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Le géant du tabac Philip Morris se dit favorable à la poursuite des recherches sur l’impact sanitaire des alternatives à la cigarette, tels que les cigarettes électroniques, à condition que celles-ci soient menées par « une association tierce indépendante et scientifique ».

The post Philip Morris soutient la volonté de l’UE d’évaluer l’impact des cigarettes électroniques sur la santé appeared first on Euractiv FR.

Brüssel setzt verstärkt auf engere Beziehungen zu Indien, der bevölkerungsreichsten Demokratie der Welt – ein Kernstück der europäischen Strategie, geopolitische Allianzen breiter aufzustellen, während die Weltordnung zunehmend von China, Russland und den USA destabilisiert wird.

In today's edition: Business Wallet uses, Musk snubs the Dutch and LinkedIn's AI data grab

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Die Spannungen zwischen der Tabakindustrie und der Kommission nehmen zu. Brüssel will nicht nur die Steuern auf Zigaretten anheben, sondern auch auf neue Produkte. Zudem soll ein Anteil von 15 Prozent der nationalen Tabaksteuereinnahmen künftig direkt in den EU-Haushalt fließen.

X a été la seule grande plateforme de réseaux sociaux à ne pas participer à une table ronde organisée par l’autorité de régulation de la gouvernance en ligne des Pays-Bas en amont des élections législatives prévues le 29 octobre dans le pays.

The post X absent de la table ronde sur les élections néerlandaises appeared first on Euractiv FR.

Qui étaient ces « Alexandrines », ces femmes slovènes d'origine modeste et rurale, parties travailler en Égypte juste après l'ouverture du canal de Suez de la fin du XIXe siècle aux années 1950 ? Nourrices, gouvernantes, cuisinières, elles étaient appréciées par la société cosmopolite d'Alexandrie pour leur propreté, leur honnêteté et leur intelligence. Les trois héroïnes, Merica, Ana et Vanda, embarquent à Trieste sur un bateau à vapeur pour rejoindre Alexandrie. Là-bas, elles travaillent (…)

- Livres / Slovénie, Littérature

Aux origines intellectuelles et culturelles des transitions yougoslaves, entre socialisme et nationalisme (des années 1920 aux années 1970).

- Livres / Nationalismes, Histoire, Communisme, Grand Bazar - Diaporama

Le paiement et l'apposition des timbres fiscaux ainsi que la formalité d'enregistrement des actes sont désormais dématérialisés. La Direction générale des impôts (DGI), informe les usagers à travers une circulaire en date du mardi 16 septembre 2025.

La Direction générale des impôts poursuit sa politique de digitalisation des procédures. Le paiement et l'apposition des timbres fiscaux ainsi que la formalité d'enregistrement des actes sont désormais dématérialisés sur la plateforme e-services.impots.bj. L'information a été portée à la connaissance des usagers à travers une circulaire en date du 16 septembre 2025.
Selon la note signée de Nicolas Yenoussi, directeur général des impôts, la décision de dématérialiser ces services a été prise conformément aux dispositions de l'article 441 du Code général des impôts (CGI).
Selon la procédure dématérialisée desdits actes, un timbre électronique de 40 mm sur 30 mm est désormais apposé à l'angle supérieur droit, sur chaque feuillet de l'acte. « Ce timbre électronique remplace le cachet « mention » portant la date, le folio, la case, les droits payés, la signature physique et le cachet du service. Il remplace également le timbre physique proprement dit », précise le communiqué de la DGI.
Les utilisateurs et les bénéficiaires ainsi que tous les usagers qui y ont intérêt peuvent vérifier l'authenticité de la formalité de l'enregistrement sur la page non connectée, e-services.impots.bj, dans le module « authentifier un document », au moyen du code QR qui est apposé sur les actes.

F. A. A.

Belgium’s Oostende’s shoreline to mark World Cleanup Day with civic beach action

Jeudi 18 septembre, le chancelier allemand Friedrich Merz effectuait sa première visite officielle à Madrid depuis son entrée en fonction en mai. Le désaccord le plus marqué entre lui et le Premier ministre espagnol Pedro Sánchez a porté sur Israël.

The post À Madrid, Friedrich Merz et Pedro Sánchez divisés sur la question d’Israël appeared first on Euractiv FR.

The room at the Swiss Inn Nexus Hotel in Bole was silent but tense as Sunita Narain, one of the world’s most influential environmental voices, fixed her gaze on rows of African journalists, scientists, and policymakers. Her tone was gentle, but the words cut deep. “Us, we are—I call us the ants of the world, […]

Les législateurs allemands ont approuvé, jeudi 18 septembre, le budget du pays pour l’année 2025, qui prévoit d’importants investissements dans l’armée et les infrastructures.

The post L’Allemagne adopte enfin son budget 2025 appeared first on Euractiv FR.

