Brexit: EU citizens in UK could be shut out of vital services
Brexit: EU citizens in UK could be shut out of vital services

Thousands of EU nationals could face problems accessing essential services because the government is refusing to issue physical proof of their right to live in the UK.

The settlement scheme grants EU citizens the right to remain in the UK after Brexit. Unlike other foreign nationals, they are not provided with a biometric residency permit proving their status.

Instead they have to access the Home Office’s online database each time they need to produce evidence of eligibility.

The process, which requires applicants to have a smartphone and reliable internet access, is part of a government plan to phase out paper permits and make the entire immigration service digital.

But it means those with settled status and service providers have to negotiate a sequence of logins, emails and share codes to confirm their eligibility. And critics claim the challenges of the online system could prevent them accessing jobs, housing and medical treatment.

“A lot can go wrong – technology outages, people unable to navigate the digital system and service providers unwilling to engage with it,” says Maike Bohn, a co-founder of the support group the3million, which is campaigning for a paper backup document while the digital system beds in.

“We don’t want a two-tier society developing in the UK: British and non-EU citizens who can prove their right to work and access healthcare anytime, anywhere, simply by showing a physical card or passport – and EU citizens who cannot.”

Problems are already emerging for people who have attempted to use the new system.

Elisabeth Dodds had the offer of a £50,000 home improvement loan rescinded when her bank insisted on proof of her status.

“I submitted both a copy of my letter from the Home Office confirming that I had been granted settled status, as well as the share code for checking my status online,” she said.

“Royal Bank of Scotland [RBS] refused to accept this information. On advice from a loan adviser, I printed out the Home Office documents, including screenshots from the Home Office website showing I have indefinite leave, and brought it into a bank branch.

“This was also rejected. I was variously told they had never heard of settled status and were powerless to change what form of proof they could accept.”

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) bank branch in central London

Royal Bank of Scotland said it could not change what form of proof it could accept from Dodds. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images

A survey published this month by the3million found that only 14% of companies questioned were clear on the new rules for employing EU citizens after free movement ends in December, while one in five would more readily accept a biometric permit as evidence of status over a digital check.

Strict penalties on employers, landlords and banks that fail to verify the immigration status of applicants mean that those unfamiliar with the requirements may err on the side of caution and reject EU nationals.

Research by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants shows that only three in 150 landlords would be prepared to perform digital checks on prospective tenants.

An EU passport remains valid proof of status until July 2021, but there are concerns about what will happen after that.

Dodds, who is American but qualifies for settled status as the spouse of a Swedish national, later secured a loan from another lender that did not require status verification, but fears for the future when EU passports are no longer valid proof.

RBS apologised after being contacted by the Guardian. “We would like to reassure customers, and prospective customers, that this was an isolated incident. We should not have rejected this application,” a spokesperson said.

Paula Uusnäkki, an EU national, was one of the first to apply for settled status when the scheme was launched in 2018. She received an email confirming her application had been approved, but when she attempted to view her status in June the system had no record of her.

“Fortunately, I discovered this before needing to officially prove my status to a landlord or employer,” she said.

A letter from the Home Office confirming that a person has been granted settled status.

A letter from the Home Office confirming that a person has been granted settled status. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Some have found their access to the online service compromised after updating their passport details or address on the Home Office system.

Gina Fierlafijn, who is Flemish, never received the promised email confirming that her new passport number had been successfully logged. Her status has been updated but she still has to log in using her expired passport number to access it.

“Fortunately I kept a note of it so I do have it for the future,’ she says. ‘This online system seems totally inadequate and I am sure will fail many of us.”

Victor Piris has been locked out of his online status after updating his address last month.

The Spanish national received the email confirmation that the new details had been logged, but since then a message has informed him that his details don’t match Home Office records when he tries to log in.

“This means if I have to prove my rights, I’m unable to do so. What would happen to me if this happens again when the transition period ends?”

The government is refusing to change its stance and issue backup permits, despite its own assessment concluding that a digital only service could disadvantage many users.

The Home Office said its policy was part of a move to digitalise the entire immigration service. “Physical documents expire, become invalid, or can be lost, stolen or tampered with,” a spokesperson said.

“A digital status is more secure and ensures that EU citizens who are granted status in the UK can constantly access and securely share proof of their status. We see no reason why any institution should not accept a migrant’s online information as evidence of immigration status and will be launching an extensive package of communications to ensure individuals, employers, landlords and other third parties are fully aware of the move to digital.”

Settled status: how it works

The UK government’s website says the letter you get emailed to confirm your settled or pre-settled status cannot be used as proof of it.

The UK government’s website says the letter you get emailed to confirm your settled or pre-settled status cannot be used as proof of it. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

When the Brexit transition process comes to an end on 31 December, people from the EU, EEA or Switzerland who live in the UK will need to apply for settled status to retain their rights to work, use the NHS and claim benefits.

The scheme is open and will remain so until 30 June, but anyone applying must be living in the UK by the end of this year. If you have lived in Britain for a continuous five-year period, subject to a few exceptions, you can qualify for settled status. Otherwise, you will get pre-settled status and apply to change this once you have built up five years’ residency.

The application is free. Once granted you will be able to work and have access to the NHS and claim pensions and other state benefits if you are eligible.

The government’s website is clear that the letter you get emailed to confirm your settled or pre-settled status cannot be used as proof of it. Instead, you can get a share code that you will need to give people, along with your date of birth, so they can go online and see your status.

Citizens Advice’s guidance is that until 1 January you should still be able to use your passport or ID card to prove your right to work, rent or access the NHS.

“If an employer or landlord asks you to prove your settled status before 1 January 2021, this could be discrimination,” its website advises. After that, local councils, landlords and employers should be able to use the digital process to check your status. Hilary Osborne

Farzam Arbab, 1941–2020 | BWNS
Farzam Arbab, 1941–2020 | BWNS
BAHÁ’Í WORLD CENTRE — Farzam Arbab, a former member of the Universal House of Justice, passed away on 25 September 2020 in San Diego, United States. He was 78 years old.

The Universal House of Justice has sent the following message to all National Spiritual Assemblies.

    *

With grief-stricken hearts we mourn the sudden passing of our former colleague, our dearly loved brother Farzam Arbab, news of which has brought us fresh sorrow. His brilliant mind, loving heart, and vibrant spirit were ever turned towards the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, seeking to draw from it insights that, through the process of education, could build spiritual and intellectual capacity within entire populations. Born in Iran, he studied in the United States before settling in Colombia as a pioneer. His outstanding gifts fitted him, it seemed, for a distinguished career in the physical sciences—but Providence had determined otherwise. His rigorous scientific training was instead applied to the work of the Faith. He recognized that the verities contained in the Bahá’í writings concerning spiritual and social transformation and the entry into the Faith of the masses of humanity demanded persistent effort to learn how to bring them about; the investment of his whole being in this great enterprise was complete and constant. Throughout his time as a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of Colombia, as a Continental Counsellor, as a member of the International Teaching Centre, and finally as a member of the Universal House of Justice for two decades, his unshakeable belief in the capacity of all of God’s children, especially of young people, was the hallmark of his service to the Cause. Always insightful, always discerning, always attuned to spiritual reality, this man of exceptional vision lived a life shaped by the harmony between scientific truth and true religion.

To Sona, his beloved wife, and to Paul, his cherished son, as well as to other family members, we extend our heartfelt condolences at this unexpected loss. We supplicate in the Sacred Shrines for the progress of his illumined soul as it commences its journey into the eternal realms of God. May it be lovingly welcomed to its heavenly home. All Bahá’í communities are urged to arrange memorials, as circumstances permit, including in all Houses of Worship, to mark the passing of much-loved, illustrious Farzam Arbab.

The Universal House of Justice

Keeping It Eel: How One Historian Is Using Twitter and Medieval Factoids to Help Endangered Animals
Keeping It Eel: How One Historian Is Using Twitter and Medieval Factoids to Help Endangered Animals

Encounter an eel nowadays, and it’s likely in a sushi roll. Or maybe in your nightmares, inspired by the flesh-eating shrieking eels in The Princess Bride or the moray minions of The Little Mermaid.
But perhaps the creature’s reputation is in for a change. After all, unbeknownst to eels, they now have a great publicist—a medievalist who aims to transform their image from villain to environmental hero.
John Wyatt Greenlee, who completed his Medieval Studies Ph.D. at Cornell in May and runs what he calls “the world’s premier eel-history Twitter account,” believes that if people saw eels as part of their cultural heritage and identity, perhaps they’d be more likely to care about the animals’ future. The European eel is a critically endangered species, and as environmental advocates use World Rivers Day on Sept. 27 as a moment to talk about the importance of protecting those ecosystems, Greenlee hopes surprising stories about eels can inspire more people to get involved with such efforts.
“They’re not cute, cuddly or majestic so it’s difficult to get people interested in saving them,” says Greenlee. “The scientific community’s been trying for a really long time to convince people that it’s worth doing, but you seldom convince people by throwing facts at them.”
Greenlee had been tweeting about eels in medieval texts for about two and a half years when, at the end of 2019, his quest got a boost, in the form of a tweet about the fact that eels used to be a form of currency:

              The tweet racked up thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets, was widely shared among a group of medievalists and historians who are active on Twitter, and led to some <a href="https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">mentions</a> on popular <a href="https://slate.com/podcasts/political-gabfest/2019/12/impeachment-vote-pete-buttigieg-stories-of-2019" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">podcasts</a>.
              The attention has been yet another twist in the 44-year-old scholar’s surprising journey to becoming an expert on the history of eels. He calls himself the “Surprised Eel Historian” on Twitter because, as he put it to TIME, “This was not the topic I intended to write about, so I have found myself surprised to be an eel historian.”
              <h2>The Age of Eels</h2>
              Greenlee, a former college volleyball coach turned expert on medieval map history, got into the subject in 2015, after his curiosity was piqued by a 1647 <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1212155627562315776" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">map</a> of London that labeled vessels in the Thames “the eel ships.”
              More research revealed a backstory that involved everything from changing British demographics in the early modern period to international trade disputes. As London boomed, the city’s population began eating so many eels that the domestic stock couldn’t keep up, so Dutch imports filled the gap until the import of eels via the Thames was temporarily banned in the latter half of the 17th century during the Dutch-Anglo trade wars. From there, Greenlee’s interest grew.

