Search Results for: Austria

BY ALAN OSBORN

BRITISH nurses might be forgiven for thinking that the 25 eminent judges who make up the European Union’s (EU) top legal institution, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), have little in common with them, and they may well be right.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A PARALLEL electricity competition inquiry staged by the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) along with that held by the European Commission has concluded that Norway has some competition problems that could spark future legal action. The EFTA Surveillance Authority has similar competition powers to the Commission regarding the three European Economic Area (EEA) members of EFTA: Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s new regulation to support organic food production – unveiled just before Christmas – isn’t quite the key to lift-off in this sector that some of us were hoping for. A cynic would say that’s because it doesn’t provide any fresh money though Brussels, farm people say that was never the plan anyway.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s food and drink consumer alert service has warned of a spate of contaminations in Italy of various non-alcoholic drinks from packaging print with the potentially toxic isopropyl thioxanthone. Its ‘rapid alert system for food and feed (RASFF)’ has reported the leaching of the chemical into; a banana and strawberry soya drink, standard orange juice, and "red" orange juice that were made in Germany; plus orange juice, general ‘fruit’ juice and chocolate milk made in Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s food and drink consumer alert service has warned of further contaminations in Italy of various non-alcoholic drinks from potentially toxic packaging print ingredient isopropyl thioxanthone. Its ‘rapid alert system for food and feed (RASFF)’ reported it leaching into a banana and strawberry soya drink, standard orange juice, and "red" orange juice made in Germany; plus orange juice, general ‘fruit’ juice and chocolate milk from Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

The Austrian presidency of the EU is calling for a negotiated solution to the Russia /Moldova natural gas dispute reflecting deepening concern in Brussels about Europe’s increasing dependence on potentially unreliable outside energy sources. Russia supplies a third of the EU’s gas imports (a fifth of all gas used in the EU) with Germany, Italy and France the main buyers, though a number of EU countries are critically dependent on supplies sent by the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom through the Ukrainian pipeline: 100% for Slovakia, for instance, 92% for Greece and between 60 and 75% for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) advocate general has said European Union (EU) victims whose property is damaged by a foreign EU nuclear power operator should launch legal actions in their domestic courts. Miguel Poiares Maduro has advised the ECJ to rule that the 1968 Brussels Convention on jurisdiction and the enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters, effectively allows aggrieved property owners to choose between their home courts and those of a nuclear plant: "Both courts should….claim…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE AUSTRIAN government has failed at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to secure an abolition of the current ecopoints system that Vienna claims insufficiently controls the movement of lorries across its Alpine passes. Austria argued that this issuing of pollution-based permits to hauliers broke the European Union (EU) legal principle of ‘proportionality’, which requires that laws must be "both adequate and necessary for attaining the objective concerned".…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that European Union (EU) member states may ban the sale of unwrapped chewing gum from automatic vending machines on health grounds, if they so choose.

ENDS…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has highlighted Britain, Germany, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria, and the only European Union (EU) countries offering drug addiction programmes for young offenders. These countries, its 2005 annual report noted approvingly, have "selective prevention programmes for first-time offenders (largely cannabis users), offering psychological support, training and counselling."…