European Union

Romania v Commission
Law governing the institutions
The General Court dismisses Romania’s action against the Commission’s decision registering the proposed citizens’ initiative entitled ‘Cohesion policy for the equality of the regions and sustainability of the regional cultures’

AC Milan v EUIPO - InterES (ACM 1899 AC MILAN)
Intellectual and industrial property
The General Court confirms that the sign representing the crest of the football club AC Milan cannot be registered internationally as a trade mark designating the Union for stationery and office supplies

Google and Alphabet v Commission (Google Shopping)
Competition
The General Court largely dismisses Google’s action against the decision of the Commission finding that Google abused its dominant position by favouring its own comparison shopping service over competing comparison shopping services

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Artificial Intelligence regulation should focus on the level of risk associated with specific uses, a draft report presented in the AIDA committee on Tuesday says.
Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Newsletter - 10-11 November 2021 - Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Length of video : 70'

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

On Thursday, the co-rapporteurs of the Civil Liberties and Legal Affairs committees will present Parliament’s proposals to curb the use of legal actions to silence critical voices.
Committee on Legal Affairs
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Length of video : 35'

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Withdrawing from, or abandoning altogether, major arms control treaties would seriously damage the stability provided by international arms control regimes, warn MEPs.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Withdrawing from, or abandoning altogether, major arms control treaties would seriously damage the stability provided by international arms control regimes, warn MEPs.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Withdrawing from, or abandoning altogether, major arms control treaties would seriously damage the stability provided by international arms control regimes, warn MEPs.
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on Security and Defence

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Over 300 metal workers in the Basque region in Spain who lost their jobs because of the COVID-19 pandemic set to receive €1.2 million in EU aid.
Committee on Budgets

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

AMENDMENTS 337 - 679 - Draft report Implementation of the common security and defence policy - annual report 2021
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nathalie Loiseau

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 336 - Draft report Implementation of the common security and defence policy - annual report 2021
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nathalie Loiseau

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Multinational companies will have to disclose publicly how much tax they pay in each EU country, which will increase scrutiny of their tax practices.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Length of video : 14'

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

They want to see the end of the EU altogether. That’s been the aim of prominent Brexiters from the start.

And it’s certainly the aim of the guy who started Brexit: former UKIP leader and MEP, and now President of the Reform Party, previously the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.

In September 2017, Mr Farage received a standing ovation at a far-right rally in Berlin when he addressed Germany’s anti-EU party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Mr Farage was applauded after urging the AfD to fight for German independence from the EU.

This is nothing new. On the morning after the EU referendum, on 24 June 2016, with his and his party’s dreams realised, Mr Farage made clear that there was unfinished business with the EU.

He said in his 4am victory speech:

“I hope this victory brings down this failed project … let’s get rid of the flag, the anthem, Brussels, and all that has gone wrong.”

On Talk Radio in Spain in 2014, Mr Farage said that he not only wanted Britain to leave the European Union, he also wanted to see “Europe out of the European Union” – in other words, the complete disintegration of the European Single Market.

Some ardent Tory Brexiters also share Mr Farage’s goal to see the end of the European Union altogether.

 STEVE BAKER

Conservative Steve Baker MP, Wycombe, a prominent member of the hard-Brexit Tory ERG group and a former Brexit negotiator, said in 2010 that he wanted to see the European Union “wholly torn down.”

In a speech to a right-wing think-tank he branded the EU as an “obstacle” to world peace and “incompatible” with a free society.

In his 2010 speech Mr Baker also told the cheering audience:

“I think UKIP and the ‘Better Off Out’ campaign lack ambition. I think the European Union needs to be wholly torn down.”

 MICHAEL GOVE

In a keynote speech for Vote Leave during the referendum campaign in 2016, Michael Gove, MP, then Justice Secretary and now ‘Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’, made similar comments about bringing down the EU.

Mr Gove said:

“Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting – the democratic liberation of a whole continent.”

He described Britain’s departure from the EU as “a contagion” that could spread across Europe.

Reporting on Mr Gove’s speech, the BBC stated:

“Leaving the EU could also encourage others to follow suit, said Mr Gove.”

Commenting after the speech, a senior aide for the Leave campaign indicated to HeraldScotland that Mr Gove would be, “happy if Britain’s in-out referendum sparked similar polls across Europe.”

The Herald Scotland reporter asked if Brexit would lead to the break-up of the EU as we knew it and the aide replied, “Yes.”

