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Plenary sessions : Data on your online activities - from social media to shopping - is regularly sold to American advertisers. Strong data protection standards are in place in the EU to protect your privacy, but this is not the case in the US. The EU is now negotiating a new agreement with the US called Privacy Shield to safeguard your data. MEPs debate whether this deal will offer enough protection in plenary on Wednesday 25 May. Read on for an explanation of the issues involved.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plenary sessions : Data on your online activities - from social media to shopping - is regularly sold to American advertisers. Strong data protection standards are in place in the EU to protect your privacy, but this is not the case in the US. The EU is now negotiating a new agreement with the US called Privacy Shield to safeguard your data. MEPs debate whether this deal will offer enough protection in plenary on Wednesday 25 May. Read on for an explanation of the issues involved.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Le 15 juin 2010, le second-maître Sébastien Wancké, 32 ans, mettait fin à ses jours à bord de la frégate La Fayette, qui revenait d’une mission dans l’océan Indien. Cet officier-marinier était le maître d’hôtel du commandant du navire, qui était alors le capitaine de vaisseau Éric Delepoulle. Quelques jours avant de commettre l’irréparable, le […]

Cet article La Marine lance une procédure disciplinaire contre un ex-pacha d’une frégate, condamné en appel pour harcèlement moral est apparu en premier sur Zone Militaire.

Participants in two adult education groups are showing that every day in life can be a school day if you have the right support to encourage lifelong learning.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

C'est «un oubli» qui passe mal. Le réseau social Twitter, qui revendique 310 millions d'utilisateurs par mois, a ouvert ces derniers mois des plateformes de blog un peu partout dans le monde pour dialoguer avec ses utilisateurs. Partout? Pas vraiment, car il y a un continent où ne s'est pas aventuré le petit oiseau bleu pour cette nouveauté: l'Afrique.

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Der Ausbau chinesischer Außenposten im Südchinesischen Meer hat in Art, Umfang und Geschwindigkeit neue Maßstäbe gesetzt. Zwar haben auch Anrainerstaaten wie Vietnam in der Vergangenheit ihre Stützpunkte auf kleinen Inseln und Riffen erweitert, allerdings über viele Jahre und nicht binnen weniger Monate. China hat eine Gesamtfläche geschaffen, die der Kommandeur der US-Pazifikflotte ironisch als »Große Sandmauer« bezeichnete. Allen gegenteiligen Beteuerungen aus Beijing zum Trotz zeichnet sich eine Militarisierung in diesem Meer ab, dessen reiche Ressourcen und Energielagerstätten schon früher als potentielle Konfliktursachen galten.

Da das Südchinesische Meer eine wichtige Transitstrecke für internationale Handels- und Rohstofftransporte ist, wären der Welthandel sowie Japan und Südkorea unmittelbar von einer Beeinträchtigung des Schiffsverkehrs betroffen. Die Lage in Ostasien droht sich zu verschärfen, obwohl alle Staaten der Region auf stabile und sichere Seeverbindungen angewiesen sind. Im Kern handelt es sich um einen Regionalkonflikt um Seewege und Ressourcen, an dem maßgeblich Staaten der ASEAN und China beteiligt sind, der aber auch globale Auswirkungen hat: Erstens betrifft er einen »Superhighway der Meere«, auf dem fast ein Drittel des weltweiten Seehandels abgewickelt wird. Zweitens ist er eng mit der sino-amerikanischen Großmachtrivalität verknüpft. Drittens beinhaltet er einen seerechtlichen Ordnungskonflikt, der ein Grundprinzip der liberalen Weltordnung in Frage stellt – »Freiheit der See« versus exklusive Seeräume. Untersucht werden Hauptursachen, Verlauf und Implikationen dieses Konflikts sowie Wege zu dessen Einhegung im regionalen und internationalen Rahmen.

Les 28 ministres des Affaires étrangères de l'Union européenne, réunis à Bruxelles, se sont penchés sur la situation en RDC où la dégradation récente des perspectives électorales les préoccupe fortement. Les Vingt-Huit se sont fendus d'une longue déclaration commune pour appeler tous les acteurs de la vie politique congolaise à relancer le processus qui doit conduire à la tenue des élections, dans les délais prévus par la Constitution de la RDC et remis en cause par la décision de la Cour constitutionnelle de Kinshasa, il y a quinze jours, d'autoriser le maintien à son poste du président Joseph Kabila au-delà de décembre 2016 si aucun scrutin n'est organisé d'ici là. Les Européens voient une impasse dans la situation actuelle.

