European Union

The Council adopted a regulation which will make it more difficult for criminals to misuse crypto-assets for money laundering purposes.

The EU brings crypto-assets and crypto-assets service providers under a regulatory framework for the first time. The Council today adopted a regulation on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA).

Remarks by Paschal Donohoe after the Eurogroup meeting of 15 May 2023, focusing on the spring economic forecast, the European banking system and the digital euro.

The presidents of the European Council and the European Commission spoke to the press ahead of the Council of Europe Reykjavik summit, the G7 summit in Hiroshima and the EU-Korea summit in Seoul.

The Council appointed Luigi Di Maio as EU Special Representative for the Gulf from 1 June 2023 until 28 February 2025.

The Council has approved conclusions on the social dimension of a sustainable Europe for young people.

Council will sign an agreement with Montenegro on cooperation with Frontex to allow joint border management operations.

President Michel hosted Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev for a fifth meeting in the Brussels format focusing on progress on the path towards Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization.

The participants of the G7 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors issued a communiqué at the end of their meeting in Niigata, Japan. At this meeting, Eurogroup President Paschal Donohoe represented the EU together with ECB President Christine Lagarde and Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni.

Weekly schedule of President Charles Michel, 15 - 21 May 2023

The European Council on 29 and 30 June 2023 will take place in the Europa building in Brussels

A few months ago, the government updated its retained EU law (REUL) dashboard, its go-to place for monitoring progress in moving away from this foreign imposition on the UK.

As I noted at the time, this wasn’t entirely satisfactory, either in terms of the new discoveries of EU law or the progress towards the nomination deadline of the REUL Bill, wherein anything not explicitly dealt with otherwise by the end of 2023 would be revoked/sunset/sunsat/sunsetted.

It’s been clear from the off that the Bill is a nonsense, given that the government doesn’t know what is on the books and that departments evidently don’t have the capacity to check the impact of revocation.

That the government has finally conceded this point with the decision last week to move an amendment to make revocation an exception rather than a rule is welcome, even if it doesn’t address the other deficiencies of the Bill.

The intention now is that the government will seek to revoke a specified list of REUL by the deadline, with everything else being left for later/kept on the books (depending on how you want to see it).

That list finally came out this week.

Having produced a tracker of progress on REUL since last summer, it felt incumbent that I check out what was on this list and its impact on revocation.

On a first analysis, problems rather leapt out:

Some more analysis of the REUL schedule

tl;dr it's a bit of a mess

1/ https://t.co/bMWlxian3x pic.twitter.com/Hoj9h56d45

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) May 16, 2023

The problems are two-fold.

First up, the schedule includes a lot of items that weren’t previously listed on the dashboard: 171 of the 587 items, or 29% have no obvious match to what was available with last week’s update of the dashboard.

While many of these new items were relatively mundane and inconsequential, the fact that after two major revisions to the list there were still so many items that hadn’t been noted before just underlines the fundamental problem behind the REUL Bill: it’s hard to have confidence in the automatic revocation/sunsetting process when you keep on discovering new items that this affects.

This new discovery falls across a lot of departments in Whitehall, especially in DEFRA, DfT and DESNZ. The outlier is Treasury, mainly because their REUL is parked in a separate process under a new financial services bill.

However, for everyone the impression is that there’s ever more REUL than before (and these graphs are without the new items from the schedule):

record

Which leads to the second issue: record-keeping.

In the course of checking through the schedule it became apparent that there is neither a consistent identification protocol for REUL items nor a check on duplication.

to take two examples from the Excel spreadsheet behind the dashboard, Council Decision 2010/763/EU and Regulation 906/2009 both appear twice. Even if that doesn’t carry through to the dashboard itself, it raises questions about how far there is full oversight of the process in central government bodies.

Overall, while the government’s move on the REUL Bill is welcome it still leaves a number of basic questions unanswered on how practical or viable the process intended might be. The shift to retention until otherwise decided makes even more sense that it already did, but this should not obscure the difficulties involved or the potential for unintended consequences.

The post Even more retained EU law (in every sense) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Women provide the majority of paid and unpaid care in the EU. Working conditions are poor and socio-demographic changes will increase the need for carers. What can the EU do?

How political turmoil and repression — and an over-reliance on fossil resources — killed a flourishing tourism industry.

Six months after Qatargate, as institutional inertia and parliamentary privileges weigh in, the sense of gravity and collective resolve have all but disappeared. MEPs show little enthusiasm for reform of the rules that today allow them significant outside paid activities.

Committee meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

MEPs tasked with controlling spending of EU funds said they continued to have "great concerns" on how Hungary is handling EU money and called on prime minister Viktor Orbán's government to implement the necessary reforms to unblock suspended EU funds.

What started in 2015 as a 'friends-with-benefits' relationship between Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, for Hungary and Poland, is ending in disgust and enmity — which will not be overcome until both leaders leave.

Following today’s confirmation by EU Ambassadors at the Council on setting 6 to 9 June 2024 as the dates for the next European Parliament elections, EP President Roberta Metsola said:

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Following today’s confirmation by EU Ambassadors at the Council on setting 6 to 9 June 2024 as the dates for the next European Parliament elections, EP President Roberta Metsola said:

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP