Sunday
13th Jun 2021
The EU is committed to reduce "the risk and use of pesticides by 50 percent" by 2030. However, given the level of controversy and public distrust surrounding EU pesticides regulation over the last decade, which reforms could garner public support?
Sometimes it takes a little geopolitical competition to acknowledge the sins of the past.
In Hungary, a proposed amendment of the housing law insists municipalities sell their housing units to inhabitants at 10-30 percent of the market price, a decision that would "further deepen the current urban housing crisis and increase existing housing inequalities".
At Tuesday's summit co-chaired by the EU and Sweden to discuss the most pressing issues faced by Yemen - world leaders have a real chance to pull the country back from the brink, write seven international NGOs.
The mining industry is working hard to ensure communities in Europe (and worldwide) have no real power to reject mining projects, using the industry-coined concept of 'social licence to operate' - with as little community input and dissent as possible.
Lukashenko's Belarus is increasingly reminiscent of North Korea in its mix of capricious unpredictability and unbridled aggression born out of paranoia, writes Lithuania's foreign minister.
As a membership candidate, Serbia is expected to join foreign policy declarations and restrictive measures of the EU. However, Serbia is unlikely to join the EU measures against Belarus for both international and domestic reasons.
Our investigation reveals war crimes were committed by all parties to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Thousands of civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict. None of the key decision-makers are being held to account.
As the crisis in Ceuta unfolded, Spain resolutely requested Brussels' support. And it got it.
The Covid-19 crisis has revealed that the current European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has neither the funding, the staff or – perhaps most importantly – the authority to lead an effective response to a pandemic in Europe.
It's not uncommon to hear accusations of Catalan financial greed as a motivation for independence. But in reality, the economic relationship between Spain and Catalonia is a nuanced one, which many Catalans believe is historically, and now, based on domination.
We must recognise that subversive acts like the Ryanair hijack are acts of war, just like poisonings or the spread of fake news.
Progress at the Union for the Mediterranean has been slow and remains below its potential. The EU is still responsible for over 95 percent of the region's internal merchandise exports and 93 percent of the external merchandise exports.
Last month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch Parliament had an online call with Russian dissident Alexi Navalny's chief of staff. Or so the parliamentarians thought. It turned out that they may have been talking to a deepfake.
Trust in government bodies tends to be higher in the Germanic cultural region than in the Latin one. Differences in basic values, and emotional and behavioural differences, have been causing problems for the EU since it was established in 1952.
The Conference on the Future of Europe can become a milestone in EU climate policy making – if its recommendations are specific and address the deadlocked issues.
Workers such as United Nurses Association of India are furious that the EU is undermining their best efforts and exacerbating the crisis by continuing to put big-pharma profits ahead of Covid vaccine patent-waivers. Is this what solidarity looks like?
Alexander Lukashenko's administration has forced over 14,000 citizens to flee the country. This gives the International Criminal Court a sliver of a chance to hold the Belarus regime to account.
The relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is actually an oversized Stanford Prison Experiment. That 1970s experiment showed that if you give people power, they start to abuse that power very quickly.
Georgia is an ideal case study to prove the effectiveness of EU policies, mainly because the EU's leverage in Georgia is the highest of all Eastern Partnership states.
As European foreign ministers meet to talk about Israel and Palestine, Palestinians from both sides of the Green Line will be looking to the EU, Israel's main trade partner, to take the moral, legal and political steps required.
The impact of the EU's e-privacy directive was not theoretical. Since the rule passed, there was a 58 percent decrease in EU-related reports of child sexual exploitation online.
EU policymakers are right to resist pressure to emulate the hard security stance and implicit anti-China bias of 'Quad' members: the US, Japan, Australia and India.
The pro-Kremlin affiliation of various radical paramilitary organisations is a significant cause for concern throughout central Europe.
The question remains whether the EU can take advantage of the latest talks, and other shifts in the Middle East, to reverse its own diplomatic marginalisation.
While I welcome Albania's EU integration, it is questionable whether they have fulfilled all the conditions. It surprises me that the commission claims that Albania already has; to whitewash inconvenient facts will not help neither Albania, nor the EU.
Will this weekend's EU-India summit help translate the recently approved Council conclusions on the Indo-Pacific strategy into more pragmatic set of actions able to elevate Europe in the Asia-Pacific region?
The UAE's international reputation is steadily being shredded by its own leadership, in moves so blatant that no amount of sporting spin can hide them. Like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, China will also discover that sportswashing never works.
The Conference on the Future of Europe must concretely involve our local communities, regions, cities and villages. This is key to avoid a top-down exercise that would only feed the demagogic and anti-European false narrative of populists and eurosceptics.
With the Biden administration and EU leaders both pressing the reset button on relations with Turkey, could press freedom begin to be restored? Ankara is currently one of the world's biggest jailers of journalists.
Sexism may have played a role, but the deeper meaning of Ursula von der Leyen's humiliation in the palace of Turkish president Erdoğan is political and geopolitical.
In spite of all the denials, it seems clear the non-paper "Western Balkans – a way forward" – which explicitly proposes the redrawing of borders in the region according to ethno-national/territorial groupings – exists, though its origins remain in doubt.
