Europe

"We encourage you to consider, beyond the state subsidies, other reasons leading Chinese EVs to be sold at prices below market in the EU," Philippe Dam, EU Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), writes in an open letter to the European Commission.

Refering to the EU's ongoing consultations with Beijing regarding tariffs on Electric Vehicles (EVs), HRW asks the Commission to "urge the Chinese government to end crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and elsewhere and implement the recommendations of the August 2022 OHCHR report on Xinjiang".

HRW demands three points:

• Release everyone who remains arbitrarily detained or imprisoned

• Investigate and appropriately prosecute government officials implicated in serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity

• Grant free and unfettered access to Xinjiang to independent monitors, as requested by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and several UN Special Procedures

The rights groups also calls to ensure coherence with the pending Forced Labor Regulation, which enables the European Commission and EU member states to take steps to block entry into the EU market for products made with forced labor.

From [email protected]

Additional link:https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2024-07-01/el-gobierno-presenta-el-diseno-su-app-antiporno-que-obligara-a-los-adultos-a-tramitar-acreditaciones-que-caducan-al-mes.html

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17126450

> >The EU Council has now passed a 4th term without passing its controversial message-scanning proposal. The just-concluded Belgian Presidency failed to broker a deal that would push forward this regulation, which has now been debated in the EU for more than two years. > > > >For all those who have reached out to sign the “Don’t Scan Me” petition, thank you—your voice is being heard. News reports indicate the sponsors of this flawed proposal withdrew it because they couldn’t get a majority of member states to support it. > > > >Now, it’s time to stop attempting to compromise encryption in the name of public safety. EFF has opposed this legislation from the start. Today, we’ve published a statement, along with EU civil society groups, explaining why this flawed proposal should be withdrawn. > > > >The scanning proposal would create “detection orders” that allow for messages, files, and photos from hundreds of millions of users around the world to be compared to government databases of child abuse images. At some points during the debate, EU officials even suggested using AI to scan text conversations and predict who would engage in child abuse. That’s one of the reasons why some opponents have labeled the proposal “chat control.” > > > >There’s scant public support for government file-scanning systems that break encryption. Nor is there support in EU law. People who need secure communications the most—lawyers, journalists, human rights workers, political dissidents, and oppressed minorities—will be the most affected by such invasive systems. Another group harmed would be those whom the EU’s proposal claims to be helping—abused and at-risk children, who need to securely communicate with trusted adults in order to seek help. > > > >The right to have a private conversation, online or offline, is a bedrock human rights principle. When surveillance is used as an investigation technique, it must be targeted and coupled with strong judicial oversight. In the coming EU council presidency, which will be led by Hungary, leaders should drop this flawed message-scanning proposal and focus on law enforcement strategies that respect peoples’ privacy and security. > > > >Further reading: > >- EFF and EDRi Coalition Statement on the Future of the CSA Regulation

More images: https://444.hu/kepek/2024/07/02/zelenszkij-kijevben-fogadta-orbant

Containers of tomato paste exported from Xinjiang to Italy are the subject of domestic criminal and international complaints filed by rights lawyers on behalf of Uyghur advocacy groups who allege that the goods were produced using Uyghur forced labor.

The shipment was among 82 containers of agricultural products from China’s state-owned Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment (Group) Co., Ltd. shipped by rail and sea from Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to southern Italy in late April, according to the plaintiffs.

The shipment also sparked outrage among Italian farmers who protested against the arrival of the cheaper processed tomato products from China in what they said were unfair imports.

The move comes less than two months after the European Parliament approved a new regulation banning products made with force labor from entering the European Union. The EU’s 27 member countries must approve the Forced Labour Regulation for it to enter into force and will have three years to implement it. “This legal challenge addresses both violations of fundamental principles of human dignity and international law instruments, as well as calling for the seizure of these recently imported goods under national law,” said a statement issued by these groups on June 3.

UniCredit said on Monday it was challenging the terms set by the European Central Bank (ECB) for the Italian bank to cut its exposure to Russia, and seeking a ruling from the European Union's General Court, as well as a freezing of the request in the meantime.

Euro zone banks still involved with Russia more than two years after Moscow invaded Ukraine have come under growing pressure in recent weeks from the bloc's supervisors, as well as U.S. authorities, over their ties to the country.

A complex regulatory backdrop, involving Western sanctions against Moscow and local laws in Russia where the Italian group runs a retail bank, meant it had to "seek clarity and certainty" on the actions it needed to take, UniCredit said in a statement two and a half years after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine.

After Austria's Raiffeisen, UniCredit has the biggest exposure to Russia, where it runs a top 15 bank, among European lenders.

Raiffeisen has no plans to take legal action against the ECB over the request to reduce its Russia-related business, a spokesperson has said.

"For anyone who believes that Ukraine's fight against Russia is important for the security of Europe, the fact that UniCredit stayed in Russia, made profits, and is now suing the ECB over their attempts to get it to leave, this doesn't look good," said Nicolas Veron of Brussels think tank Bruegel.

Archived link

Here is the report (pdf).

Serbian authorities have adopted invasive surveillance practices and facial recognition technology to monitor political opponents, civic activists and critical journalists, says a BIRN report entitled ‘Digital Surveillance in Serbia – A Threat to Human Rights?’, published on Friday.

Equipment from Chinese manufacturers, such as Dahua and Hickvision, predominates.