              In combing through medieval financial records, writing and art, going back to the eighth century, he was struck by the extent to which people in medieval England and early modern England used eels to identify themselves—a phenomenon that became the subject of his dissertation in 2017.
              Scholar <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1273279859435995136" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Thomas Bradwardine</a>‘s 14th century book of mnemonics likens eels to England, advising readers to imagine the King of England holding in “his right hand an eel [anguilla ] wriggling about greatly, which will give you ‘England’ [Anglia ].” <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1219305242745065473" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Family crests boasted eels</a>. In<a href="https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/discover-the-bayeux-tapestry/what-is-the-bayeux-tapestry-about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> the Bayeux Tapestry</a>, which depicts the Norman conquest of England by William the Conquerer in the 11th century, the image of Anglo-Saxon King Harold shows him above a pile of <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1173974837565566977" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">eels</a>. An Englishman in the bottom border is holding an eel the wrong way—by the tail, rather than the head—perhaps symbolizing Harold’s hold on the English throne, represented by eels, slipping away.

              But eels were more than a metaphor. In 1086, when the Normans undertook a study to figure out how people lived in the countryside they had conquered and how much it was worth, known as the Domesday Study, they collected more mentions of <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1266158139533144070" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">rents</a> paid in eels than any other in-kind tax. When the survey was conducted, the English likely owed some 500,000 eels in taxes to landlords around that time. As part of his dissertation research, Greenlee created <a href="https://historiacartarum.org/eel-rents-project/english-eel-rents-10th-17th-centuries/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">an interactive map</a> of eel rents paid between the 10th and 17th centuries, and used the British Archives’ medieval currency<a href="https://historiacartarum.org/eel-rents-project/what-does-a-stick-of-eels-get-you/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> converter </a>to calculate what eel rents could mean in today’s dollars. He estimated at one point that an Amazon prime membership, for example, would cost between 150-300 eels.
              Many landlords collecting rent payments in eels were monasteries; being paid in eels meant the monks would have enough fish to eat during the <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1233060313928552449" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lenten season</a> when they couldn’t eat meat. The fish was thought to be the perfect food to eat to suppress sexual thoughts during this fasting season.







              Eels were also valuable to nobles, who ordered tens of thousands of eels for feasts. <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1249693735270731777" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Eels</a> were “the most commonly served freshwater fish in noble English households,” <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1206963899490328576" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">according to</a> Greenlee. <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1206963899490328576" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Henry I</a> loved eels. Henry II gave his otter hunter a piece of property <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1206963899490328576" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">on the condition</a> that he could stop by for meals of eels.
              The 1348-49 outbreak of the Black Death may have been a factor in an over 90% decline of English eel-rents due annually between the 13th century and the 14th century. The population had declined, land-use norms had changed and other sources of protein like beef, pork and mutton were more readily available. The Netherlands, meanwhile, got into the eel-trading business partly because the plague had driven people away from outbreaks in the Dutch countryside, allowing businessmen to buy up abandoned swampy spaces that made friendly habitats for eels.
              Greenlee found eels in every aspect of life. “Medieval England had an eel culture in the same way we think of England having a tea culture,” he says.
              He found medieval European <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1289245559723704320" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">recipes</a> for eel flan, minced eel pie and eel broth. The English made wallets, clothes and wedding bands out of eel skin. Medieval medicinal remedies suggested snorting <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1208098962395320320" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">eel skin</a> to stop bloody noses. A remedy for perking up a tired horse called for a <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1207696750854787073" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">rather unsavory use of a live eel.</a> Eels were commonly the subject of jokes, from <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1222217069133008897" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">sexual innuendos</a> to <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1243177641710141440" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">religious insults</a>. In addition, eels appear in Shakespeare’s writing <a href="https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1298629088198852609" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">more than any other fish</a>.
              <a href="https://time.com/newsletter-history"><em>Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter</em></a>
              <h2>Before They Slip Away</h2>
              Today, for Greenlee at least, the eel culture endures. Strangers send him stories about eels or photos of eel oddities—canned eel, eel jerky, a deodorant labeled “free of eels”—and someone even sent him hand-sewn masks with eel illustrations for his wife and two sons. And, as his Twitter feed began to accumulate more followers, he realized his research could be put to use beyond scholarly circles.
              Since the early 20th century, the European eel population has been in decline, a shift attributed largely to industrialization, especially the draining of wetlands and the addition of new barriers to fish migration. <a href="http://www.eelregulations.co.uk/cont-009.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A century ago</a>, eels made up about half of the fish by weight in most European waterways. Today, while it can be hard to generalize about the status of the eel worldwide—there at least 16 species that can be found in 150 countries—they face many of the same problems as other migratory freshwater fish. In July 2020, the World Wide Fund for Nature <a href="https://www.wwf.eu/?uNewsID=364693" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reported</a> that migratory freshwater fish species have declined by 76% on average over the past four decades, and by 93% in Europe in alone, due to hydropower, overfishing, climate change and pollution.
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              Wildlife trafficking also threatens the health of the eel population and the health of the human population too. The European eel is one of <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/illegal-eel-trade-smuggling" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the world’s most smuggled animals</a>, fueling an illegal trade worth more than $3 billion, and the Europol wildlife crime division estimates that more than 300 million glass <a href="https://www.sustainableeelgroup.org/europol-15-million-endangered-eels-have-been-seized-in-worlds-greatest-wildlife-crime/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">eels</a> are smuggled from Europe to Asia each year. Nick Walker, a conservation biologist and director of Eel Town, a non-profit for the conservation of freshwater <a href="https://eeltown.org/the-mayor/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">eels</a>, credits Greenlee with raising awareness about “the importance of eels to humans throughout history, especially in medieval Europe.”






              This framing could be vital to their future, as for years conservation advocates have known that <a href="http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1845993,00.html">“charismatic megafauna”</a>—mammals that look cute and cuddly—draw in donations that don’t often accrue to the protection of less-charismatic species. Like, say, eels.
              The stakes are high. As Walker points out, it’s clearer than ever that wildlife trafficking of the sort that harms eels is dangerous—the zoonotic origins of the novel coronavirus raised awareness of the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02052-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">connection between the animal trade and human health</a>—and also that eels play a key role in keeping ecosystems healthy. For example, in the U.S., Eastern elliptio mussels, which act sort of like water filters, disperse themselves by hitching a ride on American eels.
              “Eels are a very important part of a fully-functioning freshwater river system,” says Andrew Kerr, chairman of the Brussels-based Sustainable Eel Group. “You take the eel out, and you completely disrupt the food chain. Eels are a moving protein of very nutritious fat that many species feed off and they in turn feed off others.”
              Recently, some <a href="https://www.sustainableeelgroup.org/counter-trafficking-success-is-reflected-by-crash-in-european-glass-eel-supply-into-chinese-eel-aquaculture/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">crackdowns on trafficking</a> and increases in population growth, following efforts to recreate wetlands and remove dams, have given eel-conservation advocates hope.
              As for Greenlee, while he works on figuring out his post-doc academic career, he’s homeschooling his kids and keeping the Twitter account active, and looking for a publisher to turn his eel history dissertation into a book. “People all over the world eat eels. So focusing on this fish in this one place in this period of time is a way of getting people to think about culture more broadly,” he says. “Historians, at a basic level, are storytellers, and you tell an interesting story by getting people to relate to the topic.”
              And there’s plenty of story to tell. As he puts it, eels aren’t just vital to their ecosystems, but also to the “story of who we are.”
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              <p class="author-feedback-text"><strong>Write to </strong>Olivia B. Waxman at <a href="mailto:olivia.waxman@time.com?subject=(READER FEEDBACK) Keeping It Eel: How One Historian Is Using Twitter and Medieval Factoids to Help Endangered Animals&amp;body=https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F5886487%2Feels-history-conservation%2F" target="_self" rel="noopener noreferrer">olivia.waxman@time.com</a>.</p>
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'Stop using so much English', French journalists tell EU Commission
‘Stop using so much English’, French journalists tell EU Commission

French journalists covering the European Union have complained to the bloc’s chiefs about the increasing use of English in their communication which they say gives un “competitive advantage” to the anglophone press.

The French section of the Association of European Journalists reminded Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President Charles Michel in a letter dated September 23 that the use of several European languages in the communication of any EU institution is a legal obligation enshrined in founding treaties.

Taking as an example the EU’s proposed migration pact unveiled earlier this week, they complained that all communication about it was only released in English.

“No version in any other working language (French or German) was available, more than two hours after the official communication. At the end of the day, only the two-page press release was available in French. This is out of proportion with the constraints of speed inherent to the journalism profession,” they wrote.

“This seems all the more unacceptable to us since this is not an isolated case, but a repeated practice, now almost systematic, especially since your arrival as head of the European Commission,” they added.

They argued that the increasing practice of communicating in only one language makes disinformation easier and that other countries including Russia, China and the US regularly makes official documents available in other languages including French, Spanish and German.

“By the way, by focusing on a single language you give a notable competitive advantage to the English-speaking press, which does not need to translate and can simply copy and paste extracts. The French-speaking press, and others, are required to translate or even interpret all comments as well as technical terms. There is a clear distortion of competition, contrary to European treaties,” they went on.

Von der Leyen, a Brussels-born German politician speaks German, French and English fluently and regularly slips in and out of them when she delivers speeches.

Ukraine conference flops after controversial judge prompts EU no show
Ukraine conference flops after controversial judge prompts EU no show

EU policymakers and civil servants cancelled their participation in an online conference dedicated to Ukraine when they learned the day before that a controversial high-ranking judge would sit on the Kyiv panel, EURACTIV has learned.

The conference ‘Dialogue about justice – 2’ held online on 2 September was a follow-up to meetings between the Kyiv-based think tank “Institute for Democracy and Development (PolitA)” – established by Ukrainian community leaders and experts to promote democratic development in the country – and EU policymakers and administrators.

Because of the COVID-19 restrictions, the conference took place in parallel sessions – linked via video – in Kyiv, and in the Brussels Press Club, plus – via Zoom – experts from Estonia, Israel and the United States.

Participants told EURACTIV that the conference was largely a flop, after EU representatives who had registered ultimately did not take part, having learned about the participation of judge Pavlo Vovk and some other panellists.