 » La France est un des États qui, sur le dossier israélo-palestinien, a encore des titres à faire valoir, une continuité dans l’histoire, des positions qui jusqu’à une période récente étaient assez équilibrées, s’inscrivaient systématiquement dans le code du droit international. Je pense que l’on peut se prévaloir d’une ancienneté de participation aux résolutions de ce type de dossier. La question est de savoir si le gouvernement actuel, qui porte ce projet, aura suffisamment de courage. Je n’en suis pas persuadé.

Les dernières séquences, notamment celle du ministre des affaires étrangères, Jean-Marc Ayrault, qui s’est confondu quasiment en excuses parce que Benyamin Netanyahou avait fait un froncement de sourcils, sont assez déplorables. Il n’y a pas à s’excuser à propos de la résolution de l’Unesco. Il n’y a rien d’anti-israélien dans cette résolution, rien de répréhensible dans le code du droit international. Je suis choqué que François Hollande lui-même dise que ce vote est fâcheux. Parce qu’on dit qu’il s’agit des territoires occupés ? Oui, de fait ce sont des territoires occupés.

Si c’est là notre attitude, alors non, on n’aboutira pas à un quelconque résultat. Nous n’aurons aucun moyen pour tenter de faire avancer ce dossier. Si on porte un dossier aussi compliqué, il faut faire preuve de fermeté, de courage, de résolution. Je ne suis pas sûr que le gouvernement actuel ait ces trois qualités.

La France, bien qu’elle soit aujourd’hui une puissance moyenne, a encore, ou devrait encore avoir une forme de singularité dans les relations internationales et sa parole peut encore porter si elle fait preuve de courage. Quelles que soient les pressions israéliennes – et dans les 48 heures à venir, elles seront nombreuses sur Manuel Valls – son rôle est de dire : on continue, on monte la conférence début juin. Après on verra, à l’automne, à partir des paramètres mis noir sur blanc à la conférence du 3 juin. On passera alors à la phase suivante, en invitant les Israéliens et les Palestiniens et en continuant sur une ligne intransigeante de l’application du droit international.

En termes de timing, avec l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis, on peut estimer que l’initiative française – une idée de Laurent Fabius –, n’est peut-être pas très appropriée. Mais on peut renverser l’argument et considérer que, puisque c’est la dernière ligne droite de Barack Obama, on peut escompter un soutien de sa part.

Ce dernier n’a plus rien à perdre. Il avait fait de belles promesses lors de sa première élection en 2008, il n’a rien fait ensuite. Il a capitulé devant ­l’Aipac (lobby américain pro-Israël, NDLR) pr aux États-Unis. Il s’est fait maltraiter par le gouvernement israélien. Jusqu’en janvier, date de sa passation de pouvoir, le président américain, s’il en a la volonté et le courage, est en mesure de s’émanciper de ces pressions et de s’impliquer davantage. »

Propos recueillis par Agnès Rotivel

Place:        Justus Lipsius building, Brussels
Chair:        Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Minister for Finance of the Netherlands

All times are approximate and subject to change

+/- ttbc
 Doorstep by Minister Dijsselbloem 

+/- 08.00
Annual EIB governors' meeting
Roundtable

+/- 09.00
Ministerial breakfast

+/- 11.30
Beginning of Council meeting
Adoption of the agenda
Adoption of legislative A items (public session)
Anti-Tax Avoidance Package  (public session)
AOB: Financial services (public session) 

Adoption of non-legislative A items
Implementation of the Banking Union
VAT Action Plan
European Semester 2016
Any other business 

At the end of the meeting
Press conference (live streaming)

+/- 15.00
Economic and Financial dialogue between the EU and the Western Balkans and Turkey

 

The retrial of former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, who are accused of war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia, will start at the Hague Tribunal next year.

L’Institut des hautes études de défense nationale organise le mardi 28 juin 2016 une journée thématique à Paris, sur le site de l’École militaire, sur le thème suivant : « Crises à l’international : quelle place pour les acteurs humanitaires dans la gestion des crises aujourd’hui ? ». 