Serbia’s aspirations for EU membership mean that it faces pressure to adhere to EU standards on data protection and privacy as well as cybersecurity. However, Serbia has simultaneously strengthened ties with authoritarian countries, especially China and Russia.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17502400

As the U.K. heads to the polls next week, a majority thinks that leaving the EU was a mistake and has delivered few benefits—and new problems.

Archived link

• GPB International, a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprombank, has been operating in Luxembourg for over a decade. It survived the sanctions imposed on Russia for annexing Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought the bank record profits.

• Neither the EU nor the US have imposed blocking sanctions on the bank, allowing it to continue using the SWIFT system and conduct international payments. Gazprombank’s special status is a consequence of Europe’s dependence on Russian energy resources, primarily gas. Since payments for Russian energy supplies are made through Gazprombank, from the very start, the West decided not to impose restrictive measures, economists researching on sanctions say.

• Though it’s based in Luxembourg, GPB International is no ordinary European bank: it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprombank, whose co-owners include people from Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

• Gazprombank’s Luxembourg subsidiary has never been publicly linked to the president’s inner circle. It hasn’t appeared in any high-profile document leaks or investigations by European law enforcement agencies.

• Luxembourg is a convenient jurisdiction for many financial operations: the country’s legislation makes it easy to open companies, and its tax system is beneficial for investors (e.g., favorable dividend taxation). Many Russian banks and financial organizations, both state-owned and private, have taken advantage of this. For example, Alfa-Bank’s parent company, ABH Holdings SA, is registered in Luxembourg. Businessmen Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven control the bank through this entity.

The contribution would be used to combat climate change and inequality and would help to ensure that European citizens pay their fair share towards achieving these objectives.

The minimum threshold of signatories is only required a quarter of the EU countries, so in 7 of 27. France is already at 188% of the required threshold, Denmark at 88% and Germany at 80%

in February 2024, the EU Parliament adopted the eIDAS regulation, creating the framework for a "European Digital Identity Wallet". This digital Wallet will enable citizens to identify themselves in a legally binding manner, both online and offline, sign documents, login into websites and share personal data about them with others. Recently, the European Commission published the Architectural Reference Framework (ARF) 1.4 for the technical implementation of the Wallet.

The success of the EU Digital Identity Wallet depends on its ability to gain citizens' trust and establish a resilient infrastructure in our current data-driven economy.

"However, after our analysis, we believe that this goal has been missed," says the digital rights group Epicenter Works.

"We see severe shortcomings in the ARF that either contradict the regulation or ignore important elements of it. These issues, if left unaddressed, could significantly undermine user rights and privacy."

Paris (AFP) – The river Seine is still failing water quality tests one month before the Paris Olympics when it is scheduled to host the open-water swimming competition and the swimming leg of the triathlon, results showed Friday.

June 28 (Reuters) - A growing proportion of non-European Union citizens ordered to leave EU territory are being returned to countries outside the bloc as part of efforts to rein in irregular migration, data from the EU's statistics office shows.

Hungary’s pro-Kremlin leader Viktor Orban takes over the rotating presidency of the European Council on July 1, just weeks after fellow nationalist and populist parties surged across the bloc in European polls. Hungarian diplomats have promised a “normal” presidency over the coming six months, while experts note that the role carries limited powers. But Orban’s choice of slogan for the job suggests the EU’s serial provocateur is unlikely to shun the spotlight.

• At the Public Spaces conference in the Netherlands on June 6th, Alexis Kauffmann from the French Ministry of Education and co-founder of the non-profit software platform FraMaSoft, discussed France’s move towards a comprehensive open source-based education strategy, 2023-2027. The aim is to achieve digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, which are widely used in education systems in other countries.
• “One of the key actions is to offer authoring tools to our teacher and tools based on open source software. No Google Classrooms. Not Microsoft Teams. We have chosen Moodle Elea as a learning management system,” explained Alexis Kauffmann who also pointed to other tools to learn to code and mathematics like Jupyter.
• France uses an app platform with open-source tools like Nextcloud, Big Blue Botton, and Collaboration. They even have their own ‘github’ (owned by Microsoft) called La Forge, where teachers share code.
• “To support this, we have public funds for digital commons, we organise workshops and finance the software, and therefore we can do without Microsoft and Google,” Alexis Kauffmann explained.

“I am not saying it is easy. The biggest obstacle is political courage to resist the lobbyists both at a national and European level,” he said and pointed to other risks like the quality of big tech’s products, being isolated in Europa, and artificial intelligence.

He hopes other European countries will follow suit and quoted The European Council Recommendation on education:

• The University Hospital Centre Zagreb (KBC Zagreb) is under cyberattack that started on Wednesday (June 26) night. All services are working, but the processing of patients is slower than usual, Milivoj Novak, Assistant Director at the hospital, has said.

• The attacks have been claimed by the pro-Russian NoName057(16) hacker group and have resulted in a temporary unavailability of the institutions’ websites and online portals. The sites are back online now.

• It is currently unknown whether the cyberattack against the hospital involved the deployment of ransomware, and whether it’s connected to yesterday’s DDoS attacks on the websites of several Croatian government and financial institutions: the Ministry of Finance, the Tax Administration, the Croatian National Bank (HNB), the Economic Bank of Zagreb (PBZ), and the Zagreb Stock Exchange (ZSE).

Moscow allegedly plotted to kill an investigative journalist in Austria. Now his home is protected by officers with submachine guns.