Search Results for: European Parliament

ALAN OSBORN
The European Commission is bringing actions in the European Court of Justice against Sweden and Portugal for failure to adopt an EU directive on maritime safety. The legislation, which was approved by the EU council in 1999, provides for the regular safety examination of ships arriving at or leaving EU ports and calls on member states to co-operate fully in investigations of marine accidents and incidents.…

Keith Nuthall
AN INTERNET legal advice service for companies wishing to learn about European Union legislation affecting e-commerce, has been launched. The site, eLexPortal.com, will provide updated information on EU and national laws and regulations on the subject; it is free of charge, and allows users to e-mail queries to its online experts.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
EUROPEAN Union internal market ministers have reached a “political agreement” to ban the use of azocolourants in the dyeing of a range of textile and leather goods. Azocolourants are dyes made from nitrogen-based compounds, which could cause cancer.…

Keith Nuthall
TEXTILE designs are to receive uniform legal protection across the European Union in the future because of the agreement by the EU Council of Ministers of a new Regulation on the subject; it accords designers legal protection from the theft of their ideas, short of patent or copyright protection, but significant enough to deter plagiarists.…

From Alan Osborn
The fashionable term in setting up international energy projects these days is “flexible mechanisms” of which the best known is the trade in emission reductions, or carbon credits. The Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which guides implementation of the Convention, laid down emission reduction targets for industrialised countries but allowed flexibility to meet them through the purchase of emission credits from poorer countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A POLITICAL lifeline has been thrown to the EU’s Euro 3.6 billion, (Pounds 2.2 billion), Galileo project to set up a satellite-based global positioning system for European countries. After EU transport ministers appeared to have doomed the scheme by refusing some Euro 450 million, (Pounds 275 million), of development financing earlier this month, EU government leaders, meeting at the week-end in Belgium, said Galileo was of “strategic importance” adding that a financing decision should be taken by March next year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to administer the closure of a third nuclear power station in eastern Europe; it will manage the decommissioning of Bohunice, in Slovakia, having signed similar agreements earlier this year for the plants in Kozloduy, Bulgaria and Ignalina, in Lithuania.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TIGHTER noise restrictions on commercial aircraft visiting European Union airports have been proposed by the European Commission; it has tabled a new directive that would allow the worst affected airports to ban aircraft that marginally comply with the existing Chapter 3 standard accepted by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FISHING catch quotas in European Union territorial waters are to be slashed again to reduce pressure on stocks, which Brussels says “are in a parlous state.” The European Commission proposed a reduction of the total allowable catch of haddock in the Irish Sea by 52%, sole in the North Sea by 25% and langoustines in the Bay of Biscay by between 45 and 50%.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION is important in the provision of water services, whether that be to prevent the contamination of supplies by a return of this summer’s floods, or to source drinking water for arid areas where ground reserves are running dry.…