European Union

The Council agreed its negotiating position on two legislative proposals: a new mandate for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and a new regulations on cross-border threats to health.

On 22 July 2021, the President of the Eurogroup, Paschal Donohoe, gave the speech at the Cyprus Business Forum event in Nicosia, Cyprus.

President of the Eurogroup, Paschal Donohoe, is travelling to Cyprus and Greece for a series of bilateral meetings and speaking engagements.

European Council President Charles Michel delivered a speech during the session on 'Three Nations – One Choice: Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine on the Move' of the Batumi International Conference, on 19 July 2021, in Batumi.

Weekly schedule of President Charles Michel 19 – 25 July 2021

The EU issued a declaration urging China to take action against malicious cyber activities undertaken from its territory.

Statement by President Charles Michel on developments in Georgia.

Puigdemont i Casamajó and Others v Parliament
Le vice-président du Tribunal de l’Union européenne rejette la demande de suspension de la levée de l’immunité parlementaire de MM. Carles Puigdemont i Casamajó et Antoni Comín i Oliveres ainsi que de Mme Clara Ponsatí i Obiols

The Conference on the Future of Europe is looking for your ideas on how the EU should change and what it should focus on. Now is the time to get involved.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The Conference on the Future of Europe is looking for your ideas on how the EU should change and what it should focus on. Now is the time to get involved.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

As a parting gift before a summer break, I’ve pulled together the various legal pathways currently available to changing the Protocol.

This is based on the text of the Protocol/Withdrawal Agreement itself, plus a bit of customary international law, and covers both modification and disapplication of the Protocol itself.

As the graphic suggests, there are three main paths.

First, amendment is possible through two routes. One is a minor corrections option within the Joint Committee, although these can’t change the basics of the text, so it’s not really an amendment procedure of any consequence (certainly in the current political climate). The other is a generic treaty amendment, concluded by mutual agreement of the parties.

Second, the Protocol allows for new EU-UK agreements to supersede all or part of the Protocol, with the only proviso that such supersession needs to be spelled out, presumably so that whatever remains of the Protocol has clear limits for its application. This is a remnant of the original backstop model negotiated by Theresa May, where the Protocol would only kick in if the future relationship (i.e. the TCA) didn’t cover certain criteria. However, it still requires the agreement of the EU too.

So the only unilateral pathway for UK changes to the Protocol is the Consent provision of Art.18, which allows the Northern Ireland Assembly to vote (from 2024) to disapply Arts.5-10 of the Protocol (i.e. the main economic elements).

While some have seen the current arguments about the Protocol as laying the groundwork for such a vote after next year’s Assembly elections, as an ‘escape’ from the Protocol, it’s essential to read all of Art.18.

In particular, non-Consent does not end any other obligation of the parties, especially (and pointedly) the Good Friday Agreement (Art.18(4)). As such, both the UK and EU would be bound by the same set of constraints that produced the Protocol in the first place.

This is all really just to underline that while the Protocol is undoubtedly problematic, it is also the product of intense negotiation and calculation by both sides that this is the least-worst option available. As I noted in a thread late last week, treaty-making comes with obligations and there is no path open to the UK to change that basic fact.

Whether that means the Protocol will stick is a very different question and one that we’ll have to come back to in September. Until then, have a good summer and do let me know if you have any requests on graphics, as I’m always happy to help where I can.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic89

 

The post Legal options for changing the Northern Ireland Protocol appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The entire IT infrastructure of the Anhalt-Bitterfeld district administration, which was paralysed after being targeted by a ransomware attack at the start of July, has requested assistance from the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces.

It is a truism that Europe is unstable if its North African neighbours are unstable. That being so, it should be of some concern to EU leaders that, on the bloc’s south Mediterranean border, Tunisia’s ten-year-old democracy appears to be on life support.

The European Commission has opened infringement procedures against 12 member states after they failed to transpose EU rules banning unfair trading practices in the agri-food sector within the allotted time frame. 

High feed costs are giving member states a cause for concern, while the European Commission is hopeful that feed prices are likely to go down in the near future.

Facebook has teamed up with French anti-piracy association ALPA up to protect content on its platforms from copyright infringement, the tech giant announced on Monday (26 July). EURACTIV France reports.

At a time when Taliban is likely to take over Afghanistan, the stakes could not have been higher for Uzbekistan’s reformist President Mirziyoyev who hosted the 15-16 July Central-South Asia Connectivity Conference in Tashkent.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed Europe's strategic vulnerabilities and underscored the need for the European Union to foster its own industrial policy and aim for technological sovereignty in "the new geopolitical order", the EU's Commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, has stressed.

The EU on Tuesday (27 July) said it had reached its target of giving 70% of adults at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, though with only 57% of adults fully jabbed, the WHO says Europe is still “far from out of the woods” when it comes to ending the pandemic. 

Accepting half a loaf in international negotiations is always difficult. This has been especially notable in European debates over refugee policy, in which different countries have divergent interests and a mutually agreeable consensus is hard to form. However, recent developments suggest a thaw, with Mediterranean countries taking a pragmatic approach that could allow for real progress.

