European Union

How EU can boost the development of a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19 will be discussed with Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas and the Croatian Presidency.
Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
Advocate General Bobek: Member States must grant compensation to any victim of a violent intentional crime, regardless of his or her residence

Országos Idegenrendeszeti Főigazgatóság Dél-alföldi Regionális Igazgatóság
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
The placing of asylum seekers or third-country nationals who are the subject of a return decision in the Röszke transit zone at the Serbian-Hungarian border must be classified as ‘detention’

The EU’s support for R2P

The EU’s engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – a principle agreed by UN members in 2005 to prevent and respond to atrocities – reflects a surprisingly mixed record in some respects. The slow pace and, at times, ambivalence with which the EU has explicitly embraced R2P, in spite of the support of key individual members, reflects political disagreements about R2P in national capitals and bureaucratic reluctance in Brussels.

However, in recent years the EU appears to have finally shifted its substantial resources behind R2P. In 2013 the European Parliament launched a major initiative to consolidate and operationalize the EU’s support for R2P and to formulate a ‘European consensus’ on the issue. In 2016 the EU appointed an R2P Focal Point to coordinate its activities in this area – the first regional organization to do so. The European External Action Service officially launched its ‘Toolkit for Atrocity Prevention’ in January 2019, designed to coordinate European responses to atrocities in a proactive and coherent manner. EU members also represent an active group of national R2P Focal Points.

The EU has actively contributed to UN General Assembly Interactive Dialogues, and EU members have also provided input into the Annual Reports of the UN Secretary-General on the topic. Furthermore, the EU Delegation to the UN has actively participated in the activities and meetings of the ‘Group of Friends of R2P’ in New York, a group of state supporters of R2P, whose co-chair has always been a European country. All this has helped to promote the R2P label in diplomatic circles and strengthen its normative traction.

 

R2P and the EU’s global role

Photo credit: The Hague Institute for Global Justice, 3 October 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These initiatives have taken place in parallel with broader efforts to project a more active global role for the EU in conflict resolution, security, and normative leadership. As the EU High Representative stated in December 2018, ‘The Responsibility to Protect is a principle that the EU has integrated in its policies and we are closely working together with international partners, in particular with the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and civil society organisations, to end impunity…and to establish effective prevention schemes’.

 

Remaining constraints on the EU’s international normative role

However, doubts have lingered about the EU’s capacity and willingness to internalise R2P. Despite the European Parliament’s call in 2013 for consensus and coordination across the EU on R2P, a significant EU attempt to implement R2P in this sense has been slow to materialize. The EU’s recent activism – at least in terms of its internal bureaucratic organisation and declarations – therefore raises a number of questions. Can the EU be a global leader in championing R2P, at a time when the EU’s normative authority is arguably in decline, and when international order is apparently shifting against liberal norms? How will the EU’s commitment to R2P weigh against its geopolitical and economic interests?

 

The EU’s normative leadership in a changing global order

These questions are linked to the transitional international order. Rising powers have increasingly resisted key aspects of the liberal international order and openly contest norms such as R2P. This reflects a normative tension, and in particular a resurgence of conservative interpretations of state sovereignty, and also the perception amongst some states that norms related to civilian protection are a pretext for Western attempts to maintain hegemony.

While non-Western contestation has increased, international cooperation around liberal values and norms has been problematized by an apparent rise in nationalism and populism within the traditional sponsors of international order. The Western allies, formerly close partners in supporting liberal institutions and multilateralism generally, are fragmenting as a cohesive bloc.

The President of the European Commission portrayed the EU as being ‘in an existential crisis’ in 2016, and the latest EU Global Strategy similarly observed in the same year that ‘We live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat.’ This raises questions about the EU’s capacity to provide normative leadership in support of R2P on the global stage, and points to a more instrumentalist, strategic approach to tackling global challenges, rather than one driven by liberal normative commitments.

 

Internal European contestation

In addition to the global normative contestation in relation to R2P – which problematizes the EU’s engagement with the principle – there is also evidence of normative contestation within Europe. Divisions remain across and within EU members regarding the scope and operationalization of R2P, in particular regarding the role of military force in preventing or stopping egregious human rights violations.

The EU has also been slow to internalize R2P into external action machinery. In addition, the EU’s credibility in terms of its leadership in promoting humanitarian values can be questioned in relation to ‘internal’ standards and practices. Minority rights, attitudes towards hate crimes and incitement, and policies towards people fleeing human rights abuse have all raised questions about Europe’s commitment to humanitarianism, or even accusations of double standards. As a result, Europe’s standing as a credible normative actor in relation to R2P is potentially in tension with – or even undermined by – the policies or standards of justice within some European countries.

