Новости за 27.05.2021

The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg issued a joint statement on Wednesday calling on the European Commission to improve the supervision of biofuels across the European market, after cross-border fraud was detected from the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. "The biofuel supply chain is international, so supervision needs to be set up accordingly," they said. These five member states produce the majority of European biofuels.

Ireland has become the first EU country to formally designate Israeli settlement expansion as "annexation" of Palestinian land.

A group of digital rights organisations on Thursday filed legal complaints against the company Clearview AI -which uses facial-recognition to have "the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images". The company previously offered its product to law enforcement and private companies in various countries, according to The New York Times. The complaints were submitted to data protection regulators in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK.

EU policy is partly to blame for rising migrant fatalities in the Mediterranean, the UN said in a report on Wednesday. Inadequate search-and-rescue was "not a tragic anomaly, but rather a consequence of concrete policy decisions and practices by the Libyan authorities [and] European Union member states and institutions," it said. "So much of the suffering and death along the central Mediterranean route is preventable," a UN official said.

EU lawyers asked a Brussels court on Wednesday to impose a €10m fine on the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca over delays in delivering Covid-19 vaccines, Reuters reported. The EU is also seeking €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation for breaching contractual obligations. The bloc has demanded 90m doses from AstraZeneca by the end of June. A verdict is expected before the end of June.

Hungarian MPs overwhelmingly ratified an EU fund for post-pandemic economic recovery in a vote on Wednesday, paving the way for €750bn in joint European borrowing and spending in coming years. Austria, Poland, and Romania are still to do so. But Hungary had been a potential stumbling block, amid an EU clash with its nationalist-populist regime on rule of law, and Budapest's frequent use of EU vetoes to force concessions.

France should lobby Europe for the speedy ratification of an EU-China investment treaty despite a sanctions dispute, Chinese commerce minister Wang Wentao urged his French counterpart Franck Riester in talks this week, the Chinese ministry said Wednesday. He spoke after the European Parliament froze ratification of the agreement due to Chinese sanctions on MEPs - imposed in retaliation against EU sanctions on Chinese human-rights abuses.

The UK should clean its banks of corrupt money linked to the Belarusian and Russian regimes, Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid told BBC Radio Wednesday. "We were not very shy here in Estonia ... to point out that there is a lot of [this] money in your own country," she said, adding "[be] the strongest you can be, considering this money is siphoned off from the suffering of the Belarusian people".

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said he acted "legally" in diverting a Ryanair flight with a dissident onboard and slammed the West for "crossing red lines," The Moscow Times writes. "Don't blame me. I was acting legally to protect my people. That's how it will continue to be," Lukashenko said. The Kremlin said it saw no reason not to trust his statements.

The European Commission has introduced beefed-up rules tackling disinformation. Although the code is voluntary, it is set to be embedded into the Digital Services Act, where sanctions could be imposed.

A Dutch court ruled that energy giant Shell must reduce CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030, and push its subsidiaries to do the same. This is the first time an oil company is being held liable for climate change.

The Czech government has lost its fourth health minister during the Covid crisis. But it's new (fifth) one, was actually also the first - making a total of four.

A jab-in-the-arm rather than a bite-to-the-neck is what visitors get if they choose to vaccinate in one of Romania's most famous tourist attractions.

Progress at the Union for the Mediterranean has been slow and remains below its potential. The EU is still responsible for over 95 percent of the region's internal merchandise exports and 93 percent of the external merchandise exports.