Vovk, the president of the Kyiv District Administrative Court (OASK), and his colleagues have been the subject of many media investigations related to their lifestyle, including expensive holidays, that appear to be beyond their official salaries.

Vovk was first appointed president of the District Administrative under pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. During Euromaidan, OASK became notorious for a series of unlawful rulings against peaceful assembly.

Beside OASK, Pechersk is another court which has become the symbol of the judiciary in Ukraine becoming a fortress of arbitrary decisions and corruption. The court is presided by judge Serhii Vovk. Pechersk is a district of Kyiv where the capital’s most beautiful historic monuments are located.

Recently, the Pechersk court has been handling cases against veterans and volunteers from the anti-terrorism operations against separatists in Eastern Ukraine with the purpose of discrediting them.

Ukrainian oligarch linked to Zelenskiy suffers blow in London court

Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hardly expected to become a protagonist in a possible impeachment of his US colleague Donald Trump. On top of that, his name has now also appeared in the press in relation to a London court case of possible financial malpractice involving billions of dollars. 

The Pechersk court specializes in cases in favour of pro-Russian members of Yanukovych’s team, and pressuring the opposition, in particular the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko.

The boycott by EU officials was not the only highlight of the online conference held on 2 September, according to participants.

After half an hour of the meeting, a bomb alarm forced the Kyiv public to leave the space. A police investigation confirmed it was a false alarm and the speakers and the audience could return and continue the discussion with the Brussel panellists and the public.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

On The Money: Half of states deplete funds for Trump's 0 unemployment expansion | EU appealing ruling in Apple tax case | House Democrats include more aid for airlines in coronavirus package
On The Money: Half of states deplete funds for Trump’s $300 unemployment expansion | EU appealing ruling in Apple tax case | House Democrats include more aid for airlines in coronavirus package

Happy Friday and welcome back to On The Money. I’m Sylvan Lane, and here’s your nightly guide to everything affecting your bills, bank account and bottom line.

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Write us with tips, suggestions and news: slane@thehill.comnjagoda@thehill.com and nelis@thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @SylvanLane, @NJagoda and @NivElis.

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THE BIG DEAL—Half of states run out of funds for Trump’s $300 unemployment expansion: Half of all states have depleted their funding for the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits that President Trumptrumpdonald 070117gettyDonald John TrumpFederal prosecutor speaks out, says Barr ‘has brought shame’ on Justice Dept. Former Pence aide: White House staffers discussed Trump refusing to leave office Progressive group buys domain name of Trump’s No. 1 Supreme Court pick MORE ordered after failing to strike a deal with Congress.

  • A congressionally approved expansion of benefits this spring provided unemployed Americans with $600 more in weekly unemployment payments, but that expansion expired in July. 
  • Democrats pushed to renew the benefits, but Republicans argued they were too high and discouraged people from returning to work.
  • After the unemployment boost expired, Trump signed an executive order to retool Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for an additional $300 in weekly benefits.

Unemploymentpua.com, a website that follows the minutia of state-level COVID-19 unemployment relief programs, found that 25 states had reached their funding limit, though only seven had already sent out their final payments. The Hill’s Niv Elis has more here.

LEADING THE DAY

EU appealing ruling in Apple tax case: The European Union announced on Friday that it will appeal a July court ruling that annulled its 2016 finding that Apple owes Ireland up to 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said it is appealing the EU general court’s opinion to the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court.

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The commission “respectfully considers that in its judgment the General Court has made a number of errors of law,” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the commission, said in a statement.

The Hill’s Naomi Jagoda walks us through the case here.

House Democratic coronavirus relief package to provide more aid for airlines: The House Democratic emergency coronavirus relief package, which has not yet been unveiled, includes additional funding for airlines, two sources told The Hill.

Speaker Nancy Pelosipelosinancy 111317cf leadNancy PelosiDemocratic senator to party: ‘A little message discipline wouldn’t kill us’ Overnight Health Care: New wave of COVID-19 cases builds in US | Florida to lift all coronavirus restrictions on restaurants, bars | Trump stirs questions with 0 drug coupon plan Overnight Defense: Appeals court revives House lawsuit against military funding for border wall | Dems push for limits on transferring military gear to police | Lawmakers ask for IG probe into Pentagon’s use of COVID-19 funds MORE (D-Calif.) had tasked committee heads with drafting a package this week and Ways and Means Chairman Richard Nealnealrichard 030817gnRichard Edmund NealOn The Money: Half of states deplete funds for Trump’s 0 unemployment expansion | EU appealing ruling in Apple tax case | House Democrats include more aid for airlines in coronavirus package House Democrats to include more aid for airlines in coronavirus package The Hill’s Morning Report – Sponsored by Facebook – Republicans lawmakers rebuke Trump on election MORE (D-Mass.), who is leading the charge, said the package could receive a vote by Oct. 2.

  • Under the terms of the CARES Act relief funding that passed this spring, airlines are prohibited from firing or laying off any employees until Oct. 1. Once that deadline passes, workers in the industry are expected to take a hit, barring new assistance from the government.
  • On Oct. 1, American Airlines expects to ax 19,000 jobs, and United Airlines said it plans to cut 16,370. Delta Air Lines will delay the effective date for a potential 220 pilot furloughs to Nov. 1 but will not furlough any flight attendants and front-line workers in 2020 due to the many employees who opted for early retirement.

“We have been told that airline worker relief is in the package and are grateful for the strong, bipartisan support. We are hopeful that this is the start of a negotiation that will help our industry and others in distress,” Nicholas Calio, head of the industry group Airlines for America, told The Hill in a statement. The Hill’s Alex Gangitano has more here.

ON TAP NEXT WEEK

Tuesday:

  • Federal Reserve Board Vice Chair Richard Clarida delivers remarks at the 2020 U.S. Treasury Market Conference, 11:40 a.m.
  • The House Financial Services Committee’s task force on financial technology holds a hearing on the legal framework for digital lending and payments processing, 12 p.m.
  • Fed Vice Chair of Supervision Randal Quarles discusses financial regulation at the Harvard Law School and Program on International Financial Systems, 1 p.m.
  • The Wilson Center hosts a panel discussion on Mexico’s perspective on labor provisions included in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, 1 p.m.
  • Quarles will also discuss financial stability during an event held by the Center for Financial Policy at the University of Maryland, 3 p.m.

Wednesday:

  • The Washington International Trade Association hosts a webinar entitled “Reengaging the Asia-Pacific on Trade: A TPP  Roadmap for the Next Administration,” 9 a.m.
  • The House Small Business Committee holds a hearing on COVID-19’s impact on small businesses within the food system, 10 a.m.
  • Federal Reserve Board Governor Michelle Bowman speaks at a conference on community banking, 1:40 p.m.

Thursday:

  • The House Small Business Committee holds a hearing on preventing abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, 10 a.m.
  • The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis holds a hearing on the financial system and economic opportunity, 2 p.m.
  • Fed Governor Bowman speaks about the role of community banks in providing equitable mortgage access, 3 p.m.

GOOD TO KNOW

  • A group of bipartisan House and Senate lawmakers on Friday introduced legislation to increase resources to help local government, small businesses and nonprofit groups defend themselves against cyberattacks.
  • Politico: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-run companies that stand behind about half of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market, pose a potential danger to the stability of the broader financial system, a Treasury-led panel said today.”

ODDS AND ENDS

  • Six months after states began issuing stay-at-home orders, many employees have settled into working-from-home routines that are likely to persist in some form beyond the pandemic. But with that seismic shift comes concerns about productivity, fatigue and cybersecurity.

Recap the week with On The Money:

  • Monday: Shutdown clash looms after Democrats unveil spending bill | CBO: $900B a year needed to stabilize post-crisis debt | Airline CEOs plead with Washington as layoffs loom
  • Tuesday: Powell, Mnuchin stress limits of emergency loans | House seeks to salvage vote on spending bill | Economists tell lawmakers: Kill the virus to heal the economy
  • Wednesday: House panel pulls Powell into partisan battles | New York considers hiking taxes on the rich | Treasury: Trump’s payroll tax deferral won’t hurt Social Security
  • Thursday: Anxious Democrats push for vote on COVID-19 aid | Pelosi, Mnuchin ready to restart talks | Weekly jobless claims increase | Senate treads close to shutdown deadline
EU Commission to appeal Apple ruling in Ireland over .9 billion tax case
EU Commission to appeal Apple ruling in Ireland over $14.9 billion tax case

The European Commission is appealing a July court judgment in the ongoing saga of Apple’s taxes in Ireland. Buckle in, this one gets a bit complicated. And it’s likely to drag on for some time.

In July, the General Court of the EU annulled a 2016 ruling by the European Commission. In that ruling, the commission had determined that Ireland gave Apple a “sweetheart deal” that let the iPhone maker pay significantly lower taxes than other businesses. “Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies — this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in 2016.

The commission ordered Apple to pay €13 billion ($14.9 billion) in back taxes to the Irish government. Ireland and Apple both disputed the decision, with CEO Tim Cook calling the judgment “total political crap.”

But in the July ruling, the judges said that the commission had failed to make its case. “The commission did not succeed in showing to the requisite legal standard that there was an advantage” for Apple, they declared, and “the commission did not prove, in its alternative line of reasoning, that the contested tax rulings were the result of discretion exercised by the Irish tax authorities.”

The commission said Friday it will appeal the court’s July ruling, with Vestager saying in a statement that the court “has made a number of errors of law.”

“The General Court has repeatedly confirmed the principle that, while Member States have competence in determining their taxation laws taxation, they must do so in respect of EU law, including State aid rules,” Vestager said. “If Member States give certain multinational companies tax advantages not available to their rivals, this harms fair competition in the European Union in breach of State aid rules.”

An Apple spokesperson said in a statement emailed to The Verge on Friday that it would review the commission’s appeal when it receives it, adding that the company has always abided by the law in Ireland and other places it operates. “The General Court categorically annulled the Commission’s case in July and the facts have not changed since then,” the spokesperson said. “This case has never been about how much tax we pay, rather where we are required to pay it.”

Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told The Irish Times Friday that the appeal was “expected,” and that it would likely “take a number of years further before this matter is further determined.”

