While there is a shortage of healthcare workers all over Europe, wealthier European countries are recruiting healthcare workers from other parts of Europe. With dire consequences.
20 million children do not have their basic rights ensured: they lack healthy food, adequate shelter and health care, and their chances for personal and professional development are also undermined.
The EU's response has been swift and coordinated, but will need adjustments to be sustainable in the long term if they want to effectively adapt their markets to Ukrainian workers.
Telework in the EU has a growth potential of up to 49%—what if a status was created to work from any EU country without major bureaucratic hurdles?
Hundreds of Belgian workers laid off last year are set to benefit from an EU job funding scheme after TNT, a logistics firm, made Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport their primary hub of operations.
For France's over three million 'precarious workers' the retirement age has long been 67 — if they ever do retire.
Coming to Europe to work from outside the EU is hard. Despite dramatic labour shortages across sectors and EU countries, work permits for non-EU workers are few and those that exist often leave workers at the mercy of exploitative employers.
The pandemic, war, and inflation have only worsened a situation that already required urgent action. MEPs and NGOs fear that the lack of binding rules for member states will not ensure that those most in need are actually covered.
Rail workers, MEPs, and trade unions rallied on Tuesday in Brussels to stop the EU Commission's attempt to further privatise public transport across the EU.
Three Green MEPs complain of a biased approach by the chair of the European Parliament's petitions committee, concerning the handling of a session on the use of the Catalan language in Spain.
Embarrassingly, the European Parliament could soon be handing its prize to a film in a language which cannot be used in the European Parliament.
News editors have a responsibility to give more weight to the unique angles that women war reporters bring to stories; to ensure that more women experts are featured in the news; and to focus on stories relevant to women audiences.
