Europäische Union

Approximate timing, public sessions and press opportunities.

The Council had suspended certain elements of the EU visa rules in 2024.

The G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, met on 18 and 19 May 2026 in Paris, France. They were joined by the Heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank Group (WBG), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as Chair of the Multilateral Development Banks’ Heads Group, and the African Development Bank (AfDB). They also held consultations with Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from Brazil, India, Kenya and South Korea. 

Press briefing ahead of the upcoming Agriculture and Fisheries Council will take place on 20 May 2026 at 14.00.

Press briefing ahead of the Eurogroup meeting will take place on 20 May at 15.30.

Der Rat hat beschlossen, die restriktiven Maßnahmen gegen das ehemalige Al-Assad-Regime um ein Jahr, d. h. bis zum 1. Juni 2027, zu verlängern und sieben Organisationen von der Liste zu streichen.

Der Rat hat Schlussfolgerungen angenommen, in denen ein stärkerer EU-Ansatz in Bezug auf Fragilität, Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und nachhaltige Entwicklung in den Partnerländern gefordert wird.

The EU issued a statement on the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia condemning all forms of discrimination and reaffirming its strong commitment to uphold the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights by LGBTI persons.

Weekly schedule of President António Costa, 17 - 24 May 2026.

Der griechische Finanzminister Kyriakos Pierrakakis wird die Euro-Gruppe auf dem Treffen der Finanzminister und Zentralbankpräsidenten der G7 vertreten.

Der Präsident des Europäischen Rats, António Costa, wird die EU auf dem Gipfeltreffen EU-Mexiko am 22. Mai 2026 in Mexiko-Stadt vertreten. Zuvor wird er am 20. Mai Guatemala einen offiziellen Besuch abstatten.

Thursday 21 May

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

By CIVICUS
May 21 2026 (IPS)

 
CIVICUS discusses the cancellation of RightsCon 2026 with Barbora Bukovská, Senior Director for Law and Policy at ARTICLE 19, a human rights organisation that works on freedom of expression and information around the world.

Barbora Bukovská

On 29 April – days before RightsCon, the key global gathering of digital rights advocates, was due to open in Lusaka – the Zambian government announced a postponement that effectively cancelled the event. The government stands accused of giving in to China’s pressure over the participation of people from Taiwan. The event had been set to bring over 2,600 participants to sub-Saharan Africa for the first time, with another 1,100 joining online. Instead, it became the latest casualty of growing authoritarian pressure on the spaces where civil society convenes.

Why does the cancellation of RightsCon matter?

This cancellation is significant on three levels. First, it means the loss of community. The human rights movement depends on relationships built across borders and over time. RightsCon was one of the few global spaces where civil society organisations, funders, governments, journalists, researchers and technology professionals could meet without political interference. Losing it means losing opportunities to build solidarity and strengthen the networks the movement runs on.

Second, it was a symbolic blow. RightsCon represented the idea that at least one global space existed where civil society could convene freely, protected from political pressure. That illusion is now shattered. The space proved vulnerable. It is yet more evidence of shrinking civic space globally, and the message it sends is chilling: no space is truly protected from state interference any more.

Third, it caused financial damage. Following funding cuts from the USA in early 2025 and reduced funding from other major donor governments, civil society is struggling to secure resources. Organisations had invested precious funding to attend RightsCon, covering travel, organising side events and preparing advocacy materials. These are resources vulnerable civil society organisations cannot afford to waste.

What does this episode reveal about transnational repression?

The cancellation lays bare how emboldened China feels to globalise its political red lines and exercise transnational repression. For years, it has applied pressure on governments to sideline Taiwanese participation in multilateral forums. Taiwan’s leading role in digital rights and technology has long irritated China. What’s new is other governments’ willingness to yield.

China’s tactics have grown more sophisticated. Rather than open confrontation, it leverages threats of diplomatic fallout or lost investment. The pressure now extends into spaces once thought beyond its reach, such as cultural institutions, rights conferences and universities. China has shown it can coerce governments across sectors and at multiple levels.

The wider context matters too. The USA, once a leading global supporter of internet freedom, has retreated from diplomatic and financial backing for digital rights. China’s influence on the African continent has expanded in the absence of rights-based alternatives. When democratic states withdraw support for civil society, authoritarian influence fills the void.

How do China’s leverage and Zambia’s democratic decline combine?

