Category Archives: European Union

UK and EU clash over crime-fighting database in Brexit talks

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UK set to lose access to Schengen Information System that police across continent use to stop criminals

EU officials have accused the British government of threatening to weaken security cooperation with the bloc unless the UK gets an equivalent to a major crime-fighting database.

The UK is set to lose access to the Schengen Information System (SIS II), a massive EU database, where police across the continent share millions of pieces of information on criminal suspects, at the end of the year.

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We lived the European dream. Will any politician stand up for open borders?

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Millions of us built our lives on the promise of free movement. Under cover of coronavirus, that dream is disappearing

They said he was German, others Italian, but then again he might have been French. We may never know the true nationality of “patient zero” in Europe. And it doesn’t much matter, because the true patient zero in our continent is Europe itself.

From the first detection of the virus on European territory, Europe has been in a coma.

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Young climate activists call for EU to radically reform farming sector

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Fridays for Future to publish letter urging reform of common agricultural policy ahead of European commission meeting

The EU’s farming sector needs radical reform, and the common agricultural policy (CAP) must be rewritten if the climate crisis is to be tackled, a group of young climate activists will urge.

Fridays for Future, founded by teenagers in the wake of Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, will confront the European commission’s vice-president, Frans Timmermans, online to call for new plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and replace subsidies based on the amount of land farmed with payments for farmers supplying public goods, such as clean water, clean air and lower carbon emissions.

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Brexit: Gove confirms plans for checks on goods crossing Irish Sea

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Minister says checks on animals and food products are needed to maintain island of Ireland’s ‘disease-free status’

The government has confirmed for the first time that there will be Brexit checks on animals and food goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK from next January.

The announcement, detailed in a 23-page document released by the government on Wednesday, comes months after Boris Johnson pledged there would be no checks on trade crossing the Irish Sea – telling businesses that if anyone asked them to fill in new paperwork, they could “throw it in the bin”.

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Europe should brace for second wave, says EU coronavirus chief

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Exclusive: ‘The question is how big,’ says Dr Andrea Ammon, who thinks March skiing breaks were pivotal to spread

The prospect of a second wave of coronavirus infection across Europe is no longer a distant theory, according to the director of the EU agency responsible for advising governments – including the UK – on disease control.

“The question is when and how big, that is the question in my view,” said Dr Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

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EU plan for 3bn trees in 10 years to tackle biodiversity crisis

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Concern that new strategy, which also includes protecting primeval forests, ‘lacks tools’

The European commission will launch a sweeping effort to tackle the global biodiversity crisis on Wednesday, including a call for 3 billion trees to be planted in the EU by 2030 and a plan to better protect the continent’s last primeval forests.

The draft policy document, published online by an environmental NGO, admits that to date in the EU, “protection has been incomplete, restoration has been small-scale, and the implementation and enforcement of legislation has been insufficient”.

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Belgium confirms inquiry into Malta-China spy threat

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Investigation centres on claims Beijing has spied on EU from Malta’s embassy in Brussels

Malta’s ties to China have come under the spotlight after Belgium’s intelligence services confirmed they have been investigating suspicions that Beijing has been spying from the country’s embassy opposite the European commission’s headquarters in Brussels.

A spokesman for Belgium’s homeland security service, the Veiligheid van de Staat, made the unusual disclosure about the existence of the inquiry after the French newspaper Le Monde reported on the suspected espionage by the Chinese state.

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Carmakers press for EU and UK subsidies after slump in demand

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Green campaigners say giving subsidies to all cars would be missed opportunity

Carmakers are negotiating with the EU and UK for subsidies to help boost demand for new vehicles, but campaigners are concerned that the stimulus could end up paying for pollution unless emissions restrictions are imposed.

The carmakers argue that subsidies would help kickstart demand as lockdown measures ease and factories reopen, preventing tens of thousands of job losses amid a global slump in car orders.

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British negotiator gives EU two-week deadline to drop ‘ideological’ stance

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David Frost says there has been ‘very little progress’ in talks with Michel Barnier as clock ticks on

Britain’s chief negotiator in the talks over the future relationship with the EU has warned Michel Barnier that he must drop his “ideological approach” within the next fortnight, as the latest round of talks ended in stalemate.

The comments from David Frost came as both sides offered a gloomy prognosis for the negotiations on trade, security and fisheries, with little sign of the teams finding common ground.

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May and Johnson hung civil servants out to dry, report finds

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Inquiry into Whitehall’s Brexit role says prime ministers failed to protect officials

Theresa May and Boris Johnson let the former chief Brexit negotiator Olly Robbins and other civil servants hang out to dry after they became “targets for political attacks”, an investigation into Whitehall’s role in the Brexit drama of the past four years has found.

The independent thinktank the Institute for Government (IfG) spent months talking in confidence to Whitehall sources including officials, ministers and special advisers, to shine a light on the behind-the-scenes experience of some of those involved in one of the most controversial chapters in British political history.

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Northern Ireland-born British and Irish win EU citizenship rights

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UK government makes change to immigration law after Derry woman’s residency case

All British and Irish citizens born in Northern Ireland will be be treated as EU citizens for immigration purposes, the government has announced after a landmark court case involving a Derry woman over the residency rights of her US-born husband.