World Day of Migrants and Refugees - EU Bishops: “Let’s welcome migrants with humanity”
World Day of Migrants and Refugees – EU Bishops: “Let’s welcome migrants with humanity”

World Day of Migrants and Refugees

EU Bishops: “Let’s welcome migrants with humanity”

 

“Let’s welcome migrants with humanity, fraternity and solidarity. Let’s give them a place at our table”, states H. Em. Card. Jean-Claude Hollerich SJ, President of COMECE, on the eve of the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which will be celebrated on Sunday 27 September 2020.




In the context of the dramatic events occurring in different areas of the world regarding forced movements of people, Pope Francis devotes his message for the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees to internally displaced persons, “an often unseen tragedy exacerbated by the global Covid-19 crisis”.

 

In this regard, the Holy Father calls on all governments and on all of us “not to forget the many other crisis that bring suffering to so many people. Jesus is present in each refugee fleeing from hunger, war and other grave dangers in search of security and of a dignified life for themselves and for their families. We are called to see the face of Christ who pleads with us to help”.

Already two years ago, in a similar message, Pope Francis urged all of us to respond to this pastoral challenge by welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating migrants and refugees, including the internally displaced persons.

In our commitment to the weakest, he proposes to include the following practical orientations:

  • to know in order to understand;
  • to be close in order to serve;
  • to listen in order to be reconciled;
  • to share in order to grow;
  • to be involved in order to promote and;
  • to cooperate in order to build

In 5 May 2020, the Holy See’s Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development has issued the document “Pastoral Orientations on Internally Displaced People” in order to inspire and encourage the pastoral work of the Church in this specific area.

In its regular dialogue with the EU institutions, COMECE highlights the need to consider migrants and refugees as persons and not as numbers, people with dignity, fundamental rights, each of them [with] a name, a face, and a story, as well as an inalienable right to live in peace and to aspire to a better future for their sons and daughters”.

Conflict, climate crisis, threaten fragile gains to advance women and children’s health
Conflict, climate crisis, threaten fragile gains to advance women and children’s health

Protect the Progress: Rise, Refocus, Recover, 2020 highlights that since the movement was launched 10 years ago, spearheaded by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, there has been remarkable progress in improving the health of the world’s women, children and adolescents, with under-five deaths reached an all-time recorded low in 2019, and more than 1 billion children were vaccinated over the past decade.

Coverage of immunization, skilled birth attendant and access to safe drinking water reached over 80 per cent. Maternal deaths declined by 35 per cent since 2000, with the most significant declines occurring from 2010. An estimated 25 million child marriages were also prevented over the past decade, says the report.

Prioritize women and girls: UN deputy chief

However, conflict, climate instability and the COVID-19 pandemic are putting the health and well-being of all children and adolescents at risk. The COVID-19 crisis, in particular, is exacerbating existing inequities, with reported disruptions in essential health interventions disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable women and children.

“We know that women and children are the foundation of our communities and of our future”, said UN deputy chief, Amina Mohammed, in a video message broadcast during the report launch online. “Plans to respond to and recover from COVID-19 must prioritize their rights, and ensure continued access to services that support health, access to clean water, nutrition and education.

“While much is still unknown and uncertain, our collective goal endures: for women, children and adolescents everywhere to survive and thrive, and for their lives to be transformed”, added the Deputy Secretary-General.  

Death ‘every six seconds’

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, a child under the age of five died every six seconds somewhere around the world”, said Henrietta Fore, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director.

“Millions of children living in conflict zones and fragile settings face even greater hardship with the onset of the pandemic. We need to work collectively to meet immediate needs caused by the pandemic while also strengthening health systems. Only then can we protect and save lives.”

Last year, 5.2 million children under the age of 5 and 1 million adolescents died of preventable causes. Every 13 seconds a newborn baby died. Every hour 33 women did not survive childbirth; and 33,000 girls a day were forced into marriages, usually involving much older men.

The report examines the deep-rooted inequities which continue to deprive women, children and adolescents of their rights, noting that where you are born, is a significant determinant of survival.

“For too long, the health and rights of women, children, and adolescents have received insufficient attention and services have been inadequately resourced”, said former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Board Chair of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, Helen Clark.

“We call on all partners to work together to support governments to strengthen health systems and tackle the inequities that constrain progress.” 

Narrow the gap

The report calls upon the global community to fight COVID-19 while honoring and respecting commitments that can improve the lives of women and children, and not widen the gap between promise and reality. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to turn back the clock on years of progress in reproductive, maternal, child and adolescent health. This is unacceptable,” said Muhammad Ali Pate, Global Director for Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank Group.

“The GFF partnership will double down on its efforts to engage with partners and countries and honor the global commitment to ensure that all women, adolescents and children can access the quality, affordable health care they need to survive and thrive.”

The past decade of progress to advance the health of women, children and adolescents must be protected from the impact of the pandemic and the responses to it, the report emphasizes.

“As we respond to COVID-19 and reimagine a better future, with sustained peace, including at home, we must repeat unequivocally that the rights of women and girls are not negotiable. Even in times of crisis – especially in times of crisis – their sexual and reproductive health and rights must be safeguarded at all costs”, said Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of UN reproductive rights agency, UNFPA.

Statement by President Donohoe on the candidates for the post of ECB executive board member
Statement by President Donohoe on the candidates for the post of ECB executive board member

The term of the European Central Bank’s executive board member, Yves Mersch, will end on 14 December 2020. The European Council will appoint a new member on a recommendation from the Council and after having consulted the European Parliament and the ECB.

At the Eurogroup meeting of 11 September, I asked euro area members to put forward candidates for Mr Mersch’s replacement. The call for candidates ended today and I received the following applications:

  • the Netherlands proposed Frank Elderson, Executive Director of Supervision of the Netherlands Bank.
  • Slovenia proposed Boštjan Jazbec, Director of Resolution Planning and Decisions, at the Single Resolution Board

At its next meeting on 5 October, the Eurogroup will discuss these applications with a view to supporting one candidate.

The Council will then adopt a recommendation to the European Council, acting by reinforced qualified majority of euro-area members. Such majority requires the support of 72% of euro area member states (i.e. at least 14 out of the 19), representing at least 65% of the population of the euro area.

The European Council is expected to take a final decision by the end of the year.

Belarus must release opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava, stress independent rights experts
Belarus must release opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava, stress independent rights experts

In a news release, on Friday, the experts also called on the authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the enforced disappearance of Ms. Kalesnikava, who, they said was “snatched off the streets” of the capital, Minsk, threatened with death or deportation, and then secretly imprisoned. 

It is particularly troubling that the authorities have resorted to enforced disappearances in an effort to quash protests, stifle dissent and sow fear –  Independent experts

“It is particularly troubling that the authorities have resorted to enforced disappearances in an effort to quash protests, stifle dissent and sow fear,” said the rights experts.  

“We urge the authorities not to use national security concerns to deny individuals their fundamental rights, among others the rights to opinion, expression, of peaceful assembly and association.” 

Ms. Kalesnikava, a musician and political activist. campaigned for an opposition candidate, later forced to leave the country, ahead of the 9 August presidential election which is widely considered to have been rigged.

As protests swept the country, she was elected to the seven-person leadership of the self-styled Coordination Council, a body established to overcome the ongoing political crisis through negotiations. Most of its leaders have been arrested, deported or fled the country, according to the news release

Ms. Kalesnikava was abducted on 7 September by a group of masked men presumed to be security agents. She was driven to the border the next day, where she was told she would be deported “alive or in bits”. However, she reportedly managed to thwart deportation by ripping up her passport. 

She then disappeared for three days with no information on her whereabouts or state of health. On 10 September, authorities said she was held in pre-trial detention in Minsk, and on 16 September, she was officially charged with undermining national security, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. 

Kseniya Halubovich

Protesters, young and old, have taken to the streets in Belarus over the disputed presidential election.

Demand for prompt investigations 

The experts also called on Belarus to conduct prompt and effective investigations into what happened to Ms. Kalesnikava, uphold her right to an effective remedy, and identify and hold perpetrators accountable. 

“It is unacceptable that her relatives and associates were denied information on her whereabouts for three days in clear violation of fundamental safeguards enshrined in national legislation and international law,” they said. 

Several opposition politicians have reportedly been forcibly taken to borders with Poland, Lithuania or Ukraine and expelled from Belarus. Those who refused to leave, such as Ms. Kalesnikava, have faced reprisals. 

‘Absolutely no justification’ for disappearances 

The human rights experts strongly reminded Belarus that there are “absolutely no circumstances” that can justify enforced disappearances – not political instability or any other public emergency. 

“Belarus must strictly comply with fundamental legal safeguards to prevent enforced disappearances,” they underlined. 

“These include immediate registration, judicial oversight of the detention, notification of family members as soon as an individual is deprived of liberty, and the right to hire a defence lawyer of one’s choice.” 

Culture of impunity

In the news release, the experts also raised alarm over a culture of impunity in the country, stretching back decades. 

“Regrettably, no progress has been made in the investigation and the search for several individuals who disappeared in the early 2000s,” they said, recalling a communication sent to the Belarusian government, earlier this year. 

The experts reminded Belarus that it is “obliged to protect the relatives’ rights to truth, justice and reparations regarding past cases of enforced disappearance”. 

The experts calling on the Government of Belarus include the special rapporteurs on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; on the situation of human rights in the country; on the right to freedom of expression; on the rights of peaceful assembly and association; and on violence against women; as well as members of the working groups on enforced or involuntary disappearances; and on arbitrary detention

The Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. The experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.  

European Union appeals in  billion tax battle with Apple
European Union appeals in $15 billion tax battle with Apple

The European Union is taking its fight to get $15 billion in back taxes from Apple to the continent’s highest court, officials said Friday.

The European Commission said it will appeal a July ruling from the EU’s General Court that found insufficient evidence that Apple got unfair tax breaks from the Irish government.

The commission will bring the case to the European Court of Justice because the lower court’s ruling both raised important legal issues and contained “a number of errors of law,” competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.

“Making sure that all companies, big and small, pay their fair share of tax remains a top priority for the commission,” Vestager said in a statement. “… If member states give certain multinational companies tax advantages not available to their rivals, this harms fair competition in the European Union in breach of state aid rules.”

The July ruling was a win for Apple, which the European Commission accused in 2016 of artificially reducing its tax burden with allegedly illegal benefits from Ireland, a nation known as a corporate tax haven.

Ireland had appealed the commission’s initial decision alongside Apple, saying it had always been clear it had not given special treatment to the tech giant.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the iPhone maker told CNBC the commission’s appeal “will not alter the factual conclusions of the General Court, which prove that we have always abided by the law in Ireland, as we do everywhere we operate.”

