Новости за 11.06.2021

The European Court of Justice president on Friday decided to use an expedited procedure in a case where Poland and Hungary are challenging the legality of the EU's new rule-of-law mechanism, linking EU funds to respect for the rule of law. The hearing will be held in October. The tool has been in force since January, but the EU Commission has been reluctant to launch it before the court's ruling.

Hungary's ruling nationalist party has submitted legislation to ban content it sees as promoting homosexuality and gender-change to minors, Reuters reported. The draft law would ban LGBTIQ literature for under-18s, including educational material, and advertisements deemed to be promoting gay rights. The vote will take place next Tuesday. Prime minister Viktor Orbán's government has been taking aim at the LGBTIQ community ahead of elections next spring.

The European Parliament has lent political weight to an EU citizens' petition to end farming of caged animals and force-feeding of ducks and geese to make fois gras pate, putting pressure on the European Commission to table legislation. Forced-feeding was "cruel and unnecessary" and cages so small animals cannot stand or turn around were of "grave concerns" MEPs said Thursday. Over 90 percent of EU-farmed rabbits are kept in cages.

The committee of ministers of pan-European rights body the Council of Europe has strongly urged Russia to "immediately" release jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in line with a previous ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, The Moscow Times reports. The committee, which oversees the implementation of ECHR rulings, expressed "its grave concern" that Navalny "remains in detention and his conviction stands", the Council of Europe said.

China passed a law Thursday saying foreign nationals involved in drawing up sanctions against it can be denied entry expelled from the country and have their assets seized. "Such action is not conducive to attracting foreign investment or reassuring companies that increasingly feel that they will be used as sacrificial pawns in a game of political chess," Jörg Wuttke, from the EU Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, said.

The European Commission has asked Poland not to question the primacy of EU over national law, eliciting furious rebukes from the Polish government.

EU flight passengers should have fewer rights to compensation for delayed or cancelled flights, the pandemic has showed, according to European airlines. "When events like mass cancellations get put in place this law is not flexible enough to handle such events," Air France-KLM chief Ben Smith told an industry video-conference Thursday, Reuters reports, calling the EU passenger rights' regimes "one of the most punitive" in the world.

EU leaders on Thursday called for an investigation on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, after the World Health Organization probe ended without conclusions earlier this year, Reuters reported. "Investigators need complete access to whatever is necessary to really find the source of this pandemic," European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said. "The world has the right to know exactly what happened," said European Council president Charles Michel.

MEPs from the liberal Renew Europe group came under fire on Thursday for abstaining on the resolution pointing to the conflicts of interest of the Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš. The resolution calls for reinforced measures to protect the EU budget and transparency on who benefits from these subsidies. Liberal MEPs said this week the European Commission must apply the new rule-of-law conditionality mechanism or face legal action.

Spain's health ministry has scrapped a nationwide plan to gradually reopen nightlife, just a week after introducing it, following widespread complaints from regional authorities, who dismissed it as either too strict or too loose, Reuters reports. The plan, scrapped on Wednesday, would have allowed areas with low infection rates to open nightclubs until 3AM.

Amnesty International has collected new evidence of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China, which it says has become a "dystopian hellscape" for hundreds of thousands of Muslims subjected to mass internment and torture, The Guardian writes. The human rights organisation has collected more than 50 new accounts from Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly-Muslim ethnic minorities

MEPs have backed a motion demanding the temporality lifting of intellectual properties rights of Covid-19 vaccines - a symbolic move that puts pressure on the European Commission to change its position on the issue of global access to vaccines.

The EU's anti-fraud agency has so far identified more than 1000 of these suspicious companies, many of which are based outside the EU.

It would require between 40 to 75 additional staff to oversee how MEPs spend their monthly €4,500 lump sum on office supplies, according to the European Parliament. An EUobserver Freedom of Information request reveals those calculations are flawed.

The EU is committed to reduce "the risk and use of pesticides by 50 percent" by 2030. However, given the level of controversy and public distrust surrounding EU pesticides regulation over the last decade, which reforms could garner public support?