Tuesday 4 December the House of Commons voted in favour of a “contempt motion” for the Government May’s failure to publish the legal advice by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox concerning the EU Withdrawal Agreement. With 311 votes in favor and 293 against, the British MPs approved a motion finding Ministers in contempt and establishing the immediate publication of the full
Earlier this month at a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels, the European Union announced support for sanctioning measures that had been put in place by the government of France, in response to Iranian terror threats. This is a step in the right direction for European policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, albeit a tentative one. This decision set
Last April, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stef Blok, addressed a letter in response to the President of the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) expressing appreciaton for the recommendation of the European Ombudsman on transparency of the legislative process of the Council. Mr Blok wrote: “It is with great interest that I took note of the research and recommendations
The news about Chinese economic growth, though slowed by macroeconomic imbalances, overall indebtedness and the “trade war” with the US, confirm the extent of the results achieved by President Xi Jinping at the domestic level as the Chinese Communist Party has a firmer grip on power: power which has been accumulated by one man, a President with no term limits
For over three weeks now, the corridors of the buildings in the European capital have been swept by what is now known as the “Selmayrgate”. What is it about? To make it short, it is the appointment of the new Secretary General of the European Commission, the official in charge of over 33,000 European officials, the top job within highest
Following an 11-month inquiry, European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, issued on 13 February a recommendation relating to the transparency of the Council legislative process. As Mrs O’Reilly puts it: “EU citizens have a treaty-based right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Citizens cannot properly exercise this right unless the EU legislative process is sufficiently open to allow citizens to
The meeting held in the Vatican on 5 February between Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pope Francis represented a propaganda event useful to improve the heavily deteriorated international image of the Turkish head of state. Erdoğan seized the common view with the Vatican on the very sensitive issue of the status of Jerusalem in order to cast his positive
The International Criminal Tribunal has sentenced the former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić to life imprisonment for the crimes committed during the bloody conflict in former Yugoslavia in 1990s. Mladić was found guilty of ten out of eleven counts of indictments including the genocide of Srebrenica occurred on 11 July 1995 where 8372 men and teenagers were massacred. This sentence
The European Parliament on November 15, 2017 adopted in plenary session a resolution on the Rule of Law and democracy in Poland. The resolution was adopted with 438 votes in favor, 152 against and 71 abstentions, foreseeing the launch of a mechanism provided in Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, for the imposition of EU sanctions against Poland.The
“We had no instructions” senior Tory MP and former Justice Minister Ken Clarke said on Wednesday, November 15, in a debate on Brexit on the floor of the House of Commons. The British public was not the only one left in the dark. Even MPs had no instructions, given that a proper debate over the options and the consequences of the United