Das müssen Sie wissen: Russland: Die Botschafter beraten heute über das 19. Sanktionspaket des Blocks.; UN: Die EU-Staaten einigen sich vage auf ein Klimaziel für 2035; Merz x Sanchez: Amtsantritt in Madrid ein politischer Tango; Verteidigung: Brenner-Basistunnel ein Meilenstein für Verteidigungsmobilität.

Credit: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)

Thousands of Afghans who fled to the USA when the Taliban took over in August 2021 now face the prospect of deportation to countries they’ve never been to. People who risked everything to escape persecution, often because they helped US forces, now find themselves treated as unwanted cargo under the Trump administration’s anti-migration policy.

Trump’s expanded deportation programme targets an estimated 10 million foreign-born people who live in the USA but lack proper legal documentation. This includes people who entered the country without authorisation, whose visas have expired, who’ve had their asylum claims denied, whose temporary protected status has lapsed, or whose legal status has been revoked or suspended. Within a hundred days of Trump’s inauguration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested over 66,000 people and removed over 65,000. Some 200,000 had been deported by August.

But the Trump administration isn’t simply removing undocumented immigrants to their countries of origin. It’s increasingly embracing a particularly cruel tactic: dumping people in distant countries they’ve no connection with. This deportation strategy shows how the US government is willing to flout basic humanitarian principles in pursuit of political goals.

The government has invoked an obscure immigration law to deport people to other countries, offering financial incentives or applying diplomatic pressure to compel states to accept US deportees. Around a dozen have recently accepted such deals, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay in the Americas, and Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda in Africa. This geographic spread dispels any pretence that the policy is about returning people to transit countries: it’s about finding anyone willing to accept money in exchange for unwanted human cargo.

The programme is nakedly transactional, with rewards taking the form of direct payments, trade concessions, sanctions relief and diplomatic benefits. Uganda signed a formal agreement with the US government amid US sanctions on government officials, suggesting it traded migrant acceptance for improved diplomatic relations and potential sanctions relief. Rwanda’s deal coincided with US-brokered talks over the Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict, indicating that the deportation agreement was being leveraged in unrelated diplomatic negotiations. It’s highly unlikely the US government will criticise the human rights records of repressive states such as El Salvador, Eswatini and Rwanda now it’s struck migration management deals with them.

Human rights flouted

Although the USA has a long history of outsourcing asylum processing, these practices have been taken to another level under Trump. The administration is prepared to deport people to war zones, authoritarian states and directly to prison. These arrangements violate core principles of international law, including the right to seek asylum and the prohibition against returning people to places where they’ll face danger.

A particularly shocking example involves Venezuelan deportees sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre, an overcrowded jail notorious for human rights abuses. In March, the US government accused 238 Venezuelan men of being gang members based on little more than tattoos and fashion choices to justify their expedited removal to this hellish facility. The administration agreed to pay El Salvador US$6 million to house deportees, effectively buying prison space for people whose only crime was seeking safety in the USA. These deportees were later returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap, raising further questions about the use of migrants as diplomatic pawns.

Trump’s approach isn’t limited to recent arrivals. Unlike previous policies focused on border enforcement, it targets longtime residents – people who’ve spent years building families, careers and community ties.

This has sparked unprecedented resistance. People have mobilised in ways that transcend traditional political divides, with teachers protecting students’ families, employers refusing to cooperate with raids, religious leaders offering sanctuary and neighbourhoods forming mutual aid networks and early warning systems.

In response to ramped-up ICE raids seeking to fulfil arrest quotas of 3,000 people a day, people have protested in cities across the USA. Resistance has been particularly intense in sanctuary cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco – primary targets for federal operations to arrest migrants. Civil society activists have confronted ICE agents, blocked deportation vehicles, protested at airports and launched boycott campaigns against companies profiting from deportations.

The scale of resistance has prompted an unprecedented federal military intervention, with the government illegally deploying over 4,000 national guard troops and 700 marines to Los Angeles.

A choice to be made

Trump’s policies are legitimising xenophobia and racism, poisoning political discourse and polarising society. When it’s the world’s most powerful democracy that treats refugees as tradeable commodities, it sends an unmistakable signal to all the world’s authoritarian leaders: human rights are negotiable.

The USA faces a choice between two different versions of itself. It can continue down the path of transactional cruelty, treating human beings as problems to be exported, empowering authoritarian regimes and undermining international law. Or it can fulfil its humanitarian and human rights obligations, provide safe and legal pathways for migration and help address the root causes that force people to flee their homes.

The USA must suspend all offshore migration management agreements, stop deporting asylum seekers to unsafe countries and countries they have no connection with and restore the principle that seeking safety isn’t a crime but a fundamental human right.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Advisor, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

 

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Le président ukrainien prévoit que les contributions des membres de l’OTAN pour l’achat d’armes américaines pour l’Ukraine via le mécanisme PURL s’élèveront à environ 3,5 milliards de dollars (2,9 milliards d’euros) d’ici octobre.

The post Volodymyr Zelensky s’attend à recevoir 3,5 milliards de dollars d’ici octobre pour l’achat d’armes américaines appeared first on Euractiv FR.