Irish finance minister Paschal Donohoe noted the commission’s decision but said the government had not received a formal notice of the appeal. His office said the appeal process could take up to two years.

“When it is received, the government will need to take some time to consider, in detail, the legal grounds set out in the appeal and to consult with the government’s legal advisors, in responding to this appeal,” Donohoe said in a statement.

Apple’s stock price dipped 0.8 percent in premarket trading Friday to $107.35 as of 7 a.m.

Agrifood Brief: A State of the Agricultural Union
Agrifood Brief: A State of the Agricultural Union
Welcome to EURACTIV’s AgriFood Brief, your weekly update on all things Agriculture & Food in the EU. You can subscribe here if you haven’t done so yet.
thumbnails PodCast

4 – New Copa President, labelling disputes, cocoa initiative

The discontent in the agri-food world has still not been allayed after Commission president Ursula von der Leyen gave agriculture little weight during her State of the Union speech last week (16 September).

We wrote on this space that, although not directly mentioned, a reference to agriculture was implicit in the renewed ambition to reach climate neutrality by 2050, which needs much effort from farmers to be delivered.

In a tweet, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture (DG AGRI) also relaunched von der Leyen’s only bit of the discourse loosely referable to agriculture, as she highlighted the need to bring rural broadband in rural areas.

But it was not enough and von der Leyen’s slip-up went undigested.

In an exclusive interview with EURACTIV.com, the newly elected president of the European farmers association COPA, Christiane Lambert, said she was “very disappointed” about this forgetfulness.

“How can a former minister of an agricultural country and now Commissioner of a large agricultural continent, whose first policy has been the Common agricultural policy (CAP) since 1960, make a speech as the head of the Union without talking about agriculture?”

According to Lambert, the lack of recognition of the agricultural sector was particularly galling in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, which she said has made everyone recognise the important role of agriculture.

For this reason, she revived the idea of taking stock of the current situation in European farming.

“[A point in] my agenda is to make a State of the Agricultural Union and to say everything that agriculture brings to the EU: food, food security, health through food,” she said.

It does not sound like a bad idea.

Over recent years, lots of words have been spent setting out plans to rethink farming as we know it.

In Spring, the Commission unveiled its pivotal food policy strategy, the Farm to Fork (F2F), with the intention to anticipate – and shape – trends in the agri-food world that still have to come.

However, there is no “what we need to be” moment without a preliminary “what we are now” one.

Many have complained about the lack of an impact assessment behind the F2F that would have taken into account not only the finish line for European farming but the starting position as well.

A state-of-the-art today in the agri-food sector could also be useful in dispelling any doubt on whether the main EU’s farming subsidies programme is still a necessity since NGOs are increasingly questioning its very existence – which is, however, heavily defended by farmers and the industry.

Perhaps one of the forthcoming EU presidencies – upcoming ones are Portugal, Slovenia and France – could get the fruit of opportunity and endorse the idea to shedding light on the actual contributions and damages of farming to Europe.

Taking into account, it goes without saying, any aspect in which agriculture can have an impact: not only from the environmental side but also from the social, economic and cultural point of view.

Agrifood news this week

EU farmers boss: Farm to Fork to be revised if negative impact was proved
The European Commission’s new food policy should be reviewed if a future impact assessment shows that it will negatively affect farmers, the newly-elected chair of farmers association COPA, Christiane Lambert, told EURACTIV.com in an exclusive interview.

EU mulls over plan to boost carbon-storage on farmlands
Farmers and foresters need to be “directly incentivised” to put in practice carbon-capture crops and other measures intended to reduce net greenhouse gases (GHG), according to an update of the European Commission’s Climate Law. Gerardo Fortuna has more.

Member states coalition presents latest challenge to colour-coded nutrition label
The fight against the supremacy of France’s Nutri-Score system as the EU-wide nutrition food label has kicked up a notch with the addition of a new non-paper backed by at least seven member states. Natasha Foote has the story.

‘Efficiency not a dirty word’: why bigger can sometimes mean better in farming
The concept of efficiency and productivity in farming is often associated with poor animal welfare and sustainability, but that is not necessarily the case and more work must be done to change this perception, stakeholders highlighted at a recent event on animal welfare. Read more here.

Farmers need financial reassurance to support uptake of agroforestry
In a clear nod to the strategic importance of agroforestry, the term has now cropped up in both the European Green Deal, the European Commission’s roadmap for making Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050, and the EU’s flagship new food policy, the Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy. Natasha Foote has more.

Targets for anti-microbials must allow for ‘massive’ variation within livestock sector 
Ambitions to lower the use of antibiotics in farming must take into account the “massive” amount of variation between member states and also between species, according to a leading livestock sustainability consultant who also highlighted the pressing need to digitalise the animal health sector. Learn more here.

“The guidelines for member states’ strategic plans are not legally binding documents, they are recommendations”

Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski during a press conference after the AGRIFISH Council this week

News from the bubble

New committee chair: This week, Green MEP Tilly Metz has been elected chair of the new Inquiry Committee on Animal Transport in the European Parliament. For more information on the Committee, see here.

Cocoa initiative: The European Commission has kicked off an initiative to improve sustainability in the cocoa sector. A new multi-stakeholder dialogue will bring together representatives of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana – the two main cocoa producing countries accounting for 70% of global cocoa production – as well as representatives of the European Parliament, EU Member States, cocoa growers and civil society. It aims to deliver concrete recommendations to advance sustainability across the cocoa supply chain through collective action and partnerships.

Soil health report: The Missions Board presented it’s report on soil, entitled “Caring for Soil is Caring for Life“, at the European Research and Innovation Days event this week, where high-level independent experts presented their proposals to the European Commission for possible EU missions on some of our most pressing societal challenges.

Agricultural stats: Eurostat released a updated report on agriculture statistics at the regional level, focusing on four specific areas with information on: the age of farm managers; the harvested production of various cereals (common wheat and spelt; grain maize and corn-cob-mix); the number of bovine animals and milk production; the share of agricultural area that has been converted to organic farming. It also released a report on the country-by-country break down on livestock numbers in the EU.

New protected origin: The Commission has approved the addition of “Szilvásváradi pisztráng” from Hungary and of “Provola dei Nebrodi” in the register of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). “Szilvásváradi pisztráng’ is a fish belonging to the trout family, while Provola dei Nebrodi is a stretched-curd cheese from a mountain region in Sicily.

Agrifood news from the Capitals

ROMANIA
Romania wants to include pork and poultry meat on the list of products eligible for coupled payments under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), according to agriculture minister Adrian Oros. Oros told the AGRIFISH Council on Monday that Romania supports an allocation of at least 15% of the national CAP for coupled payments for pork and poultry products. (Bogdan Neagu | EURACTIV.ro)

UK
The UK House of Lords has supported amendments to the Agriculture Bill which would require food products imported under future trade deals to meet or exceed domestic standards for animal health and welfare, environmental protection, food safety, hygiene and traceability, and plant health. The proposals were intended to address concerns that British food standards may be compromised in post-Brexit trade agreements. (Natasha Foote | EURACTIV.com)

FRANCE
The High Council for Energy has rejected a proposal from the government to reduce the price of bio-methane. The potential reduction up to 15% in the feed-in tariffs for biomethane had provoked a strong reaction from farmers and politicians in the Hauts-de-France (North) region. The Minister of Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili, said she wanted to start a consultation with the biogas sector in the coming weeks. According to the Agriculture Ministry, 380 methanisers existed in France in 2018. (Anne Damiani | EURACTIV.fr)

BELGIUM 
Two of Belgium’s most iconic products, beer and fries, stand to be severely affected by the effects of climate change, a new report commissioned by the National Climate Commission warned on Thursday (17 September). (Alexandra BrzozowskiEURACTIV.com)

ITALY
According to Italian dairy association Assolatte, cheese export witnessed an increase of 3% in volume and 0.8% in value during the first six months of the year. The positive trend was driven by fresh (+14.1%) and grated cheese (6.2%) (Gerardo Fortuna | EURACTIV.com)

POLAND
The National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) will offer nearly €22 million from European Funds to support new technologies in the agricultural sector. The initiative aims to increase the competitiveness of Polish companies working on projects in the field of robotisation, automation, digitisation and environmentally friendly agri-food production. (Mateusz Kucharczyk | EURACTIV.pl)

On our radar

A new European Alliance for Plant-based Foods (EAPF) has launched this week, which aims to place plant-based foods at the heart of the transition towards more sustainable and healthy food systems. The alliance, which includes industry players such as Upfield, Nestlé, and Beyond Meat, as well as NGOs and the scientific community, aims to promote policies and laws that recognise the role of plant-based foods in the sustainable transition and guarantee fair access to the EU market.

Ahead of the next round of EU-UK talks next week, FoodDrinkEurope has joined with farmers association COPA-COGECA and agricultural trade association CELCAA to warn of a “disastrous double whammy” if no deal is reached in a joint statement.

Upcoming events

25 September – There is a workshop dealing with all aspects of the European Green Deal that are directly concerning the agro-food and bio-economy sector.

25 September – #IGrowYourFood is a global action day celebrating anyone involved in growing food using organic and agroecological practices—whether you’re a farmer or a processor, producer, exporter, trader or organiser.

29 September – There is a conference on the “Farm to Fork” Strategy: Ensuring a healthy balance between Europe’s food systems and biodiversity conservation” which will discuss opportunities and challenges for the “Farm to Fork” Strategy, one of the main pillars of the EU Green Deal recently unveiled by the European Commission.

29 September – To mark the International day of food loss and waste, FAO Brussels is holding an event to discuss solutions to the food loss and waste issue and highlight the importance of working together across all actors. You can register here to attend.

Don’t miss

Watch out for EURACTIV’s upcoming special report on new terminologies in sustainable food systems.

Politicians see the EU recovery fund as key to getting a railway line as far as Marbella
Politicians see the EU recovery fund as key to getting a railway line as far as Marbella
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'Pride was Their Downfall': How Muslims Routed Christians at Nicopolis
‘Pride was Their Downfall’: How Muslims Routed Christians at Nicopolis


September 25, 2020

Today in history, on September 25, 1396, a major military encounter with Islam that demonstrated just how disunited Christendom had become took place.

