Eurobloat #0109 • May 2019
A busy month for the people who never face an election, and an awkward one for those who do. The Court invented a duty to time everyone, the Council banned cotton buds, and the leaders flew to Romania to declare their own unity, days before the voters declined to share the enthusiasm.
Folly of the Month: The Court invents a Europe-wide duty to clock everyone in
On 14 May the Court of Justice handed down its ruling in case C-55/18, deciding that the Working Time Directive obliges every member state to force every employer to set up a system recording the daily hours of every worker. Nobody in any national parliament had voted for this; the judges simply read it into the law, and overnight the continent acquired a fresh layer of timesheets, software and compliance. A union case against a Spanish bank thus became a mandate for the small business in Galway and the workshop in Bavaria alike. Brussels calls it protecting workers; in practice it is the Court legislating, and the punch clock returning as a fundamental right.
1. The upload filters are now the law
The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive was published in the Official Journal in mid-May, locking in Article 17, which pushes platforms towards automated content filtering, and Article 15, the link tax. Brussels spent two years insisting it would not break the open internet, then wrote the machinery for doing exactly that into binding law.
2. The continent that conquered the bottle cap
On 21 May the Council adopted the Single-Use Plastics Directive, banning cotton bud sticks, plastic plates and polystyrene food boxes, and decreeing that bottle caps must stay tethered to their bottles. The tethering alone is estimated to cost industry between 2.7 and 8.7 billion euros, so that the cap, having been redesigned across an entire continent, can now annoy you instead of escaping.
3. The leaders fly to Sibiu to applaud themselves
On 9 May, Europe Day, the EU-27 heads of government met in Sibiu and adopted a Declaration recalling their values, their achievements and their confidence in the future. No problem was solved and no power was returned to anyone; the deliverable was a feeling of unity, suitable for framing, timed for the cameras a fortnight before the elections.
4. A brand-new sanctions regime, for the EU to wield
On 17 May the Council gave itself a framework to impose travel bans and asset freezes on anyone it blames for a cyber-attack, anywhere, including attacks on third countries. A tool pressed hardest by London and The Hague becomes, naturally, another competence parked in Brussels, to be aimed by qualified majority at targets the Council will decide later.
5. Brussels grades the homework of sovereign nations
The Commission's spring package put the member states back in the headmaster's study, issuing country-specific recommendations on how each government should run its budget and its reforms, and lining up deficit reports on Italy, France, Belgium and Cyprus under Article 126. Elected national treasuries are told what to do by an institution no voter can remove.
6. The Commission leans on the platforms before the vote
Through the spring the Commission ran its monitoring of Facebook, Google and Twitter under the disinformation code, demanding monthly reports and urging them to do more across every member state ahead of the elections. An unelected executive deciding which speech counts as manipulation, in the weeks before people vote, is a habit that should worry anyone regardless of who is in office.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
7. The voters decline the script
Between 23 and 26 May, in the highest turnout for twenty years, the electorates of Europe handed sceptic and national parties their best result yet, with such forces topping the poll in Italy, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. For the first time since direct elections began in 1979 the two grand-coalition blocs could no longer command the Parliament between them, a verdict Brussels promptly resolved to manage rather than heed.
→ commonslibrary.parliament.uk
8. Clinging to a deal that everyone else has left
On 8 and 9 May, with Washington tearing up the last oil and nuclear waivers and Tehran threatening to walk, the EU rejected any ultimatum and restated its full commitment to the Iran nuclear deal. The grand sovereign payment vehicle meant to defy American sanctions, INSTEX, had still not processed a single transaction, so the commitment amounted to a press release and a wish.
→ cnbc.com
9. The money that keeps people in Libyan cages
Through the spring the EU continued funding and training the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrants and return them, even as Human Rights Watch and others documented the torture and abuse in the detention centres they are returned to. This is what the EU's borders look like when stripped of the speeches: not an orderly system, but cash to a militia-ridden coast to keep the problem offshore and out of the headlines.
→ hrw.org
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