When asked if the Out campaign hoped that it would trigger “the end of the Brussels block” the aide replied, “Certainly.”

In his speech, Mr Gove suggested that far from being the exception if Britain left the EU, it would become the norm as most other EU member states would choose to govern themselves. It was membership of the EU that was the anomaly, argued Mr Gove.

• The Guardian headline was:

‘Brexit could spark democratic liberation of continent, says Gove’

• The Telegraph headline:

‘Michael Gove urges EU referendum voters to trigger ‘the democratic liberation of a whole continent’

• The Express headline:

‘BREXIT WILL BREAK-UP EU: Leave vote to spark domino effect across bloc, says Gove’

• The Bloomberg headline:

‘U.K. Brexit Vote Would Be End of EU as We Know It, Gove Says’

• The Irish Times headline:

‘Michael Gove says other EU states may leave EU’

Britain’s EU referendum was not just about whether Britain should remain in the European Union. For some leading Brexit campaigners, it was a referendum about whether the European Union itself should continue to exist.

Leading Brexit supporters hope that what happened in Britain on 23 June 2016 could result in the end of the EU. This is no doubt a wake-up call for pro-EU supporters across the continent.

Britain chose not to be one of the founding members of the Union back in 1957 but joined later, in 1973.

Now Britain is the bloc’s only member ever to leave the Union, with the open aspiration of at least some ‘Leave’ campaigners that other EU members will also follow Britain in exiting the EU.

As Denis MacShane a former Labour Minister of Europe, wrote in The Independent yesterday:

‘The English right assumed that, after Brexit, the EU would be fatally weakened and there would be a rise of Brexit-type politics across Europe.

‘They were delighted when Marine Le Pen hailed Brexit and put the union flag on her social media accounts in June 2016.’

English right = Tory Party/hard Brexiters.

However, it didn’t turn out as British Brexiters hoped. The opposite happened.
Explained Mr MacShane:

‘Emmanuel Macron comprehensively beat Le Pen in 2017.

‘Since then, to the disappointment of the Boris Johnson camp in England, she has given up calling for a referendum on “Frexit” or even leaving the Euro.

‘The same has happened in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands where anti-European, anti-immigrant populists like Matteo Salvini and Geert Wilders have faded and lost votes to pro-European politicians from the centre, liberals, greens and social democrats.’

But let’s not lose our guard. Don’t underestimate that leading Brexiters are the enemies of the European Union and want to see its end.

There is no love from Boris Johnson and the Tories in power towards the EU. There is no goodwill.

They hate the EU. Its collapse would prove that Brexit was the right decision.

After all, the government is currently engineering an entirely unnecessary trade war with the EU, which would result in a no-deal Brexit for real.

Constant conflicts with the EU are how the Tories hope to stay in power.

For all of us who cherish the European Union as one of the most successful post-war projects, this has never been a battle just about Brexit.

This needs to be a Europe-wide movement to ensure that Brexit politicians and their allies don’t succeed in inflicting grievous damage to the EU, with their stated aim to destroy the European Union entirely.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook:

The post What they want: The end of the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Eva Saeva, Newcastle Law School This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2021 (17-18 June, online)

 

Cybersecurity has become the backbone of a global digital society, a key element for a variety of issues ranging from national security, data protection, the trustworthiness of AI and 5G technologies, digital sovereignty, to, last but not least, responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the many benefits of digitalisation, but also exposed its vulnerabilities. During the (ongoing) health crisis, and especially the first few months, there was a sharp rise in cyberattacks against various critical infrastructure (CI) sectors, particularly the health sector, which was heavily targeted in certain EU Member States. More specifically, a series of serious attacks in the spring of 2020 were directed against the Czech Republic. In September 2020, a woman died in a German hospital, which at the time was suffering a ransomware attack. In addition, in late 2020, even the European Medicines Agency was attacked and vaccine data was accessed.

Against this background, this blog will investigate the new EU Cybersecurity Strategy adopted in December 2020, by discussing the new legislative proposals, with a particular focus on the new measures under development within the cyber diplomacy area. The blog’s objective is to examine whether COVID-19 was a key factor in the Strategy’s development.

The 2020 EU Cybersecurity Strategy for the Digital Decade put forward two legislative proposals. Both these proposals were built on existing legislation: the review of the NIS Directive and the resilience of critical entities. From a legal standpoint, it did not bring forward anything new – the focus remained on cyber resilience and risk management, in line with the 2013 Strategy. In other words, the 2020 Strategy efforts were directed towards securing critical infrastructure from possible attacks rather than dealing with the attackers themselves.