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In 1394, the Ottoman Turks “were doing great injury to Hungary,” causing its young king, Sigismund, to appeal “to Christendom for assistance.”  That appeal came at an opportune time.  The hitherto quarreling English and French had made peace in 1389, and a “crusade against the Turks furnished a desirable outlet for the noble instincts of the Western chivalry.”

Matters were further settled once “men of all kinds” — pilgrims, laymen, and clerics returning from the Holy Land and Egypt — told of “the miseries and persecutions to which their Eastern co-religionists were subjected by the ‘unbelieving Saracen,’ and … appeal[ed] with all the vehemence of piety for a crusade to recover the native land of Christ.”

Western knights everywhere — mostly French but also English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Polish — took up the cross in one of the largest multiethnic crusades against Islam.  Their ultimate goal, according to a contemporary, was “to [re-]conquer the whole of Turkey and to march into the Empire of Persia … the kingdoms of Syria and the Holy Land.”  A vast host of reportedly some one hundred thousand crusaders — “the largest Christian force that had ever confronted the infidel” — reached Buda in July 1396.

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But numbers could not mask the disunity, mutual suspicions, and internal rancor that were evident from the start.  Not only did the French spurn Sigismund’s suggestion that they take a defensive posture and forgo the offensive, but when the king suggested that his Hungarians were more experienced with and thus should lead the attack on the Turks, the Frenchmen accused him of trying to take away their glory and set out to take the field before him.

They easily took two garrisons before reaching and besieging Nicopolis, an Ottoman stronghold on the Danube.  Victories and still no response from Sultan Bayezid led to overconfidence and complacency; dissolution set in, and some sources say the camp became all but a brothel.


Suddenly, on September 25, 1396, as the Western leaders were feasting in a tent, a herald burst in with news that Bayezid — who only three weeks earlier was far away besieging Constantinople — had come.  Without waiting for Sigismund’s Hungarians, who were trailing, the Westerners instantly formed rank and made for the first, visible line of the Ottoman force, the akinjis, or irregular light cavalry.



Although they made quick work of them, the vagabond horsemen had “veiled from the sight of the enemy a forest of pointed stakes, inclined towards the Christians, and high enough to reach the breast of a horse.” Many charging horses were impaled and fell — as volleys of arrows descended upon man and beast, killing many of both.


The loss inflicted on the Christians was considerable.  A young French knight called on the men “to march into the lines of the enemy to avoid a coward’s death from their arrows and the Christians responded to the marshal’s call.”  Although the Muslim archers harrying them were scattered along a sloping hill, the unhorsed and heavily armored crusaders marched to it on foot.


As they ascended, “the Christians struck vigorously with axe and sword, and the Ottomans retaliated with sabre, scimitar and mace so valiantly, and packed their lines so closely, that the issue remained at first undecided.  But as the Christians were mailed, and the Ottomans fought without armor, the bearers of the Cross … butchered 10,000 of the infantry of the defenders of the Crescent, who began to waver and finally took to their heels.”



As the latter fled, another, larger host of Islamic horsemen became visible.  The unwavering crusaders “hurled themselves on the Turkish horse, effected a gap in their lines, and, striking hard, right and left, came finally to the rear,” where they hoped to find and kill Bayezid with “their daggers [which they used] with great effect against the rear.”  Startled at this unusual way of fighting — reportedly five thousand Muslims were slaughtered in the mêlée — “the Turks sought safety in flight and raced back to Bayezid beyond the summit of the hill.”


At this point, the Western leaders called on their knights to stop, recover, and regroup; yet despite “their exhaustion, the weight of their armor, and the excessive heat of an Eastern summer day,” the berserkers pursued “the fugitives uphill in order to complete the victory.”  There, atop the hill, the full might of the Muslim host finally became visible: forty thousand professional cavalrymen (sipahi), with Bayezid grinning in their midst.


Instantly and to the clamor of drums, trumpets, and wild ejaculations of “Allahu akbar!,” they charged at the outnumbered and now exhausted Christians.  The latter valiantly fought on, “no frothing boar nor enraged wolf more fiercely,” writes a contemporary.  One veteran knight, Jean de Vienne, “defended the banner of the Virgin Mary with unflinching valor.  Six times the banner fell, and six times he raised it again.  It fell forever only when the great admiral himself succumbed under the weight of Turkish blows.”  His “body was found later in the day with his hand still clutching the sacred banner.”


No amount of righteous indignation or battle fury could withstand the rushing onslaught.  Some crusaders broke rank and fled; hundreds tumbled down the steep hill to their deaths; others hurled themselves in the river and drowned; a few escaped and got lost in the wood (a handful made it home from their odyssey years later, in rags and unrecognizable).


The Hungarians arrived only to witness the grisly spectacle of a vast Muslim army surrounding and massacring their Western coreligionists.  Sigismund boarded and escaped on a ship in the Danube.  “If they had only believed me,” the young king (who lived on to become Holy Roman Emperor thirty-seven years later) later reminisced; “we had forces in plenty to fight our enemies.”  He was not alone in blaming Western impetuosity: “If they had only waited for the king of Hungary,” wrote Froissart, a contemporary Frenchman, “they could have done great deeds; but pride was their downfall.”


Though it failed, the crusade caused considerable damage to Bayezid’s forces: “for the body of every Christian, thirty Muhammadan corpses or more were to be found on the battlefield.”  But the Islamic warlord would have his vengeance:



On the morning after the battle the sultan sat and watched as the surviving crusaders were led naked before him, their hands tied behind them.  He offered them the choice of conversion to Islam or, if they refused, immediate decapitation.  Few would renounce their faith, and the growing piles of heads were arranged in tall cairns before the sultan, and the corpses dragged away.  By the end of a long day, more than 3,000 crusaders had been butchered, and some accounts said as many as 10,000.


Whether because hours of this “hideous spectacle of mutilated corpses and spilt blood horrified [even] Bayezid,” or whether because his advisers convinced him that he was needlessly provoking the West, “he ordered the executioners to stop.”


When news of this disaster spread throughout Europe, “bitter despair and affliction reigned in all hearts,” writes a chronicler.  Never again would the West unite and crusade in the East.  “Henceforward it would be left to those whose borders were directly threatened to defend Christendom against the expansion of Islam.”  All of this was a sign of the times, of a burgeoning secularization that prioritized nationality over religion in the West.  As historian Aziz Atiya notes in his seminal study of the battle:



The Christian army consisted of heterogeneous masses, which represented the various and conflicting aspirations of their countries and nascent spirit of nationality therein.  The sense of unity and universality that had been the foundation of Empire and Papacy in the early Middle Ages was passing away, and in its place the separatism of independent kingdoms was arising.  This new separatist tendency demonstrated itself amidst the crusading medley before Nicopolis.  There was no unity of purpose, no unity of arms and companies, and no common tactics in the camp of the Christians.  The Turkish army was, on the other hand, a perfect example of the most stringent discipline, of a rigorous and even fanatic unity of purpose, of the concentration of supreme tactical power in the sole person of the Sultan.  For an increasingly isolated Constantinople, such developments boded ill.


Thanks to its cyclopean walls, the city of the Byzantine emperors managed to survive for another 57 years, falling to the Turks in 1453 — thanks primarily to cannons developed by European turncoats contracted by the Ottomans.


Note: All quotations in the above account were excerpted from and documented in the author’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.





Today in history, on September 25, 1396, a major military encounter with Islam that demonstrated just how disunited Christendom had become took place.

In 1394, the Ottoman Turks “were doing great injury to Hungary,” causing its young king, Sigismund, to appeal “to Christendom for assistance.”  That appeal came at an opportune time.  The hitherto quarreling English and French had made peace in 1389, and a “crusade against the Turks furnished a desirable outlet for the noble instincts of the Western chivalry.”

Matters were further settled once “men of all kinds” — pilgrims, laymen, and clerics returning from the Holy Land and Egypt — told of “the miseries and persecutions to which their Eastern co-religionists were subjected by the ‘unbelieving Saracen,’ and … appeal[ed] with all the vehemence of piety for a crusade to recover the native land of Christ.”

Western knights everywhere — mostly French but also English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Polish — took up the cross in one of the largest multiethnic crusades against Islam.  Their ultimate goal, according to a contemporary, was “to [re-]conquer the whole of Turkey and to march into the Empire of Persia … the kingdoms of Syria and the Holy Land.”  A vast host of reportedly some one hundred thousand crusaders — “the largest Christian force that had ever confronted the infidel” — reached Buda in July 1396.

But numbers could not mask the disunity, mutual suspicions, and internal rancor that were evident from the start.  Not only did the French spurn Sigismund’s suggestion that they take a defensive posture and forgo the offensive, but when the king suggested that his Hungarians were more experienced with and thus should lead the attack on the Turks, the Frenchmen accused him of trying to take away their glory and set out to take the field before him.

They easily took two garrisons before reaching and besieging Nicopolis, an Ottoman stronghold on the Danube.  Victories and still no response from Sultan Bayezid led to overconfidence and complacency; dissolution set in, and some sources say the camp became all but a brothel.

Suddenly, on September 25, 1396, as the Western leaders were feasting in a tent, a herald burst in with news that Bayezid — who only three weeks earlier was far away besieging Constantinople — had come.  Without waiting for Sigismund’s Hungarians, who were trailing, the Westerners instantly formed rank and made for the first, visible line of the Ottoman force, the akinjis, or irregular light cavalry.

Although they made quick work of them, the vagabond horsemen had “veiled from the sight of the enemy a forest of pointed stakes, inclined towards the Christians, and high enough to reach the breast of a horse.” Many charging horses were impaled and fell — as volleys of arrows descended upon man and beast, killing many of both.

The loss inflicted on the Christians was considerable.  A young French knight called on the men “to march into the lines of the enemy to avoid a coward’s death from their arrows and the Christians responded to the marshal’s call.”  Although the Muslim archers harrying them were scattered along a sloping hill, the unhorsed and heavily armored crusaders marched to it on foot.

As they ascended, “the Christians struck vigorously with axe and sword, and the Ottomans retaliated with sabre, scimitar and mace so valiantly, and packed their lines so closely, that the issue remained at first undecided.  But as the Christians were mailed, and the Ottomans fought without armor, the bearers of the Cross … butchered 10,000 of the infantry of the defenders of the Crescent, who began to waver and finally took to their heels.”

