Новости за 03.04.2018

Dutch MPs Tuesday passed a motion tasking the government to push for EU-level and national-level 'Magnitsky Acts' against Russian and other human rights abusers in the next five months. Pieter Omtzigt, the MP who tabled the motion, told EUobserver the Netherlands might team up with Baltic and Nordic states in the EU Council. Magnitsky Acts, named after a late Russian activist, impose asset freezes and visa bans on egregious individuals.

Selecting in which country to execute a European Arrest Warrant - as Spain appears to have done in the Puigdemont case - sets worrying precedents as EU states such as Poland and Hungary diverge from the rule of law.

Schleswig-Holstein's public prosecutor requested on Tuesday the extradition of former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, to Spain for involvement in the Catalan independence referendum in October, underlining that the Spanish crime of 'rebellion' is the equivalent of the German offence of 'high treason'. Schleswig-Holstein's highest court will examine the request for extradition and decide whether Puigdemont meanwhile should be kept in custody because he represents a flight risk.

Current negotiations on the next seven-year spending plan may be the last opportunity for the EU to use its economic muscle to preserve its values.

A Council of Europe expert group said in a report on Tuesday that labour exploitation became the most common form of trafficking in 2017 in Belgium, Cyprus, Portugal, and the UK. "Our monitoring shows that more and more people are being trafficked to work in awful conditions in Europe, both within and across national borders," said Siobhan Mullally of the Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings.

Catalan former leader tells supporters to continue fighting for independence in 'non-violent and civilised' way.

With an Erdogan-Putin summit on Tuesday, joined by Iran on Wednesday, it is time for Europe to face facts - Turkey's ties with the West are no longer strategic. When Europe goes hither, Turkey deliberately goes thither.

The European Commission on Monday said it would provide funding of €180m for aid projects in Greece to help get refugees out of camps and to provide them with regular cash assistance. Humanitarian aid commissioner Christos Stylianides announced the move when he met with Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens. The cash is planned to reach 45,000 people, while 27,000 homes will be rented by 2018.

Only one high-speed TGV train out of eight and one regional train in five will be running on Tuesday as part of a massive strike by French workers that affects several sectors in a bid to resist president Emmanuel Macron's reform agenda. The planned three-month rolling strike is the biggest challenge to Macron's plans. Unions accuse the president of trying to "destroy the public railways through pure ideological dogmatism".

Romanian prosecutors on Monday requested permission from president Klaus Iohannis to prosecute former president Ion Iliescu and ex-prime minister Petre Roman for "crimes against humanity" during the deadly aftermath of the country's 1989 revolution, AFP reported. The move is part of a series of investigations into those responsible for the bloodshed before and after the death of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989 during which 1,104 people died.

French president Emmanuel Macron in an interview with Wired magazine warned that Google and Facebook are becoming too big to be governed and could face being dismantled. He suggested the internet giants should pay for the disruption they cause in society, and should follow European privacy regulations. Macron said the firms are "not just too big to fail, but too big to be governed".

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday the British government could have ordered the poison attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal to distract from the problems posed by Brexit. Lavrov repeated the claim at a Moscow news conference saying the murders could have been carried out by British special forces. Britain has said that Moscow was behind the murder of the ex-spy and his daughter last month.