Thursday
9th Feb 2023
While every European diplomat knows that a return to the "status quo" means maintaining the daily oppression, humiliation and anguish that comes with living under apartheid, the EU continues to acquiesce to a situation that gets worse by the day.
The scars of Brexit have left their mark in communities across Wales. The Menai mussel industry has experienced a sharp decline having once been a staple in fish counters and restaurants across Europe; its business model wrecked by post-Brexit rules.
All member states complain about European compromises, each for their own reasons. Nevertheless, these decisions tend to be robust precisely because there is enough in them for everybody. And nobody wants to start negotiating all over again for another deal.
As the Europe elections of 2024 are already looming, the centre-right must use the opportunity to rethink its model or risk marginalisation. Because its electoral base is steadily crumbling.
The EU must realise the need for a trade agreement with Mercosur. The timing has never been better. The recent election of the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, marks a fresh start to move forward on the Mercosur Agreement.
'Europeans need to pull their weight in Ukraine. They should pony up more funds.' Such has been the chorus since the start of the war. The problem is the argument isn't borne out by the facts, at least not anymore.
Countries that were once democratising are now moving in the other direction — think of Turkey, Myanmar, Hungary or Tunisia. On the other hand, in autocracies mass mobilisation rarely succeeds in changing political institutions. Think of Belarus, Iran or Algeria.
Industrial energy-intense sectors, outside Germany and France, will not move to the US. They will go bust, as they cannot compete in a fragmented single market. So to save industry in two member states, we will kill the rest?
The ECHR ruled that Russia was in "effective control" of separatist regions of Eastern Ukraine from 11 May 2014. In doing so, the court has formally acknowledged the inter-state character of the conflict and Russia's culpability for human rights abuses.
The director of Amnesty International Greece on the political spying scandal that now threatens to bring down prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Activists and NGO staff work with the constant fear that they are being spied on.
Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavsky writes that it is self-evident that Vladimir Putin and his cronies must be held accountable for planning and ordering a war of aggression — whatever the legal hurdles.
Over the last few decades, the fossil-fuel industry has shown that you do not need to all-out oppose EU legislation in order to resist it. Muddying the waters can be enough to ensure that action is paused, watered-down, or shelved.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold", W.B. Yeats wrote. Yet now, a century later in Europe — from Italy, to Hungary, to Belgium and the Netherlands, even in the European Parliament — the centre is shrinking.
The 40 civilians buried in a Dnipro apartment block by a Russian missile won't be the last war victims, since diplomats have yet to find a concrete plan to hold president Vladimir Putin accountable for the crime of aggression.
Olivier Vandecasteele, an experienced and respected Belgian humanitarian worker, is being arbitrarily detained in an unknown location in Iran, sentenced to a cumulative total of 40 years of prison and 74 lashes.
The most shocking thing about the EU's defence for letting an oil baron steward the next UN climate summit is that it shocked anyone. The move followed a time-honoured COP tradition of feting VIP polluters even as global emissions soar.
Next time you think people should not be criticised for "just being curious" about someone's origin, ask yourself just why that harmless extra sub-question only ever surfaces around non-white Europeans.
The Antwerp diamond industry has managed to evade sanctions for nine European sanctions packages. They remain convinced that voluntary measures will suffice to eventually reduce the trade in Russian blood diamonds to zero. That's incomprehensible.
Proofing European security against Russian aggression must include more than just military hardware: equally pivotal is the improvement and expansion of the continent's critical transport infrastructure. European policymakers have been aware of this need since at least 2017.
New year, new Swedish leadership in the European Council. And in 2023 political pariahs, once associated with violent racists and swastika-wearing Nazi sympathisers, are dangerously close to the helm.
As Europe ushers in 2023, attention will soon turn to the most pivotal known unknowns of the year ahead. Spain, which will hold national parliamentary elections in December, is worth watching closely.
The Berlin Forum showed for a successful German foreign and defence policy, Berlin needs to make some difficult decisions on what price they are ready to pay for peace, and also learn how to communicate and execute those decisions.
Emmanuel Macron's government has proposed to raise France's pension age from 62 to 64 and abolish sweetheart pension deals that allow public-sector workers to retire in their fifties. It's about time. France is late to raise its retirement age.
A European 'Foreign Agents Registration Act' would systematically expose the countless lobbyists and influence-peddlers on foreign powers' payrolls, giving Europeans an idea of which countries are lobbying most aggressively and toward what goals.
The story of how Wilma Viscardini, a young female lawyer in a town in northern Italy in the 1950s, pioneered using new, liberal European legislation on issues like the free movement of workers or consumer rights, to help citizens.
Frontex faces a fundamental dilemma: should it withdraw from member states where fundamental rights are at stake, or increase its presence to prevent abuses?
After years of loose monetary policy, central banks are changing tack. But using the levers of the financial system to fight inflation risks cutting climate investment just as we need it most.
My frustration grew about the price that disabled people pay to participate, to have a voice. We put our health, our income and even our lives on the line just to do things that non-disabled people take for granted.
If small and medium-sized businesses can kickstart the world's economy, we need to ensure that job creators are chasing the right goals—and at the right pace.
The most stubborn misbelief about the EU's inability to deal with its illiberal regimes in Poland and Hungary is the idea that the EU doesn't have the legal tools to deal with these democratic backsliders. It does and always has.
The inflationary "threat" is a favourite bogeyman of conservative and neoliberal economists. For them it's a question of defending savers and wealth and preparing the ground for austerity policies. This vision fails to identify the actual reasons behind price rises.
The threat to civil society organisations protecting human rights now not just from Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland but also from elected governments in states whose democracies appear healthy, such as France, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
Take 'Qatargate'. European Parliament president Roberta Metsola has artfully shifted the blame for the EU's epic bribery scandal on nasty "autocratic third countries" which (surprise, surprise) hate democracy.