As the latter fled, another, larger host of Islamic horsemen became visible.  The unwavering crusaders “hurled themselves on the Turkish horse, effected a gap in their lines, and, striking hard, right and left, came finally to the rear,” where they hoped to find and kill Bayezid with “their daggers [which they used] with great effect against the rear.”  Startled at this unusual way of fighting — reportedly five thousand Muslims were slaughtered in the mêlée — “the Turks sought safety in flight and raced back to Bayezid beyond the summit of the hill.”

At this point, the Western leaders called on their knights to stop, recover, and regroup; yet despite “their exhaustion, the weight of their armor, and the excessive heat of an Eastern summer day,” the berserkers pursued “the fugitives uphill in order to complete the victory.”  There, atop the hill, the full might of the Muslim host finally became visible: forty thousand professional cavalrymen (sipahi), with Bayezid grinning in their midst.

Instantly and to the clamor of drums, trumpets, and wild ejaculations of “Allahu akbar!,” they charged at the outnumbered and now exhausted Christians.  The latter valiantly fought on, “no frothing boar nor enraged wolf more fiercely,” writes a contemporary.  One veteran knight, Jean de Vienne, “defended the banner of the Virgin Mary with unflinching valor.  Six times the banner fell, and six times he raised it again.  It fell forever only when the great admiral himself succumbed under the weight of Turkish blows.”  His “body was found later in the day with his hand still clutching the sacred banner.”

No amount of righteous indignation or battle fury could withstand the rushing onslaught.  Some crusaders broke rank and fled; hundreds tumbled down the steep hill to their deaths; others hurled themselves in the river and drowned; a few escaped and got lost in the wood (a handful made it home from their odyssey years later, in rags and unrecognizable).

The Hungarians arrived only to witness the grisly spectacle of a vast Muslim army surrounding and massacring their Western coreligionists.  Sigismund boarded and escaped on a ship in the Danube.  “If they had only believed me,” the young king (who lived on to become Holy Roman Emperor thirty-seven years later) later reminisced; “we had forces in plenty to fight our enemies.”  He was not alone in blaming Western impetuosity: “If they had only waited for the king of Hungary,” wrote Froissart, a contemporary Frenchman, “they could have done great deeds; but pride was their downfall.”

Though it failed, the crusade caused considerable damage to Bayezid’s forces: “for the body of every Christian, thirty Muhammadan corpses or more were to be found on the battlefield.”  But the Islamic warlord would have his vengeance:


On the morning after the battle the sultan sat and watched as the surviving crusaders were led naked before him, their hands tied behind them.  He offered them the choice of conversion to Islam or, if they refused, immediate decapitation.  Few would renounce their faith, and the growing piles of heads were arranged in tall cairns before the sultan, and the corpses dragged away.  By the end of a long day, more than 3,000 crusaders had been butchered, and some accounts said as many as 10,000.

Whether because hours of this “hideous spectacle of mutilated corpses and spilt blood horrified [even] Bayezid,” or whether because his advisers convinced him that he was needlessly provoking the West, “he ordered the executioners to stop.”

When news of this disaster spread throughout Europe, “bitter despair and affliction reigned in all hearts,” writes a chronicler.  Never again would the West unite and crusade in the East.  “Henceforward it would be left to those whose borders were directly threatened to defend Christendom against the expansion of Islam.”  All of this was a sign of the times, of a burgeoning secularization that prioritized nationality over religion in the West.  As historian Aziz Atiya notes in his seminal study of the battle:


The Christian army consisted of heterogeneous masses, which represented the various and conflicting aspirations of their countries and nascent spirit of nationality therein.  The sense of unity and universality that had been the foundation of Empire and Papacy in the early Middle Ages was passing away, and in its place the separatism of independent kingdoms was arising.  This new separatist tendency demonstrated itself amidst the crusading medley before Nicopolis.  There was no unity of purpose, no unity of arms and companies, and no common tactics in the camp of the Christians.  The Turkish army was, on the other hand, a perfect example of the most stringent discipline, of a rigorous and even fanatic unity of purpose, of the concentration of supreme tactical power in the sole person of the Sultan.  For an increasingly isolated Constantinople, such developments boded ill.

Thanks to its cyclopean walls, the city of the Byzantine emperors managed to survive for another 57 years, falling to the Turks in 1453 — thanks primarily to cannons developed by European turncoats contracted by the Ottomans.

Note: All quotations in the above account were excerpted from and documented in the author’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.















EU farmers boss: Farm to Fork to be revised, if negative impact was proved
EU farmers boss: Farm to Fork to be revised, if negative impact was proved

The European Commission’s new food policy should be reviewed if a future impact assessment shows that it will negatively affect farmers, the newly-elected chair of farmers association COPA, Christiane Lambert, told EURACTIV.com.

A livestock farmer with more than 40 years’ experience under her belt, Lambert has been a strong farming advocate from a young age.

Elected in 2017 as the first woman at the helm of the French farmers’ union FNSEA, last week (18 September) she was also named president of COPA, which is the voice of European farmers in the Brussels bubble.

In an exclusive interview after her election, she stressed the need to align agriculture with environmental objectives, lending support to the EU’s pivotal Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, but cautioning against what she described as the “dogmatic” targets set in the strategy.

According to her, it is necessary to connect these figures to the capacity of the market. “For instance, when the strategy reads 25% of [total farmland being used for] organic farming: will European citizens really eat 25% organic production?” she questioned.

Lambert also regretted the lack of an initial impact study to accompany the unveiling of strategy.

“Without an impact assessment, no decision can be made. And if negative aspects come up, they must be reviewed in the strategy,” she added.

A similar remark was made by Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who has opened the possibility of revising F2F ambitious targets at a later stage if food security is threatened.

“If it were to become apparent that the achievement of the objectives set out in this strategy threatens both food safety and the competitiveness of our agriculture, then these objectives would have to be revised,” he said speaking before the French Senate in July.

For Lambert, farmers must be considered as key actors in the potential revision of the strategy in order to ensure that there are realistic and achievable objectives compatible with Europe’s food export and supply chain.

She also spoke about the need to counter a rising “agribashing” that has been seen across the EU, saying that there is a need to engage directly to society in a civil dialogue with the media, social networks and think tanks to position farmers as guardians of the environment, rather than enemies.

“Farmers are not enemies of the environment – on the contrary, they are the ones who help protect it,” she stressed, saying she has made it her mission to champion everything that agriculture brings to the EU, including food security, health and employment and vitality to rural areas.

The newly-elected farmer boss defended the EU’s main farming subsidies programme, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), from attacks, particularly those from environmental NGOs.

“As food security has begun to appear as something very valuable, it must be said strongly that we owe it to the CAP, which has enabled us to produce in quantity and quality,” she said.

Expressing her disappointment that agriculture did not merit a mention in Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first State of the Union speech last week, she emphasised that one of her main goals as President of COPA is to make a “State of the Agricultural Union”.

Environmental, as well as socio-economical uncertainties in the farming sector, accumulate and farmers are restless because of this increased unpredictability, according to Lambert.

In order to face the uncertainties coming from trade, Lambert was clear that agriculture must be placed front and centre of debates on international trade agreements.

Drawing inspiration from ex-trade Commissioner, Phil Hogan, she expressed her support for ‘open strategic autonomy’.

“Food is strategic, there are products we need such as exotic products, coffee or soya, but we need relationships to be open and equal,” she said.

However, she cautioned that the opening of borders may put the EU in competition with countries that do not have the same production rules.

“We have the impression of putting a heavyweight and a featherweight in a boxing ring. We compete, but we already know from the beginning that we will lose,” she warned, stressing that the EU cannot let products in from countries where there are not common standards.

“We must remain vigilant to ensure that the premium rules imposed on European producers lead to reflection on trade negotiations,” she said, especially in relation to the draft agreements with Mercosur or Oceania.

Asked about the battle raging on between France and Italy on nutritional front-of-pack foodstuff labelling, Lambert said that although she does not know what will be the choice at the EU level in the end, it is true that many consumers are demanding for more information.

In this regard, she highlighted that origin of food labelling is a strong demand from consumers, even more than the Nutri-score.

Her association, COPA-COGECA, has recently joined the ranks of discontent with the system proposed by the French, backing Italy’s bid against any colour-coded nutritional labels, such as the Nutri-score.

[Edited by Benjamin Fox]

OPINIONISTA: Holding on to the idea of the West, and the world that Europe created
OPINIONISTA: Holding on to the idea of the West, and the world that Europe created

Forget the actual persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar, the Roma in Europe, Latinos in the USA or people being put into veritable concentration camps, or bombed out of their homes and communities from Syria to China – the ‘Boers’, we are told, are ‘the most persecuted race in the world’.

There’s a new meme doing the rounds on social media. It tells the world, that “The Boervolk is the most persecuted race in the world” and defines “the boer” as “any white Afrikaans speaking or English speaking person of European ancestry or origin believing in God and the Boer nation and culture”.

There are so many awful statements and claims in that meme, if it were not so dangerous and filled with lies, it would be easy to dismiss it as a load of horse manure. What I will do, however, is discuss a single strand that runs through the meme, and that fits into a global spirit of the times. 

There is a growing fear and loathing about the decline of the European world, the “end of western civilisation,” and rejection of “the enlightenment”. To put it very bluntly, some white people are not happy that so many people of colour (I don’t really like that phrase, but it’s better than non-whites, or non-Europeans), are “taking over,” they want to replace European civilisation with “weapons” like “multi-culturalism,” and generally destroy the world that whites have built. This shift was spurred on by the Tea Party Movement, which was essentially a reaction to the Presidency of Barack Obama, and gained significant momentum, and emboldenment with the Donald Trump presidency. All these issues have, in turn, emboldened sections of the white population in South Africa. But let me step back, and provide some context.