China’s leverage across Africa has grown substantially in recent years. Chinese funding has built major infrastructure in Zambia, including Mulungushi International Conference Centre, the venue where RightsCon was due to take place. Only days before the cancellation, China signed a new agreement to fund further development projects. Zambia carries roughly US$5 billion in debt to China, and that dependency comes with strings attached.

Domestically, the picture is similarly bleak. Despite President Hakainde Hichilema being elected in 2021 on a promise of democratic renewal, civic space has shrunk steadily since. In 2025, parliament passed cybersecurity laws now used to curtail freedom of expression online and detain political opponents. Ahead of the August 2026 general election, the government is enacting further laws designed to entrench its power. Political control is winning out over democratic commitments.

Yielding to Chinese pressure while restricting civic space at home calls Zambia’s commitment to the rule of law and human rights into serious doubt. The debt creates a channel through which China can extract political cooperation. Together, these dynamics create a dangerous precedent for other global south nations facing similar pressure.

What does this mean globally?

The danger extends well beyond Zambia. If a government can cancel a major international civil society gathering without serious diplomatic or institutional consequences, it sends the wrong signals. States must show that interference carries costs. Democratic states, multilateral organisations and regional institutions must impose costs through sustained pressure and exclusion from future convenings.

International human rights mechanisms, including the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, have already condemned Zambia’s decision. But statements alone are not enough. Zambia shouldn’t be considered a reliable host for rights-based global dialogue in future.

If governments can yield to authoritarian pressure at the expense of civil society protections without paying a price, the pattern will spread.

What steps should be taken to protect global civil society forums?

Civil society can adapt but cannot insulate its gatherings from state pressure on its own. Real responsibility lies with states that claim to support human rights. They must send a diplomatic and political signal that interference in global forums is costly and prevent other governments from following Zambia’s example. They must reaffirm their commitment to multi-stakeholder forums and invest in civil society’s ability to convene and participate.

That includes member states of international coalitions such as the Freedom Online Coalition and the Media Freedom Coalition. They must act against restrictions on civic space and freedom of expression, using these platforms to impose costs on governments that interfere with civil society. The behaviour Zambia has just normalised must be made costly.

The UN, other intergovernmental organisations and states must work to guarantee the safety and openness of global gatherings. As democratic states withdraw support and authoritarian states expand their reach, the spaces where global civil society can gather, build relationships and advance human rights will continue to shrink. What’s at stake is the infrastructure of global civil society coordination and solidarity.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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SEE ALSO
Democracy: an enduring aspiration CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
Zambia: ‘Constitutional changes in an election period tend to be driven by political expediency rather than the public interest’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Gideon Musonda 24.Dec.2025
Zambia: ‘The NGO Bill strengthens legal mechanisms designed to discredit or silence critical civil society voices’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Josiah Kalala 03.Jun.2025

 

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ENTWURF EINES BERICHTS über den Pakt für den Mittelmeerraum als neue gemeinsame Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Beziehungen zwischen der EU und dem Mittelmeerraum
Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten
Nicola Zingaretti

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

A tea picker in the Bearwell tea estate of Sri Lanka. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Boubaker Ben Belhassen
ROME, May 20 2026 (IPS)

The tea in your cup this morning began its journey in someone else’s hands. Hands whose work most of us never think about. Almost certainly, those hands belonged to a smallholder farmer tending a small plot of land, plucking leaves by hand beneath long mornings of mist and rain.

Two leaves and a bud. Two leaves and a bud. Thousands of times. Smallholders account for about 60 percent of global tea supply. The industry built on their labor is worth US$19.5 billion a year and supports the economies of some of the world’s poorest countries. Yet the conditions that sustain that work – ecological, economic and climatic – are under growing pressure.

Smallholders account for about 60 percent of global tea supply. The industry built on their labor is worth US$19.5 billion a year and supports the economies of some of the world's poorest countries. Yet the conditions that sustain that work – ecological, economic and climatic – are under growing pressure

Tea is the most popular drink on earth after water. Global production reached 7.3 million tonnes last year, and per capita consumption continues to rise steadily. From the outside, the sector appears healthy.

Yet the millions of smallholder farming families driving that growth in China, India, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda and beyond need stronger support if the sector’s momentum is to endure.

The geography of tea production is also a geography of economic necessity, linked to patterns of economic dependence and rural livelihoods. Kenya is the world’s largest tea exporter.