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The amount of imported cheese in the Russian market has grown for the first time since Russia introduced an embargo on Western food products in 2014, the Kommersant newspaper reported Tuesday.

Greece has launched an operation to close the Idomeni refugee camp at its border with Macedonia, where thousands of people have been stranded for months, unable to journey further north.

2016. április 22-én az Üzbég Légierő átvehette a negyedik, egyben utolsó megrendelt C-295W típusú katonai teherszállítógépet.

On 25 May 2016, the Council adopted rules on the reporting by multinational companies of tax-related information and exchange of that information between member states. 

The directive is the first element of a January 2016 package of Commission proposals to strengthen rules against corporate tax avoidance. The directive builds on 2015 OECD recommendations to address tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). 

The directive will implement OECD anti-BEPS action 13, on country-by-country reporting by multinationals, into a legally binding EU instrument. It covers groups of companies with a total consolidated group revenue of at least €750 million.

The principal aim of the directive is to prevent multinationals from exploiting the technicalities of a tax system, or mismatches between different tax systems, in order to reduce or avoid their tax liabilities. 

Information to be reported by multinationals 

Increasing transparency, the directive requires multinationals to report information -- detailed country-by-country -- on revenues, profits, taxes paid, capital, earnings, tangible assets and the number of employees. 

This information must be reported, already for the 2016 fiscal year, to the tax authorities of the member state where the group's parent company is tax resident. 

If the parent company is not EU tax resident and does not file a report, it must do so through its EU subsidiaries. Such "secondary reporting" will be optional for the 2016 fiscal year, but mandatory as from the 2017 fiscal year. 

Information exchange 

The directive requires tax authorities to exchange these reports automatically, so that tax avoidance risks related to transfer pricing[1] can be assessed. For this, it builds on the EU's existing framework for automatic exchange between tax authorities, established by directive 2011/16/EU. An existing common communications network will be used, thereby saving implementation costs. 

The directive sets deadlines of: 

• 12 months after the end of the fiscal year for companies to file the information;
• a further three months for tax administrations to automatically exchange the information. 

It also requires the member states to lay down rules on penalties applicable to infringements. 

A common EU approach 

The directive will ensure harmonised implementation in the EU of the OECD recommendation on country-by-country reporting. 

The directive was adopted without discussion at a meeting of the Economic and Financial Council, following an agreement reached on 8 March 2016. 

Other initiatives 

The January 2016 anti-tax-avoidance package follows on from a number of EU initiatives in 2015. These include a directive, adopted in December 2015, on cross-border tax rulings. 

In December 2014, the European Council cited “an urgent need to advance efforts in the fight against tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning, both at the global and EU levels”. 

 

[1] Transfer pricing is the price paid for goods and services exchanged between entities that make up a corporate group.

 

The EU debate is a minefield, with half-truths and whole-lies coming from both camps. The reason for this, as I understand it, is twofold. Firstly, it is impossible to know what will happen in the event that the UK leaves the EU, or indeed what will happen in five, ten or fifty years’ time if we vote to stay on 23 June. Ergo, objective fact is largely off the table from the get-go. Secondly, the notion of ‘truth’ is tricky in ideological discussions. I recently saw Peter Hitchins make a brief intervention on the EU debate and was struck by his point that the signatories of the Irish Proclamation did not stand on the steps of the General Post Office with a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the impact on the economic forecasts and trade balance of the country. They held an ideological belief and made an impassioned political decision. By the same measure, the reason that ‘facts’ aren’t working as well in this referendum debate as some (myself included) might like, is because it is not a decision that can be based solely on fact. Moreover, in most cases, there genuinely are (at least) two answers to the question at hand. Untangling the accumulation of myths, misnomers and soundbites which permeate the referendum narrative is a job for someone more intelligent (not to mention more patient) than myself. However, in the spirit of ‘have blog, will air musings’, I draw attention here to one incident which has stuck in my mind (and which I noted down at the time) as emblematic of the problem with the EU referendum campaign.

