The crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border is artificially manufactured.

Belarus Border

Europe needs to focus on the cause of the problem – Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s desire to strike back at the EU, write Luigi Scazzieri, Camino Mortera-Martinez and Ian Bond. It is wrong to call what is happening at the border between Poland and Belarus a migration crisis, or to compare it to Europe’s situation in 2015 and 2016….

More Than a Few Steps in the Right Direction, We Need to Start Running

COP26 Protests in Glasgow

The European Greens say they welcome the progress made at the UN Climate Conference COP26 in Glasgow. Improved emission commitments from some countries, new international initiatives on phasing out oil and gas production as well as finalising the Paris Agreement rulebook bring the world a couple of desperately needed steps closer to tackling the climate…

Performance of EU Spending Programmes

EU Spending

The European Commission’s reporting on how EU spending programmes perform shows mixed results in different funding areas, and the indicators which measure progress towards targets do not focus enough on results. These are some of the conclusions of the European Court of Auditors, which has published its 2020 report on the performance of a selection…

Urgent Call for EU to Achieve 65% Emission Reductions

Climate CO2 Emission reductions

An environmental group says that while the EU and European countries helped to secure some advancements on emissions reductions at COP26, it failed to step up and secure a comprehensive package to support climate vulnerable countries.  It says the EU now needs to get behind solutions on finance to address loss and damage, scale up…

Medical Treatment Needed for Saakashvili

Mikheil Saakashvili

The EPP Group has called on the Georgian authorities to provide Georgian ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili an adequate medical treatment in an appropriately equipped hospital. “We remain seriously worried about Mr Saakashvili’s health and security conditions as well as his rights as a prisoner, including in terms of privacy and dignity and as a person standing a…

MEPs Ask Poland to Lift Ban on Abortions for Women at Risk

Polish Ban on Abortions

A year after the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, MEPs are calling on the government to lift the ban on abortion that puts women’s lives at risk. Last September, a 30-year-old Polish woman died of septic shock because her doctors did not perform a life-saving abortion, waiting instead for the foetus to die because of the…

Stop Prioritising Profits Over People!

The seas are rising

The UN climate negotiations COP26 agreement is set to be the ‘great Glasgow get-out clause’, Friends of the Earth said on the last day of scheduled talks. Developed countries have shirked their responsibilities and put the world on track for a rise in emissions and devastation of countries and communities already hardest hit by climate…

ECA Signs off on Joint Undertakings (JUs)

Joint Undertakings

The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has signed off the 2020 accounts and the underlying transactions of all the EU’s Joint Undertakings (JUs) – the EU’s public-private partnerships with industry and research groups. In the seventh of their ten-year life span, most JUs have already implemented approximately 2/3 of their activities within Horizon 2020, the…

Towards Minimum Wages in Europe

Minimum Wages in Europe

The European Parliament’s employment committee has made a big step towards a European directive for minimum wages, which both strengthens and safeguards the different social models in Europe, by approving the report tabled jointly by S&D MEP Agnes Jongerius and EPP MEP Dennis Radtke. The Socialists and Democrats’ have spearheaded the campaign for a European Directive…