 

The EU’s vital work in support of R2P

Nevertheless, the EU’s operational role in engaging with R2P is vital to keeping the principle alive as a policy framework. The EU has enormous capacity in atrocity prevention when it aligns its considerable resources and policy programmes in support of R2P. In supporting programmes aimed at strengthening responsible governance, human rights, the rule of law, and conflict prevention, the EU has the potential for real impact in preventing the conditions which may result in egregious human rights abuses.

Its Atrocity Prevention Toolkit also demonstrates the EU’s concrete commitment to strengthening early warning methodologies which have the potential to be world-leading. The steps that it has taken to engage with R2P demonstrate a commitment to coordinate EU activities around a shared set of goals in support of atrocity prevention. Further progress in this regard depends upon R2P being embraced not only by EU officials, but also by political leaders in member states. In addition, further progress in terms of policy coherence across the broad range of programmes and activities of the EU is important if the EU is to be fully integrated into the R2P agenda.

 

Can the EU save R2P?

However, irrespective of this internal progress, the promotion of the R2P framework as a norm remains problematic in global perspective. And so, while the R2P norm needs renewed leadership to survive, it is doubtful that this will come from the EU. Even if the problem of political will in Europe could be overcome in support of a more decisive approach to atrocity prevention, it is unlikely that this would gain greater traction internationally as long as the international political climate remains inhospitable to emerging human rights norms.

If the EU’s engagement with R2P is a test of its normative leadership – its ability to shape international politics as a result of its constitutive values – then the prognosis is not encouraging, in the context of both internal and external political challenges to its authority. This points to constraints on the norm, while also contributing to the ongoing critique of the ‘Normative Power Europe’ concept both in theory and in practice. The prioritization of hard economic and security interests, and the desire to avoid political conflict with strategic partners, allies and adversaries, mean that norms such as the R2P have become something of a luxury, especially for national actors if not for EU officials. And from the external perspective, the persuasiveness of the EU as a normative actor is in doubt within this transitional international order in which liberal internationalism is in retreat.

This blog post draws on Edward Newman and Cristina G. Stefan, ‘Normative Power Europe? The EU’s Embrace of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in a Transitional International Order’, published in JCMS

 

 

Edward Newman is a Professor of International Security in the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds.

 

 

Cristina G. Stefan is an Associate Professor of International Relations in POLIS, University of Leeds, and the Co-Director of the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (ECR2P).’

 

 

 

The post The European Union and the Responsibility to Protect appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Volotea v Commission
State aid
The General Court dismisses the actions against the Commission decision declaring illegal the aid from Italy to several airlines serving Sardinia

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 134 - Draft opinion Framework of ethical aspects of artificial intelligence, robotics and related technologies
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Urmas Paet

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Ten years ago this week, in May 2010, I moved to Brussels for the first time. I went there to do research for my doctoral thesis, because I wanted to understand how EU interest groups got access to information. I wanted to be in Brussels to go beyond what was accessible on EU websites at the time, which was improving but still relatively limited. But a lot has happened in a decade.

Today, the availability of information and data is much better, and I explain in a new series of videos how to find information on EU lobbying and interest group access on EU websites.

I have produced these videos because I’m teaching an M.A. seminar on EU lobbying this summer term. This week, there is a class on “How to measure access?“, which ranges  from looking at available official websites and datasets (i.e. what’s in the videos) to Camilla  Nothhaft’s 2017 PhD-thesis that employs ethnographic methods to study lobbying.

In doing the video recordings and going through EU websites again, I realized how much has changed between the time when I arrived in Brussels in 2010 and now.

Having worked with and for the Transparency International EU Office in various capacities between 2010-14, I was actually part of the group of civil society activists who fought for the availability of such information and data. And yet, it’s still amazing to see what type of research you can do today that was not possible in 2010.

Take the 2019 JCMS article “Organizing Transmission Belts: The Effect of Organizational Design on Interest Group Access to EU Policy‐making” (open access) by Adrià Albareda and Caelesta Braun and this single paragraph (p.475):

Those of you who have been reading my blog for the past decade will remember my 2011 blog post on why having a downloadable database of EU expert groups would be great for research. (I’m just kidding, you probably don’t remember that but I do.) The network visualization that I did for this blog post mirrors network visualizations I would later do in my doctoral thesis with data from EU fisheries policy expert groups and regional advisory councils.

So when Albareda & Braun write that they “downloaded” the European Commission expert group register—which you can do here—back in January of 2015, this would not have been possible in 2010 or 2011 when I was looking at EU expert groups for my own research.

As an activist with Transparency International in Brussels, I then had my first meeting with an EU Commission official working on the expert group register in May 2011. So that was quite exactly nine years ago. Back then, I tried to convince them to make the database downloadable, which technically was not possible at the time, so nothing happened at first.

