European Union News - European Union

An independent selection panel has recommended the Polish city of Wrocław for the title of European Capital of Culture in 2016. Poland and Spain are the two Member States hosting a European Capital of Culture the mentioned year. The formal nomination by the EU's Council of Ministers will take place in May 2012.

Ministers agreed that the required additional funding has to be financed through both official and private sources and welcomed the pursuit of voluntary private sector involvement in the form of informal and voluntary roll-overs of existing Greek debt. They also underlined the prerequisite of national unity for success given the length, magnitude and nature of required reforms in Greece.

EP Foreign Affairs Committee welcomed Serbia's arrest of Ratko Mladić but warned that its path to the EU is still long, stressing that another Serb leader indicted for war crimes, Goran Hadžić, was still on the run. Also, MEPs praised the Hungarian Presidency's efforts to complete EU enlargement negotiations with Croatia by end of June.

The EASO, the European Asylum Support Office, is from now fully operational. The EASO is established with the aim of enhancing practical cooperation on asylum matters, and helping Member States fulfil their European and international obligations to give protection to people in need.

EU27 Member States granted citizenship to 776,000 persons in 2009. One year before, it was granted to 699,000 persons. The new citizens came mainly from Africa, Asia and non-EU27 Europe. The main contribution to this increase came from the United Kingdom and was a consequence of the unusually low number of citizenships that, for purely administrative reasons, the United Kingdom granted in 2008.

The Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee met on 14 of June with Mario Draghi, candidate designate for the European Central Bank presidency. Mr. Draghi explained to the Committee that the ECB must not be diverted from its primary goal of price stability and he assures to the MEPs that he would use the European Parliament venue to strengthen the ECB's accountability to citizens.

The new VLT (Very Large Telescope) Survey Telescope (VST) the latest addition to the four VLT unit telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the top of Cerro Paranal (Chile) and has got images from Messier 17 (M17), a hotbed of star formation located about 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation and from Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest of all known globular star clusters.

The Schengen Agreement has made passport-free travel possible for over 400 million Europeans. Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Home Affairs stated that the creation of the Schengen area is one of the most tangible, popular and successful achievements of the European Union. Moreover, for European economy as well, free movement is central to the success of the Single Market.

The estimations released by Eurostat foresee that the EU27 population will increase from 501 million on 1 January 2010 to 525 million in 2035. After 2040, it is foreseen that the population gradually decrease. In addition, the EU27 population is also projected to continue to grow older, with the share of the population aged 65 years and over rising from 17% in 2010 to 30% in 2060.

The President of the Committee of the Regions (CoR), Mercedes Bresso welcomed the positive recommendation from the European Commission regarding the future EU accession of Croatia. She also stated that the CoR would also support Croatia's local and regional authorities in their decentralisation and administrative reforms.