The move is a major victory for Emma de Souza ending a three-year battle to be recognised by the Home Office as Irish, a right enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

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How coronavirus is reshaping Europe in dangerous ways

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From green backlash to reimposition of border controls, pandemic is accelerating tensions that could unravel the EU

We are still in the early chapters of the Covid-19 story and it’s too soon to judge the full impact of the pandemic. But one can tentatively discern six negative trends for Europe. These had all emerged before the virus struck but are now accelerating. In various ways they are all likely to help the cause of anti-EU populists: greater economic autarky, stronger borders and more hostility to green policies.

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Hungary’s coronavirus laws prompt new showdown with Brussels

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MEPs to hold debate after Viktor Orbán given right to rule by decree indefinitely

The European parliament will discuss Hungary’s controversial coronavirus laws on Thursday, the latest showdown between Brussels and Budapest over rule of law under Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

In late March Hungary’s parliament gave Orbán the right to rule by decree indefinitely as part of a package of measures aimed at fighting coronavirus.

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UK-EU trade deal with tariffs impossible in six months, say diplomats

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EU officials dismiss Michael Gove’s suggestion deal could be done without longer transition

EU diplomats have dismissed Michael Gove’s suggestion that Brussels and the UK could negotiate a trade deal with tariffs on goods in six months, saying it “will never happen”.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords EU committee last week, Gove said the government could “modify our ask” by giving up on a “zero-tariff, zero-quota” trade deal in order to keep the UK free from a duty to adhere to European standards on workers’ rights, environmental protection and state aid.

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‘A bloody method of control’: the struggle to take down Europe’s razor wire walls

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Spain is removing lethal razor wire from its borders in north Africa, but elsewhere the controversial ‘concertinas’ stay put


You could barely see that it was a finger. “The wound was large, with several deep cuts into the flesh. He had tried to climb the fence and was up there when he was caught by police in the middle of the night,” says András Léderer, advocacy officer for the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a Budapest-based NGO.

“He lost his balance. The wound was so horrific because as he fell, he tried to grab the razor wire – and also, he said, touched the second layer of the fence, which is electrified.”

The unnamed Pakistani refugee in his 30s had attempted to cross the fence near Sombor, Serbia, to get into Hungary in 2016. The coils of metal that lacerated his finger are ubiquitous at the perimeters of “Fortress Europe” and can be found on border fences in Slovenia, Hungary, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Spain and France.

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Merkel intervenes in damaging row between Germany and Brussels

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European commission has warned of possible legal action over constitutional court ruling

Angela Merkel has stepped in to try to find a way out of a damaging clash between Germany and Brussels after the EU threatened to bring infringement proceedings over a ruling by the country’s constitutional court.

The German chancellor stressed that the dispute was solvable, after the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, issued an unusual statement on Sunday warning of possible legal action against Berlin.

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Elites have failed us. It is time to create a European republic | Lorenzo Marsili and Ulrike Guérot

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After the pandemic, EU citizens must seize the moment to build a democracy of equals who share the same protections

In 1933, the year of the Nazi takeover, the French writer Julien Benda wrote his Discourse to the European Nation, urging Europeans to come together around their shared universalist values and against the rising monsters of nationalism. As Europe marched towards the murder of its soul and its people, many dared to dream the impossible.

Benda was not alone. The Ventotene manifesto, one of the founding texts of European federalism, was drafted in 1941. And it was against the background of a continent in ruins that Churchill spoke of a “United States of Europe” in 1946. The rebirth of Europe would have been unthinkable if the flame of European unity had not been kept alive throughout the continent’s darkest hour.

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The ‘United States of Europe’ speech that Winston Churchill so nearly made

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A recently discovered document sheds new light on the wartime leader’s ‘iron curtain’ address

It was a speech that electrified the world, one that coined a phrase that was to characterise the political era that followed the second world war. But its content could have been very different, reveals a document freshly unearthed by a historian researching the life of Winston Churchill.

On 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, before a huge crowd which included the US president, Harry Truman, Britain’s wartime leader issued a famous description of the political division that was opening across Europe between the Soviet-dominated Communist east and the western democracies. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

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EU wants UK to share more data before it grants access to crime-fighting system

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European committee says Britain should share same amount of fingerprint data as member states

The UK should be denied access to an EU crime-fighting system until it agrees to share more fingerprint data with member states, a European parliamentary committee has said.

The vote, in the European parliament’s justice and home affairs committee on Thursday, is not binding on EU decision-makers, but could prove influential as the UK seeks to negotiate a permanent deal on the exchange of fingerprint, DNA and other data as part of a long-term security relationship with the EU.

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Row over EU office in Belfast threatens to derail Brexit talks

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UK refuses request from Brussels for Northern Ireland presence for second time

The Irish border question threatens to derail Brexit talks again as the depth of the row over the EU’s desire to have an office in Belfast is revealed.

The UK’s paymaster general, Penny Mordaunt, has written to the EU to firmly reject a repeated request for an office in Northern Ireland: “The UK cannot agree to the permanent EU presence based in Belfast,” she wrote.

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