Recurrent crises and fault lines in global capitalism and democracy

It is almost impossible to understand national or sub-national social and political economic matters, outside of global and historical trends or states of affairs. For instance, at the end of the Cold War, very many despotic regimes across Africa lost the backing of the East or West – notwithstanding the romantic idealism of the Non-Aligned Movement. Elsewhere, across the European world – I refer to more than the cartographic reality – there was a sense of triumphalism. Liberal capitalism had won, and the last man standing was a liberal capitalist…. Then things went horribly wrong. In somewhat rapid succession, between 1990 and 2020, the world witnessed a series of banking, financial, currency, debt and “economic” crises; the East Asian Crisis of 1997 and the 2008 global crisis were the most prominent, with Argentina’s latest (2020) debt crisis being the latest in this series of crises

Over these 30 years, capitalism and democracy, which had become so entwined with the unstable idea of a Judeo-Christian world as the basis for societies in the United States and its European kin, began to come apart. Democracy came into confrontation with capitalism. Globalisation, in the financial and “purely” economic sense, turned certainty and stability (of jobs, homes, a car for every adult and assured upward mobility) of the US middle class, into a nightmare, and there emerged, partially as a response to this apparent vulnerability a new discourse on “localisation”. We can argue about that some other time. 

A world in search of purity and exclusivity

One outcome of this localisation is that everyone is rereating into the safety of their racial, ethnic or religious identities. We are at a point in history, then, where everything that has worked for the “the West” the “European world,” and all the great that was supposed to have come from the European enlightenment is coming under intense scrutiny, and provoking very many dangerous trends.

As such, we are facing an historical wave – a global historical wave – of ethno-nationalism, crypto-fascism, or outright fascism, anti-globalism and anti-multi-culturalism, and even resistance to the multilateral system. While all the former may be explained by the horrid search for purity, in a world that is becoming “impure” (races are mixing), the latter is attached to this by Trump’s resistance to “globalism”. Even the “Boere” are panicking.

Trump’s nationalism and “sloppy fascism” has parallels with those of Hungary’s Victor Orban, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and India’s Narendra Modi and his sidekick Amit Shah who has made sure that hatred of non-Hindus, especially Muslims, was going viral in India.

Add to this mix the openly and proudly expressed white supremacy of Richard Spencer, in the United States, and you have an explosive system of contending nationalisms or claims of persecution (whites complain that they are becoming a minority) and, in the case of the Boer nation, you have untested and propagated fear of persecution – and an end of the world as we have known it for the past 2000 years. We’ll come back to those 2000 years.

In the meantime, forget the actual persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar, the Roma in Europe, Latinos in the USA or any number of people being put into veritable concentration camps, or bombed out of their homes and communities from Syria to China, the “Boers,” we are told, are “the most persecuted race in the world”. But let’s get back to the macro picture. 

The end of the European world is a myth

Let’s start with a question. It sounds rhetorical – but it’s as serious as the day is long. Is the European world really ending? The short answer is no. The long answer is very complicated, but I will try to simplify it, only for the sake of brevity. Forgive me if this sounds patronising. We are in the year 2000. We have a map of the world that neatly details where all countries are, and where they share borders. In most places around the world, we use the same calendar, we set our clocks more or less in sync – accounting for vast distances. We spend our days and months in countries designed by the Europeans – and most of us speak their languages.  

While only 33% of the world claim English as their mother tongue, at least 1.1 billion people speak English. From Poland or the Czech Republic, to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia and India (and very many other countries), contribute to the Indo-European language spoken by 40% of the world. The Boers, as defined in the meme, do not want to be part of this world.

At the same time, almost every piece of technological hardware (and software) the world has used for at least seven decades, emanated mainly from “the West” – with the former Soviet Union making significant contributions in areas like space-technology. This makes the arguments of decline or collapse rather weak.

But let’s wrap it all up. The year 2000 is based on the Gregorian calendar and was introduced in October 1582. It’s European, and nobody wants to change it. I haven’t come across anyone who wants the world to turn to the lunisolar calendar (the Jewish, or Muslim calendars). The time we use on our watches is near universally accepted (Physics note: Please don’t ask me what time is – it’s very complicated). 

While Egyptians typically can take credit for the first time keeping, the production of clocks solidified the division of each day into hours and minutes. Some historical records would have us believe that wheeled vehicles first appeared from the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, across Mesopotamia, Northern Caucasus and Central Europe, but nobody knows for sure, where or when the wheel was invented.

We can go on and on, but by now it should be clear. The world that we live in, the maps we use, the measurements and markings of latitude and longitude are all European or Western creations – there is absolutely no indication that any of that will change any time soon.

While 1.1 billion of us speak English (a European language) every day, there is a possibility that most of us will speak Mandarin – in about 100 years, Kobus. It has taken about 500 years for English to be the most spoken language. I wouldn’t be too worried about European civilisation ending any time soon – at least not in our lived experience. 

Boerevolk

The Boers, who always considered themselves as Europeans, need to accept that there are no plans to destroy the institutions of Western civilisation. What will probably happen, is that non-European cultures, customs, traditions and practices will start to grow and spread – and that can only be a good thing.

We will challenge the dominance, the power and control – all of which is part of the production of knowledge. A good thing, surely. For now, Greenwich mean time, the Gregorian calendar, the technologies we use in our daily lives, will remain – and they will get better – with us for many decades to come. That’s the attempted intellectual part.

From the gut, I think “the Boers” in the meme are simply living in fear of a planet of mixed race, multi-cultural people, who self-identify, decide on their own sexual or other preferences, and where being proudly white is an aberration. DM

Gallery


Unlike US, European countries tend to pick top judges with bipartisan approval on ideologically balanced high courts
Unlike US, European countries tend to pick top judges with bipartisan approval on ideologically balanced high courts

Filling Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court immediately sparked a bitter partisan fight.

But choosing judges for the nation’s highest court doesn’t have to be so polarizing.

In some European countries, judicial appointments are designed to ensure the court’s ideological balance. And the entire process, from nomination to confirmation, is generally not seen as partisan. By choice and by law, high court justices in those places generally work together to render consensus-based decisions.

Europe’s centrist constitutional courts

I am a scholar of high courts worldwide, which are typically called “constitutional courts.”

Europe’s constitutional courts differ from country to country, but they have some important similarities.

Justices serve for fixed terms — usually nine to 12 years — rather than for life, and they are not eligible for reappointment. US-style oral arguments are rare in Europe’s constitutional courts. Instead, the justices consider written arguments and then they deliberate in private. The courts generally have more members than the US Supreme Court — 12 to 20 judges — but they also often operate in smaller panels.

Judicial appointments in such systems rarely provoke the kind of partisan confirmation battle likely to play out in Washington over the next few weeks. That’s because many European countries ensure that both sides of the political spectrum have a say in choosing constitutional court judges.

In Germany, for example, the legislature conducts the appointment process in a bipartisan fashion. The political parties negotiate over the nominees, identifying candidates who are acceptable to both the left and right.

Because each justice must be approved by a two-thirds vote, candidates need to appeal to lawmakers from across the political spectrum.

Spain and Portugal likewise require a legislative supermajority to approve constitutional court nominees.

In the US, by contrast, the president picks a Supreme Court nominee, who must be confirmed by a simple majority: 50%, plus one vote. However, until recently, opponents could filibuster to require 60 votes for confirmation. Right now, Republicans hold 53 seats in the 100-seat Senate, a balance likely to change after November’s election.

How compromise works

Many European courts also take a more centrist approach to making their rulings.

Rather than deciding cases by majority vote, as the US Supreme Court does, constitutional courts in Europe often operate on consensus. German and Spanish justices rarely write dissenting opinions to express their disapproval of a court ruling. Dissents do not exist in Belgium, France or Italy.

When all justices have to agree, compromise is essential. The US Supreme Court itself recently demonstrated this. More than a year elapsed between the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 and the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017 because Republicans refused to confirm a new justice in an election year. So the court was evenly split during that time between liberals and conservatives, four to four.

The eight justices worked harder to find common ground on divisive issues. When asked to decide whether religiously oriented employers must provide health coverage that covers contraception, they fashioned a compromise: Insurance companies would be required to provide coverage to employees without the employers having to take any action to ensure that the coverage was provided.

People like centrist courts

The centrist approach inspires high levels of public confidence. In Germany, trust in the constitutional court is impressive, hovering around two-thirds to three-quarters. Approval is strong from both the left and the right.

In contrast, public trust in the US Supreme Court has been steadily declining for years. A majority of Americans once expressed strong confidence in the court. Today, a Gallup poll finds, only 40% do — down from 56% in 1988.

While public trust has historically tended to be similar for Democratic and Republican voters, the past two decades have seen increasing polarization in that measure. Currently, 53% of Republicans have a great deal of confidence in the court. Just 33% of Democrats do, according to Gallup.

If Republicans are able to push through a nominee to fill Ginsburg’s seat before the end of Trump’s term — breaking with the precedent they set in 2016 of not filling vacancies on the Supreme Court before a presidential election — the court will have a 6-3 conservative majority.

This will likely cement polarized public opinion in the US about the Supreme Court.

Conservatives will feel confident that their priorities — restricting abortion access, for example, and expanding the role of religion in society — are well reflected on the Supreme Court. Liberals and moderates, who broadly make up about 60% of the US population, will not. If the justices’ decisions seem ideologically driven, a skewed Supreme Court composition could undermine the court’s legitimacy for many Americans.  

Perhaps in deference to that fact, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, has occasionally sided with the Court’s liberals in important but legally narrow 5-4 decisions about gay rights, immigration and abortion.

Can the US depoliticize its courts?

While public discussion right now focuses on how Congress could change the judicial appointment process, the justices could also decide on their own to depoliticize the Supreme Court.

Consensus-based judicial decision-making is required by law in some European countries. But in many other European constitutional courts, the justices have simply imposed this norm upon themselves and developed policies to ensure consensus is reached.

The US Supreme Court itself observed a norm of consensual decision-making for most of its history. Until 1941, the justices typically spoke unanimously. Only about 8% of cases included a dissenting opinion. In the 2019-2020 term, 64% of decisions included dissents.

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Chief Justice Roberts has pushed for greater consensus on the court, saying that the court functions best “when it can deliver one clear and focused opinion.” Other chief justices have pressed hard for unanimity, too. Chief Justice Earl Warren believed it so important that the court unanimously strike down school segregation that he managed to turn a 6-3 majority into a 9-0 majority in Brown v. Board of Education.

Mostly, though, extreme political polarization in the United States has translated into an extremely polarized Supreme Court. As European countries show, one effective way to bridge political divides is to ensure that both sides truly think the country’s most powerful judges represent their interests.

This is an updated version of an article originally published July 9, 2018.The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to unlocking ideas from academia, under a Creative Commons license.

unlike us european countries tend pick top judges bipartisan