European Union News

The European Commission welcomed the positive outcome on the new progress report on the implementation of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. In addition, the European Council met on 23 and 24 of June and gave its endorsement to the EU Strategy for the Danube Region, adopted by the Commission last December.

The Presidency's report on Roma inclusion has been endorsed by the EU leaders at the European Council meeting on 23 and 24 of June. The EU framework for national Roma integration strategies up to 2020 has as main goals the preparation, updating and development of Member States' national Roma inclusion strategies. The EU leaders asked for an application of the sets of policy measures within their broader social inclusion policies for improving the situation of the Roma by the end of 2011.

The results published by the European Commission on the evaluation of the impact and effectiveness of EU public procurement legislation shows that the current framework has saved around €20 billions. The responses also reveal that the priority should be given to simplification, improving market access and fostering innovation.

The European Council met on 23 and 24 of June and decided to invite the Council to take all necessary decisions for the conclusion of the accession negotiations with Croatia by the end of June 2011. Therefore, the signature of the Accession Treaty with this country is foreseen to be done before the end of the year. With this decision, Croatia will become the 28th Member State of the European Union.

The European Commission is determined to push the fight against fraud a step further. Thus, the new Strategy will cover the whole "anti-fraud cycle" with specific strategies adopted in order to cover the work of Commission's project officers, finance staff and auditors in charge of dealing with EU funds, such as Structural Funds or the European Fisheries Funds.

Researchers from the EUREKA telecommunications cluster CELTIC-Plus project '100GET are working on how advancements in delivery are needed beyond laying more optic cables to meet increasing bandwidth demand. The team kept the focus on both data transfer and networking aspects, and discovered efficiencies that ensure bandwidth capacity for the Internet can be increased dramatically, Internet could be up to ten times as speedy.

On the future of the Common Agricultural Policy the Parliament is staking out its position for the next long-term budgetary period, running from 2014 to 2020. MEPs want to keep the EU agriculture budget unchanged until 2020 so that farmers have incentives to provide secure food supplies, environmental protection, create new jobs and provide for a competitive EU farming sector.

The European Parliament approved four non-legislative resolutions on regional development which ask the EU's cohesion policy budget for 2014-2020 should at least equal the current one. The vote on the consolidated report on strategy for cohesion policy post-2013 has been postponed to the next plenary session in July.

The EP plenary adopted some amendments on the economic governance six-pack. With these measures added to the original Commission proposal, the EP intends to get more transparency, stronger automatic warnings and sanctions as well as new fines are all part of Parliament's position, although left-of-centre groups argued that this represents too much austerity. Negotiations with the Council will continue with the aim of settling everything by July.

The Council and the European Parliament have reached a political agreement on the draft regulation amending the regulation concerning the European Agency for the management of operational cooperation at the external borders of the EU (Frontex). The revised rules include strengthened provisions for the protection of fundamental rights and having "European Border Guard Teams" as the common name for teams deployed during Frontex operations.

A EU-funded research in the framework of the International Year of Forests, the LEDDRA project, points out that using the biomass of abandoned areas and farms that respect the conservation of resources helps provide and maintain work and income for people living in these areas. The research focuses in fighting against desertification in dry forests and agricultural lands that dot the Mediterranean region and China.

According to some European projects, governmental trust would help to encourage people to continue eating fresh products. This conclusion was revealed among others at the recent Nutrevent conference held in France, where A variety of innovative approaches concerning the food were presented. Other project presented there found that people are highly concerned about the recent outbreak of the deadly enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) bacteria. In addition, the experts who met at the conference noted that nutritionists must pay particular attention to functional food innovations with natural compounds to help meet the growing concerns consumers have over healthy food.