Eurobloat #0112 • August 2019
August is the month when Brussels goes on holiday, the Mediterranean fills with ships nobody will let dock, and the great project demonstrates once again that it can do everything except the one thing it was built to do. Here is what the Union got up to between sunbathing.
Folly of the Month: A rescue ship parked off Italy for nineteen days while the EU could not decide who should take 147 people
The Spanish charity vessel Open Arms sat in sight of Lampedusa for almost three weeks in August, refusing to leave Italian waters, with migrants sleeping jammed on deck and two lavatories for roughly a hundred people. The Union that abolished its internal borders and promised solidarity could not produce either. In the end an Italian prosecutor had to board the ship and seize it, after which Spain, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Portugal grudgingly agreed to take a few each. This is the European migration system in full working order: no rules, no plan, just a fortnight of human misery followed by a hasty back-room carve-up. The common asylum policy remains the thing Brussels promises every year and delivers in none.
1. The EU told Britain the backstop was untouchable, then act surprised about no deal
Michel Barnier wrote to the member states to inform them that removing the Irish backstop, as the new British government wished, was "unacceptable and not within the mandate of the European Council". Brussels spent the summer insisting the divorce treaty could not be reopened and then professed bafflement that the other side might prefer to leave without one.
2. Donald Tusk lectures the United Kingdom on borders
When Boris Johnson wrote on 19 August asking for the backstop to go, Council President Donald Tusk replied the next day that those against it "and not proposing realistic alternatives in fact support re-establishing a border. Even if they do not admit it." The man who runs an institution that cannot manage its own external frontier had found his calling as a schoolmaster grading the homework of a departing member.
→ npr.org
3. The Iranian tanker the EU seized for breaching its own sanctions sailed off anyway
The supertanker Grace 1, boarded in July off Gibraltar for allegedly carrying oil to Syria in breach of EU sanctions, was released in August after a Gibraltar court ruled it could not enforce American sanctions. Renamed Adrian Darya 1, it raised the Iranian flag and steamed away to an undisclosed destination. A fine demonstration of a sanctions regime that detains a ship, cannot agree with its allies, and then waves it goodbye.
→ npr.org
4. Brussels paid for a robot to study your face for lies at the border
The EU-funded iBorderCtrl project, a virtual border guard that quizzes travellers and scans their "micro-gestures" for signs of dishonesty, completed its three-year pilot in August after taking 4.5 million euros of Horizon 2020 money. The project's own website conceded that some of its technologies were "not covered by the existing legal framework". When the lie detector cannot pass its own legality test, perhaps the question was wrong.
5. The Greek islands took the strain the common policy was supposed to remove
August brought 547 migrants to Lesvos in a single day, the largest arrival since the crisis of 2015 and 2016, with over three thousand reaching the islands across the month. Athens responded with seven emergency measures, more patrol boats and a Frontex blimp tethered above Samos. So much for the EU-Turkey deal that was meant to make all this someone else's problem forever.
6. Brussels decides which cars your town hall is allowed to buy
From 2 August the EU's revised Clean Vehicles Directive entered into application, handing every member state a Brussels definition of a "clean vehicle" and minimum quotas for how many of them each government must buy when it next renews its bus fleet or council cars. The capitals get until 2021 to write the targets into law. A Commission that cannot organise a rescue at sea has found time to tell a Bavarian district council what percentage of its vans must be electric.
7. The link tax and upload filters keep ticking towards the member states
The Copyright Directive, with its Article 15 "link tax" for quoting a headline and its Article 17 obligation on platforms to filter what you upload, continued its march through 2019 towards national law. Sold as protecting creators, it mostly hands lawyers a new growth industry and instructs every website to police its users in advance. A solution in search of a problem, now legally binding.
8. Von der Leyen demands two names from each capital, and the capitals say no
The incoming Commission President spent August insisting every government send her one man and one woman to choose from for her college of commissioners. Only Romania obliged; seven states quietly kept their existing nominee and ignored her. A telling start: the new schoolmistress set the homework, and the class declined to do it.
9. The Galileo satellites recover from a week of being switched off
The Union's flagship answer to American GPS, the 10-billion-euro Galileo system, limped through August after a six-day total outage in July that left users automatically reverted to the very American satellites Galileo was built to replace. The cause was a malfunction at a ground control facility. A fitting emblem of the project: hugely expensive, fiercely sovereign, and quietly dependent on the people it was meant to do without.
→ phys.org
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