Sri Lanka, Uganda, Malawi and Rwanda rank among the global top ten. In these economies, revenues from tea exports help finance food imports and sustain rural livelihoods across entire regions. The sector remains a major source of employment and income for millions of poor families worldwide.

That income is more fragile than the industry’s headline numbers suggest. International tea prices, adjusted for inflation, have been declining for four decades.

The sector’s nominal value has expanded, while the real purchasing power of many producers has stagnated. FAO has documented what this means at the household level: when farmgate prices fall, smallholder families reduce spending on food, education and health care.

Smallholder producers also face limited market access, inadequate extension services, weak access to credit and technology, and persistent asymmetries in how value is distributed across the supply chain.

As production costs rise and price increases transmit unevenly through markets, many farming families struggle to generate sufficient returns to reinvest in farm renewal, climate adaptation or productivity improvements. These pressures heighten income volatility and make long-term planning increasingly difficult.

Tea production and processing are major sources of employment and income for women across East Africa and South Asia. When smallholder tea farming families prosper, women’s economic participation will determine whether that prosperity and stability hold.

Programmes that support women directly through training, market access and financial resources consistently produce stronger outcomes for both households and communities. In many tea-growing regions, women sustain not only household economies, but also the continuity of the knowledge and labor on which the crop depends.

Tea cultivation relies on highly specific agro-ecological conditions: altitude, rainfall patterns and temperatures shaped gradually over centuries in the regions where production became concentrated.

These conditions are becoming harder to predict and increasingly difficult to sustain. More erratic rainfall, fluctuating temperatures, and extreme weather events are already impacting both yields and quality.

For a smallholder farmer without savings or insurance, a lost harvest is not a temporary setback. It immediately affects household spending on food, medicine and schooling.

The unevenness of that burden is a central challenge. Larger operations often possess greater capacity to adapt through irrigation, diversification, upgrading and financial reserves.

Smaller producers, by contrast, frequently get trapped between increasing climate risks and limited investment capacity. Investment needs to be calibrated to the realities of smallholder tea farming rather than assumptions drawn from larger commercial operations.

What is at stake extends beyond a commodity market. Several tea-growing landscapes have been formally recognized by FAO as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems. These landscapes were shaped over generations through accumulated farming knowledge and long relationships between land, crop and community.

Tea cultivation depends on delicate balances of shade, slope, rainfall, soil health, and inherited knowledge built gradually over generations. Climate-related stress threatens these landscapes alongside the livelihoods and agricultural continuity they sustain.

More efficient, inclusive and sustainable value chains, including greater local value addition and stronger producer participation in markets, are essential if the benefits of the growing tea economy are to reach both the people and the environments that sustain it. Per capita tea consumption in many producing countries remains relatively low, meaning the sector’s growth potential is still substantial.

Ensuring the sector’s viability, however, requires more than rising consumption levels. Smallholder producers need better access to finance, markets, technology, and climate adaptation support calibrated to their realities.

More transparent and balanced value chains, targeted investment that reaches women directly, and stronger incentives for reinvestment at farm level will determine whether the industry’s future growth will remain economically and socially sustainable.

The farmer who grew your tea will get up again tomorrow morning before sunrise. The future of the sector depends on ensuring this remains a viable livelihood option.

You want to see a bright tea future? Join us in celebrating International Tea Day on 21 May!

Boubaker Ben-Belhassen is Director of the Markets and Trade Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Parliament wants the Commission to assess whether there could be a clear risk of a serious breach of the EU’s founding values by Slovakia’s government.
Committee on Budgetary Control
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Deutschlands Industrie schwächelt seit 2015 bei hochwertigen Technologiegütern und Spitzentechnologie – Anteile an Wertschöpfung und Welthandel sinken, Produktivität schwächelt – Politischer Handlungsbedarf bei Regulierungsdichte, öffentlicher Verwaltung und europäischem Binnenmarkt Deutsche ...

Wednesday 20 May

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

On Wednesday morning, Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement on two pieces of legislation implementing EU tariff commitments under the August 2025 EU-US Joint Statement.
Committee on International Trade

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

La Cour d’Alger a rendu, ce mardi, ses verdicts dans une affaire de corruption impliquant le groupe public des industries métallurgiques et sidérurgiques « Imetal […]

L’article Affaire Imetal : jusqu’à 6 ans de prison ferme dans un vaste scandale de corruption est apparu en premier sur .