Search Results for: European Union

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PERFORMANCE of OLAF, the European Union’s new and supposedly independent anti-fraud office, has been criticised by the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee; it has suggested that it has not worked more effectively than its predecessor UCLAF, the European Commission’s in-house fraud busting unit.…

KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union health and safety laws should be extended by a new EU directive to cover the 90 per cent of fishing boats that are currently exempt from them, a report from Spanish socialist MEP Miguélez Ramos has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DRAFT guidelines have been released by the European Commission, to help competition regulators decide when an Internet or telecommunications company is so large and powerful, it has to abide by special rules on the sharing of networks and on takeovers and mergers.…

Keith Nuthall
A PREMIUM paid to companies stripping car wrecks in the Netherlands, so that their parts can be re-used or recycled, is being investigated by the European Commission, which claims that the rates could be so high, that they would be an illegal subsidy, outlawed by European Union law.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union has lost its appeal at the World Trade Organisation against last year’s disputes panel ruling, which censured its imposition of anti-dumping duties on cotton-type bed linen from India. The Appellate Body of the WTO disputes procedure has agreed that the EU did erect duties via procedures that broke international anti-dumping regulations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union steering group has been launched to help protecting the European single currency, the Euro, against counterfeiting. It includes representatives of the Commission, the ECB and Europol. It will try to promote co-ordination between these bodies by overseeing their anti-counterfeiting work, developing a common strategy and proposing a series of concrete priority measures.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has adopted a series of action plans to integrate the protection of biodiversity into EU agricultural, fishery, environment and development policies. Their aim is to stop losses in wildlife, ecosystems, crop varieties, domestic animals and fish.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
VINEYARDS in Kosovo are bearing fruits for the first time in more than a decade because of a joint regeneration programme developed from the Commission, the United Nations and the European Agency for Reconstruction.

In 1990, nearly 10,000 acres of vineyards produced high-quality wine to traditional recipes, 80 per cent of which was exported creating a thriving wine industry in the region.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN IT companies will be able to apply for grants from a budget of Euro 3.6 billion, which has been earmarked for information society research from 2002-2006, if new proposals from the European Commission for a new framework research programme, are agreed by EU ministers and the European Parliament.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has launched a strong attack on the Council of Europe’s draft convention on cybercrime, a political move that could lead to delays in its adoption and which will almost certainly damage its reputation.

In a paper using unusually strong language for diplomatic circles, the EU’s Working Party of Data Protection accuses the draft of being “too vague and confusing” and of threatening “fundamental rights and freedoms.”…