The pragmatic approach Mediterranean countries are taking in asylum policy is an example of how a piecemeal approach can be successful in European integration. Illustration: Ben Borg Cardona

On 8 June, the so-called ‘Med-5’ countries – Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain – signed a letter supporting a limited deal that would turn EASO, the European Asylum Support Office, into a full-fledged agency. On 29 June, the European Parliament and Council agreed, establishing the European Union Agency for Asylum. The deal hinges on further agreements due to a ‘sunrise clause’, but nevertheless would make an important difference, most importantly increasing the budget and personnel available to support EU member states confronting influxes of asylum applications.

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of conducting ethnographic research for my doctorate (forthcoming, fall 2021) with asylum officers deployed to Lesvos and got to see first-hand the challenges they face. Many of these would not be addressed by the new agency status, notably inconsistent vulnerability standards and the inability to issue binding decisions (see section 11.1) . Nevertheless, the increased resources should be very helpful with application backlogs, which should reduce pressure on refugee accommodation facilities. Additionally, the new agency should be able to offer better Country of Origin (COI) and related legal guidance for EASO experts, making their written opinions on asylum cases (which national authorities use as a basis for deciding whether to grant asylum) more consistent and legally sound.

This letter from the Med-5 countries is a marked departure from their position five years ago, in which they insisted on a comprehensive deal of mandatory refugee reallocation quotas. Since that deal was scuttled as a result of disagreements in the European Council and noncompliance, Med-5 has continued to press for ever-diminishing grand bargains, most recently the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. The shift towards piecemeal negotiation – focusing on areas of asylum policy in which consensus can be found – could portend meaningful progress on non-salient technical issues. However, such an agreement could mean giving up on a negotiated solution to more controversial issues (see Baron-Ferejohn model).

Why is European migration governance hard?

The fundamental tension at the heart of the European project is its commitment to 27 member states enjoying free cross-border movement of goods, services, capital and labour while remaining sovereign in a meaningful sense. Countries have willingly ceded power over everything from technical regulations to state aid, which has allowed for a robust single market and internal migration. Despite all these harmonisations, however, areas fundamentally crucial to sovereignty, known as core state powers, have remained comparatively unaffected. Countries have independent militaries, pursue distinct foreign policies, manage independent fiscal policies and choose who can become a citizen and thereby part of their national communities.

Large inflows of asylum seekers have been an issue throughout history as wars, natural disasters and poverty tend to cause spillover effects, with people migrating to neighbouring countries in search of better lives. However, the free movement of people (which does not quite overlap with the EU’s borders due to the Schengen agreement) means that when Europe’s border countries faced a marked increase in irregular crossings due to the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, these asylum seekers could move fairly unimpeded from countries of first arrival to destination countries in northern Europe.

Third country nationals, as they are called in Eurospeak, reveal the tensions inherent in supranationalism. Migration is a member state competence, a fact made concrete in the Dublin Regulation’s insistence that asylum seekers be processed in their country of first arrival. However, freedom of movement meant that in reality applications were being lodged in Europe’s most economically attractive countries.

Following a backlash, which saw the empowerment of far-right parties across Europe, the Union became stuck. Northern and Southern Europe wanted the poorer East to take in more refugees. Eastern and Southern Europe saw the wealthy North as a magnet for migrants whose insistence on strict adherence to humanitarian law only increased crossings. And Eastern and Northern Europe saw the dithering South as incapable of managing its borders, to everyone’s detriment.

Fundamentally, the only way arrivals can be truly controlled is through binding agreements with the EU’s neighbours not to allow further crossings. However, Libya’s low state capacity and Turkey’s political conflicts with EU countries, especially with Greece and Cyprus, have made partnership difficult. Even Morocco, which has historically been quite aggressive in preventing crossings into Spanish territory, recently allowed crossings into Melilla in a reminder for Spain to take its interests in the Western Sahara seriously.

Stabilizing Libya and imposing costs on Turkey requires a common European Foreign and Security policy. However, Berlin and Athens have widely differing views on Turkey, as do Paris and Rome on Libya. Foreign policy is an unassailable core state power, and although the EU member states try to work together, with EU embassies and trade delegations across the globe, consensus is hard to reach with so many countries involved.

The Piecemeal Approach to Intergovernmental Negotiation

Critiques of European handling of refugee and many other issues tend to culminate in calls for unity. Europe needs to work together to manage the Eurozone crisis, COVID-19 vaccinations, Brexit, the rise of China and much else. At first glance, such solutions make sense because they address the underlying governance structures. This is why there are so many calls, for instance, for increasing the role of Qualified Majority Voting. Those are all fine solutions, but countries guard their core state powers jealously. By changing their approach to looking for improvements on the margin, the Med-5 countries will not fix their problems, but a more robust asylum agency will ameliorate them.

Supranationalism means, to a great extent, muddling along. And countries that can make peace with this logic will be able to see meaningful, though not transformative, change. Given the structural barriers to European cooperation on core state powers, however, better negotiation is not the key. Rather, countries should follow the lead of Med-5 and assess the realistic limits of cooperation, trying to advance whatever progress they can within those parameters.

The post Embracing a Piecemeal Approach in Intergovernmental Negotiation: The Case of Med-5 and the New European Asylum Support Office appeared first on Ideas on Europe.