Plus defence roadmap dates, and man of steel Šefčovič

Dans l'édition d'aujourd'hui : les ambassadeurs de l'UE se réunissent pour discuter du 19e paquet de sanctions contre la Russie, plusieurs milliers de manifestants ont protesté contre l'austérité en France, les États membres de l'UE s'accordent provisoirement sur un vague engagement climatique pour 2035.

The post Maroš Šefčovič contre le bloc de la nostalgie appeared first on Euractiv FR.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)

A United Nations report calling for the global abolition of surrogacy has sparked intense debate among experts, with critics arguing that blanket bans could harm the very women the policy aims to protect.

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, issued a report on violence against women and girls with a specific focus on surrogacy as a form of exploitation. The report, officially titled “The different manifestations of violence against women and girls in the context of surrogacy,” was published on July 14, 2025, and is slated for discussion at the upcoming UN General Assembly session in October.

The report calls surrogacy “direct and exploitative use of a woman’s bodily and reproductive functions for the benefit of others, often resulting in long-lasting harm and in exploitative circumstances.”

It further delves into the danger of surrogacy business models, in particular, which embrace the ambiguity of international law to churn a profit, often at the expense of both the surrogate and the prospective family. Alsalem recommends the abolition of surrogacy and asks member states to “work towards adopting an international legally binding instrument prohibiting all forms of surrogacy.”

One of the largest problems with surrogacy today, according to Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University Jutharat Attawet, is a lack of comprehensive education and legal standards around the practice. This results in social alienation and false conceptions, which worsen exploitation of people who participate in surrogacy—they are not provided adequate resources

Attawet, who specializes in surrogacy healthcare and domestic policy, considers surrogacy itself a beneficial tool for nontraditional family building. However, she acknowledges the steps it has to take to ensure autonomy and respect for surrogates.

Attawet’s research, cited in Alsalem’s report, shows that approximately 1 percent of babies born in Australia are from surrogates, so although the number has doubled over the past decade, doctors are not familiar with the process. Furthermore, legislation is primarily top-down rather than region- or area-specific. Since doctors in places like Australia are “intimidated by the language” surrounding surrogacy due to minimal education, they are less willing to openly engage with the procedures. This pushes families to seek surrogates elsewhere, where laws are less stringent and doctors more comfortable with the procedures.

Another incentive for overseas surrogacy, Attawet says, is lack of national support for surrogacy. Since it does not fulfill the criteria of most healthcare insurance plans, prospective parents often seek a more affordable surrogacy birth internationally. This further contributes to the exploitation both she and Alsalem note in their respective research—international surrogacy is much more difficult to regulate between different countries’ laws and often primarily harms the surrogate and the child, who is less likely to know their birth mother from an international surrogacy.

Alsalem criticized the practice of international surrogacy as an exploitative technique to perpetuate wealth inequality between different countries, but many experts argue that the job is one of the few accessible, well-paying jobs for child-bearing people who need to care for their family full-time. Polina Vlasenko, a researcher whose work was also cited in Alsalem’s report, explained to IPS that international surrogacy in Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia “is the type of job you can combine with being a full-time caretaker of your kid… it still benefits women.”

Vlasenko elaborated, saying that most workers in the surrogacy industry, including intermediaries and clinicians, were women who had some sort of pre-existing connection to the process—often being former surrogates. To ban surrogacy entirely, Vlasenko argues, would merely harm women in all facets of the industry rather than resolving wealth gaps. She said, “this inequality is much deeper than services of surrogacy.”

Social worker and professor at Ohio State University Sharvari Karandikar similarly opposes the Special Rapporteur’s recommendation of abolition. In an interview with IPS, Karandikar explained that “in countries like India, it’s really hard to implement policies in a uniform way, and I think that one needs to have proper oversight of medical professionals and how they’re engaging in surrogate arrangements and medical tourism. Blanket bans do not work.”

She emphasized the dangers of surrogacy without regulation, saying it would only do more harm.

Instead, Karandikar advocates for “the safety, the better communication, more education, more informed choice and decision, more safeguards, better treatment options, and long-term health coverage for women who engage in surrogacy” as “a wonderful way to speak about women’s choices, decisions and their health instead of penalizing anyone.”

However, in order for the global conversation surrounding surrogacy to center around female agency, experts like Vlasenko say the perception of surrogates needs to change. She said, “Reproductive work is not always seen as violence or exploitation when it’s done by women for free at home… surrogate mothers are taking the only work that, in their situation, allows them to fulfill certain responsibilities like childcare and income generation. They think that they’re agents in this process, but society sees them as victims.”

Ultimately, the surrogacy debate reflects broader questions about women’s autonomy, economic inequality and reproductive rights. As Vlasenko noted, addressing the “much deeper inequality” that pushes women to surrogacy may prove more effective than focusing solely on limiting the practice itself.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

United Nations Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem recently released her report on violence against women and girls with a focus on surrogacy, one of the most controversial topics in the medical field.

In today's edition: Climate target postponed, German electricity zone, Iceland oil, calls for cormorant cull