The increased number of cyberattacks against the health sector during the pandemic does not seem to have been a crucial element in the development of these proposals. However, these attacks further demonstrated the extreme vulnerability of CI sectors and the consequences of not having implemented properly prior legislative measures, such as the NIS Directive 2016. The attacks on the Czech Republic clearly illustrate this.

The Strategy also focused on the development of the EU diplomatic approach to malicious state-sponsored cyber operations. The Cyber Diplomacy toolbox, the legal framework regulating the EU’s actions in the field of cyber diplomacy, was used twice in 2020, in July and October respectively. However, sanctions fell short from attributing attacks to state-actors, even for already attributed attacks such as the WannaCry ransomware and NotPetya malware in 2017 (conducted by North Korea and Russia respectively). In the meantime, attacks such as the ones against the health sector in the Czech Republic, were not publicly and explicitly attributed or even addressed.

The newly elaborated strategic approach to cyber diplomacy seems too vague and underdeveloped. With undecided applicability of the Solidarity and Mutual defence clauses (“the EU should reflect upon the interaction between the cyber diplomacy toolbox and the possible use of Article 42.7 TEU and Article 222 TFEU”), the Strategy not only fails to build upon previous legislative efforts; it actually contradicts the 2013 Strategy, according to which “[a] particularly serious incident or attack could constitute sufficient ground for a Member State to invoke the EU Solidarity Clause”. While this could simply be a change of strategy, the applicability of the two clauses should have been further explored and reinforced as a strategic approach. The 2020 document also does not set a timeline for when the EU “will present a proposal” to “further define its cyber deterrence posture” contributing to responsible state behaviour. It therefore appears that diplomacy in cyberspace at EU level is still a challenging topic to address. COVID’s exposure of the EU’s hesitant steps in the area has not served as a lesson learned. As Helena Carrapico and Benjamin Farrand have argued, COVID “does not appear to have served in itself as a critical juncture in the EU’s understanding of cybersecurity”.

The EU’s diplomatic approach in cyberspace also affects its attribution capacities, which so far have remained a “sovereign political decision” belonging to the Member States. The EU’s Strategy does not reflect the changing international (political and technological) environment, where attribution is no longer as challenging as before. The US – a like-minded and allied state – is accelerating in its position as a leader in setting norms on state accountability, having officially attributed various cyberattacks to different nation-states. The most recent example was the SolarWinds breach, discovered in December 2020 and attributed to the Russian Federation, leading the latter to be sanctioned in April 2021. Even though 6 out of 14 EU institutions, agencies and bodies which use the SolarWinds product also fell victim of the attack, the EU remained silent on possible attribution. The EU only issued a press release “expressing solidarity” with the US and stating that the “United States assesses” that the operation “has been conducted by the Russian Federation”. The EU is therefore lagging behind in a field where it could have taken the lead. Annegret Bendiek and Matthias Kettemann have evidenced both the importance of the “strategic capacity to act” and of the EU’s ability to assert its views on security internationally, concepts which were a missed target in the 2020 Strategy.

Covid-19 is not only a health crisis. It is also a cybersecurity one. Based on existing evidence, it appears that the impact of COVID-19 on the development of the EU strategic approach to cybersecurity was little to inexistent. Rather, because of its impact on cybersecurity, the pandemic should have been a driving factor in the drafting of the 2020 EU Cybersecurity Strategy. The legislative proposals put forward are indeed a step towards more resilient CI sectors, but they do not fill the existent gaps in terms of attribution and state accountability. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on cybersecurity – a key element for both international and national security – was therefore a missed opportunity for the EU to claim its role as a global leader in developing cybersecurity legislation. If the EU wants to lead the discussions on responsible state behaviour, it should be more assertive, have a unified voice, and act collectively when attributing attacks to state-actors. Moreover, all these concepts should be clearly spelled out and included in a legal framework.

 

 

Eva Saeva is a postgraduate researcher at Newcastle Law School where she researches the EU’s legal approach to cybersecurity. Her thesis examines the UK, Italy, Bulgaria and the US’ national approaches, providing for internal and external factors in the development of the EU’s cybersecurity legal framework.

The post The new EU Cybersecurity Strategy 2020: was COVID-19 a key factor? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.