On 3 March, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme conducted an interview with Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, a member of the board of the Vote Leave campaign. Today presenter Mishal Husain put to Mr Jenkin that Sir Peter Ricketts, a recently-retired former ambassador, has raised concerns that if Britain were to leave the EU, France might cease to conduct border checks on those seeking entrance to the UK. Unusually for an MP on the Today programme, Mr Jenkin went on to directly address Sir Ricketts’ point with an equally valid counter-argument, but before he did, he made the following remarks:

‘Find me a diplomat that’s anti-EU…one of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is because we have diplomats who have religiously and slavishly pursued the European integration policy…they all have a certain view…it’s interesting, as soon as they retire they turn out to have this very pro-European view. I’m afraid I think it rather discredits the idea that we’ve got an impartial diplomatic service.’

In the interest of brevity, I will side-step the wealth of nonsense which Mr Jenkin managed to pack around his perfectly reasonable point that the French government is a rational and responsible body and is unlikely to severe all agreements with the UK overnight should we vote to leave. I will also by-pass the irony that I agreed with this central point, and yet he managed to present it and its contribution to his broader position in a way that was so infuriatingly exaggerated, misleading and childish that, in the end, it served only to convince me that I don’t want to be on any team that he is a part of. Instead, I draw attention to Mr Jenkin’s utterly bizarre string of logic which led him to conclude that, since British diplomats are commonly pro-EU, they must have been harbouring this dirty secret for many years and are somehow damaging British interests with their partiality.

I don’t have much difficulty accepting the premise of Mr Jenkin’s concern – it seems quite likely that many British diplomats (and, I imagine, diplomats from most other member states too) are pro-EU. What I find confusing is why he thinks that this is an innate characteristic, a preference which exists and pre-existed in British diplomats independent of their professional or personal experience, as if he suspects that they all went to a secret boarding school where they were drilled in the values of ‘ever closer union’ and prepared for infiltration into the UK’s diplomatic corps, only revealing their true, traitorous identities upon retirement. To my mind, the trend that Mr Jenkin identifies can best, if not only, be interpreted as follows: British diplomats (to accept Mr Jenkin’s premise that they all hold the same view as Sir Ricketts), having spent many years living in and working with the EU, have reached the conclusion that it is a project worthy of our support and participation. Possessing what is probably the most direct experience and expertise in the matter that it is possible to have, British diplomats consider the UK’s membership of the EU to be highly valuable and have chosen to voice this view in the context of the referendum campaign. Essentially, an expert group has presented its arguments for why the UK should vote ‘remain’.

This is an example of precisely the kind of rational contribution which should be being made in the referendum campaign. The view of Sir Ricketts and his colleagues, in light of their experience and expertise, carries value and voters should be exposed to it. This is not to say that it is wholly objective, of course it is not. British diplomats have particular experiences and, to that extent, their position is unavoidably biased. Furthermore, it would be impossible for me to say that I am certain that the argument they put forward is nothing but the unequivocal truth. These things are, incidentally, also true of any view aired by Mr Jenkin and his colleagues in the Vote Leave campaign, by those in the ‘remain’ camp, or by anyone else. However, by making his background known and ‘presenting his credentials’ to the British public, Sir Ricketts has made a valuable contribution which they can scrutinise and evaluate in the forming of their own judgements. Perhaps, rather than it being pro-EU campaigners who ‘lack confidence in this country’, as Mr Jenkin asserted later in his interview, it is those (on both sides of the issue) who exploit the inherently ideological nature of the referendum debate by framing informed opinion as inherent bias who lack confidence in British voters to decide for themselves.

—

Having finally submitted my thesis and in light of the impending referendum, I digress in this post from health governance – please excuse the misleading platform.

The post Fact, ideology and logic in the EU referendum campaign appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has lashed out at the English language branch of the Euronews channel, calling their work a "blow from within" for "discrediting" the news outlet.

President Vladimir Putin has held phone talks with the leaders of Ukraine, France and Germany to discuss the situation in Syria and in Ukraine's Donbass region, the Kremlin said in a statement Tuesday.

Après François Andriot et Louis Bégot, un autre Français libre du Commando Kieffer, René Rossey, nous a quittés cette année. Résidant à Maurepas (Yvelines), il s’est éteint le 19 mai. Né le 30 août 1926, à Tunis, René Rossey n’a que 16 ans quand il s’engage sein des Forces françaises libres, après avoir triché sur […]

Cet article Décès de René Rossey, un ancien du Commando Kieffer est apparu en premier sur Zone Militaire.