Then, in January 2012, I received a first database version of the expert group register through a freedom of information request. Here is the spreadsheet with the expert group register database as of 30 January 2012 that I got access to back then.

After some more convincing and advocacy, the downloadable expert group database that you can find online today finally became available in April 2013. At that time, I was working on the final first draft of my PhD thesis with no time for additional research, so had to hope that others would make use of the data—and that is exactly in the way Albareda & Braun did in their article.

The second type information on EU interest group access used by Albareda & Braun—meetings of EU Commissioners and their cabinets with EU interest groups—also was not available when I started my PhD research. And it only became available after I had left Brussels six years ago.

During my activism time, which was during the Barroso II Commission, any attempt to get to a point where these EU Commission meetings would be published was impossible. But the 2014 review of the EU Transparency Register (TR) opened the door for such data availability.

For years, but in particular during the TR review process of 2013-14, many NGOs and interest groups participating in the consultation process—including TI-EU where I was working at the time—had tried to convinced EU Commission and EU Parliament to introduce the possibility to create “incentives” for lobby registration. We asked for incentives that would make the EU’s lobby register “quasi-mandatory” because lobby organization would only get access to EU policy makers in exchange for registration.

With the results of the review of the Transparency Register, transparency now became part of the gatekeeping possibilities of the EU institutions: no transparency, no access.

And when the Juncker Commission came into office in November 2014, meetings with high-level Commission officials had not just to be made public but those interest groups wanting to have meetings also had to be on the Transparency Register. The same became true for membership on EU Commission expert groups (I don’t remember when this was introduced, though). As a result, registration in the register increased massively at the time, and so our knowledge of the EU interest group population also grew.

Because of the advocacy of many activists, EU lobbying researchers today have much better access to information and data on EU interest group access, especially to the European Commission.

And because of the open data and linked data advocacy that came with some of us realizing 9-10 years ago how useful data was, the Transparency Register and the Expert Group register are both downloadable.

More than that:

When you go to the Transparency Register today (e.g. to the BEUC entry), you can find linked information there on EU lobbying access of the respective interest group (e.g. BEUC) to variety of arenas an policy makers. Meetings with the Commission are downloadable as PDF right there on the Transparency Register, and the list of expert groups in which an interest group is a member is also there:

So if you are a student interest in studying EU lobbying today, you have many ways of finding and downloading information and data, and in the series of videos I have produced I explain how to actually find some of these.

What is great to see, ten years after I moved to Brussels for the first time and six years after I left for the last time, is that research on EU interest group access is possible today that wasn’t possible a decade ago. Seeing and teaching articles like the one by Albareda & Braun (2019) feels even more meaningful when you can appreciate the progress it represents and that civil society activism has turned into scientific advances in our understanding of EU lobbying and interest groups.

The post Measuring interest group access to EU policy makers: what a difference a decade makes appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 309 - Draft report Arms export: implementation of Common Position 2008/944/CFSP
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Hannah Neumann

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

DRAFT OPINION on artificial intelligence: questions of interpretation and application of international law in so far as the EU is affected in the areas of civil and military uses and of state authority outside the scope of criminal justice
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Urmas Paet

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Press release following the judgment of the German Constitutional Court of 5 May 2020

The EU’s annual report on arms export control presently lags behind the national reports of many countries. The introduction of a searchable online database will be a substantial step in increasing the user-friendliness of the report. This paper makes recommendations with regard to readability, comprehensiveness and comparability. Perhaps the principal recommendation is that steps be taken to harmonise the data provided under the categories ‘licensed value’ and ‘actual exports’, which are presently not consistently interpreted across the EU. The main argument of this paper is that the EU should move towards using data visualisation to complement the lengthy statistical tables in the annual report and thus make it more readable. The EU and its Member States should also explore opportunities to enhance the data contained in the report to include additional identified data fields, narrative sections to complement the statistical data, and disaggregated data on licence denials. In identifying additional data fields that could be included, the paper also examines the challenges associated with the provision of the data in each case.
Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Austria v Commission
State aid
Advocate General Hogan: the Court should reject Austria’s appeal in UK State Aid Case

Rina
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
The victims of the sinking of a vessel, which sailed under the flag of Panama, may bring an action for damages before the Italian courts against the Italian organisations which classified and certified that vessel

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

A day following the EU-Western Balkans Summit videoconference of 6 May 2020, Foreign Affairs MEPs will quiz Olivér Várhelyi, Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, on the outcomes of the summit and the EU support to the accession countries in tackling COVID-19.
Members will follow up on the recently adopted AFET recommendations on enhancing engagement with the Western Balkans and will scrutinise the unprecedented EU
assistance to the region to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Meeting agenda and documents
Live streaming
EU Fact Sheets: External relations policy
Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Statement by Foreign Affairs Committee Chair David McAllister, following Thursday’s debate with Josep Borrell on disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP