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PRISTINA, Kosovo The European Union is investing more than $89 million to improve the air quality in Kosovo, whose capital of Pristina is choking from pollution by coal-based power plants, coal and wood heating in homes and old vehicles on the roads.

Luigi Brusa of the European Union office in Kosovo on Friday said during the last few days the air in Pristina was like that of Beijing, considered one of the most polluted cities in the world.

The U.S. Embassy's air quality monitor has shown PM2.5 pollution levels higher than 50, considered the maximum level accepted, rising up to 213 on Sunday.

School children on Friday wore masks when walking to schools in the foggy capital.

To highlight the problems, air masks were also put on statutes of Mother Teresa and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Nysrete Doda, a Pristina resident walking her child to school, said even the air in her home was bad because she had forgotten to close a window overnight.

"It is better that children and old people do not go out of home, but they (children) have to," she complained.

Smoke from the Kosova B power plant in Obiliq, 6 miles from Pristina create a regular cloud over the capital.

Brussels has signed a contract with Kosovo authorities to invest $83 million to refurbish the plant, starting in May next year, to reduce the dust it produces, according to Brusa.

The EU is also investing $7.6 million to increase the capacity of the central Termokos heating system for 2,000 more households, or about 10,000 residents, including schools and kindergartens.

Outgoing Environment Minister Fatmir Matoshi says public institutions do not use coal for heating anymore and giving coal sacks to power corporation employees as a reward has stopped.

"We ask people for help because every citizen, especially in Pristina, should avoid using cars and heating with coal (now), so that we have better air," he said.

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EU funds help Kosovo fight unhealthy air pollution - Stars and Stripes

Amsterdam-headquartered full-service law firm Stibbe has hired Sophie Van Besien as a partner in its Brus...

Amsterdam-headquartered full-service law firm Stibbe has hired Sophie Van Besien as a partner in its Brussels office, strengthening its Benelux service offering in European Union law, competition law and regulated markets.

From career inception in 2007, Van Besien was hired by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels where she was retained for a decade and seconded to Washington, DC, and London.

She then became the regulatory and competition director of Belgian state-owned company Bypost, in 2016.

Having advised public and private clients before national competition authorities and regulators, national courts, the European Commission and the Luxembourg European Courts, Van Besien brings a breadth of experience in Brussels to Stibbe.

Her practice has a particular focus on intricate merger filings, cartel infringements, damage claims and abuse of dominance cases, with capabilities in the management of state aid claims and issues faced by clients in highly regulated sectors, such as financial services, e-commerce and postal.

Stibbes managing partner in Brussels, Wouter Ghijsels, said in a statement that Besiens experience spending a large portion of her career practising in foreign jurisdictions makes her a valuable addition to the team.

Also in Belgium, Pharumlegal appointed ex-PwC counsel and antitrust expert Marc Picat to its EU law and international commercial department as a partner, in December.

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Stibbe adds partner to EU and competition practice in Brussels - ICLG.com

Europe ended the year better than it started

IT WAS A year of fragmentation and fightback, of progress and decline, of fear and resolution. Europe, in short had a mixed 2019. But it ended the year, on the whole, in a better state than it started it; and most Europeans should allow themselves a little quiet satisfaction as they reflect not just on the past 12 months, but also on the past 30 years since that dramatic day, in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the great task of rebuilding a divided continent began.

First, some of the setbacks. 2019 was a year in which too much of the European Union slid back into near-stagnation, with growth flat or negative in some of its largest economies, especially Germany and Italy. The slowing of the German motor has set off an acrimonious debate within Germanys ruling grand coalition, an uneasy alliance between the Christian Democrats, who want to stick to their traditional fiscal orthodoxy (encapsulated in the black zero policy of no deficits), and the Social Democrats, who are now pushing for more spending under their more left-wing, newly elected leaders. If this row cannot be solved, the coalition could even collapse early next year. Germanys new economic weakness also poses a threat to the countries of central Europe, especially Poland and the Czech Republic, whose long boom has been intimately linked to supplying the behemoth.

Politically, too, it was a year of difficult fragmentation for some of the EUs biggest and most powerful players. Britain spent the whole year still wracked by the problems of engineering its exit from the EU, and the election with a solid majority for Boris Johnson has done nothing to solve that underlying problem. France spent much of the year casting about for ways to counter the threat of violent protest by the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets), and ended the year with a huge wave of strikes against President Emmanuel Macrons limited yet still deeply unpopular pension reforms. In Spain, political deadlock, over economic policy and how to manage the separatists of Catalonia, resulted in not one but two elections, yet neither managed to produce a viable government. In Italy, the strange alliance between the hard-right Northern League and the maverick Five Star Alliance also collapsed, and the new coalition that replaced it seems destined to fall apart in the fairly near future. Matteo Salvinis League would then be poised to win absolute power, and renew his assault on the euro.

Beyond the EU, the economic and political situation is hardly sunny. The two mighty autocracies on the EU's flanks, Russia and Turkey, have both been hammered by economic weakness and the growing unpopularity of their leaders, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Neither of the two men need face the voters in the near future, and popular uprising is doomed to failure. But both of them have increased the level of repression they employ to protect themselves.

Still, there are reasons to be cheerful as well. Perhaps the biggest came at the hands of voters in the European Parliament elections in May. Many had feared the rise of Europes populists; Italys Mr Salvini had tried, after all, to construct a pan-European alliance of nationalists, bringing in the likes of Hungarys Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pens National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany. Voters took a good look, and rejected that plan. Although the political centre is now more fragmented than it was before, with the creation of a big new liberal block as well as the traditional centre-right and centre-left, the populists made no significant gains at all.

The news on Europe and NATO is also mildly encouraging. Europeans are gradually coming to accept that they need to shoulder more of the burden of their own defence, stung of course by the threats of Donald Trump, but also by the hard words of Mr Macron, who in an interview with The Economist described the alliance as experiencing brain-death.

And the EU also ended the year well with a bold plan to combat climate change; having met its 2020 target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases a couple of years ahead of schedule, and being (more or less) on track to meet its 2030 goal as well, it is proposing that the whole 27-member club achieve zero net emissions by 2050. Leaders gave the plan their initial thumbs up at their December summit (though coal-rich Poland is resisting). Europes example may yet shame others into action.

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2019 in review: Europes fragmentation and fightback - The Economist

MINSK, 20 December (BelTA) Belarus is ready to sign the visa facilitation and readmission agreements with the European Union and would like to do it as soon as possible, Anatoly Glaz, Head of the Information and Digital Diplomacy Office, Press Secretary of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told BelTA.

On 19 December 2019, the EU Council approved the agreement on readmission with Belarus. The European Union officially suggested signing the visa facilitation and readmission agreements with Belarus in January 2020.

Anatoly Glaz stressed: "We have been fully ready to sign these agreements since 18 September 2019 when the appropriate decrees of the Belarusian president were issued. We stand ready so sign them by the end of this year, today, tomorrow or any other day, including weekends and holidays. We would like to do it as quickly as possible. If we are talking about January, then we can do it starting 3 January, either in Minsk or in Brussels. The result is important, not the technical side.

Our European partners failed to complete the necessary procedures within three months and suggested doing it in January 2020. It would be more reasonable to ask them what took them so long, the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Consultations with the European colleagues on the date and format of the signing procedure are already underway. The European Union asked for another three weeks to verify the text. For some reason the European structures find it difficult to speed up even this process despite the declared intention to facilitate the freedom of movement for our citizens.

Once the agreements are signed, they will need to be ratified by the National Assembly of Belarus and the European Parliament. They will come into force on the first day of the second month after the exchange of the notifications on the parties' compliance with the procedures, Anatoly Glaz said. He stressed that it is already clear that with the terms proposed by the EU, the agreement will not come into force before the new EU Visa Code comes into operation. The new rules provide for an increase in the cost of Schengen visas up to 80 (on 2 February 2020). This means that Belarusian citizens will have to pay 80 for a Schengen visa for at least several months.

We do not live on the Moon. We receive salaries in Belarusian rubles. We understand full well that this is big money for citizens of our country that ranks first in the world in terms of the number of issued Schengen visas. In this regard, during the events in Brussels, we called on the European partners to find a possibility and make a political or legal decision not to raise or freeze' Schengen visa fees for Belarusian citizens after the launch of the new EU Visa Code until the Belarus-EU agreement on visa facilitation comes into force. We have not received any substantive reaction yet, but we would like to hope that the issue is being considered.

In the interests of tourism development, economic and investment cooperation, the Belarusian president has taken serious decisions in recent years to relax the rules of entry for nationals of a number of countries, including EU member states, Anatoly Glaz said. The matter is about the short-term visa-free entry through Minsk National Airport and to the tourist zones of Brest Oblast and Grodno Oblast and for international sports and cultural events, including the 2th European Games.

We believe that the increase in the number of tourists entering Belarus is the best assessment of the effectiveness of such unilateral steps, that indicate the openness of our country. More than half a million of foreign nationals have taken the advantage of such visa-free entry since the program was launched, the vast majority of them being EU citizens, Anatoly Glaz summed up.

The Schengen visa fee will increase to 80 starting from 2 February 2020. However, after the visa facilitation agreement comes into force, the visa fee for Belarusian nationals will drop to 35. The visa rules will be relaxed in a number of other ways, too.

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MFA: Belarus ready to sign package of agreements with EU any day - Belarus News (BelTA)

December 20th, 2019

The Governments proposals to limit citizens and environmental NGOs access to the courts to challenge planning decisions are out of touch with EU and international law, a leading legal expert has warned.

Speaking at an event run by the Planning, Environmental, and Local Government Bar Association of Ireland last night, Dr Aine Ryall of University College Cork raised serious concern with the recently released Heads of the Housing and Planning Development Bill 2019.

If passed, the Bill set to be brought forward by Eoghan Murphy TD would introduce a new cost regime and change standing rules for citizens and environmental groups to take legal challenges over a whole range of environmental and planning-related decisions.

The Department of Housing has said that the changes would speed up legal proceedings following an increase in legal challenges in the High Court that is causing backlogs and associated delays to large infrastructure projects.

Critics, including various civil society groups and legal experts, argue that the proposals would unfairly limit standing rights and make it prohibitively expensive to take legal cases.

The proposed legislation, for example, would make it harder for environmental groups to bring a legal case by mandating that they must be in existence for at least three years and have over 100 members.

Running into conflict with EU law

Dr Ryall said that these proposals run into conflict with our responsibilities to ensure wide access to justice rights under both EU law and the Aarhus Convention. The convention gives a number of rights to the public with regard to the environment, including the right to access to justice that is fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive.

Dr Ryall said that the proposed changes in the Heads of the Bill would rollback on access to justice rights and make it almost impossible for environmental NGOs and local groups to bring challenges.

The environmental law expert said it is alarming that the Government is taking such moves now when we need, more than ever, to take a more robust overview of planning and environmental decision making as we face a biodiversity and climate crisis.

While parties to the Aarhus Convention have some discretion as to how they set up their domestic access to justice rules, Dr Ryall said that there are clear limits on how far they can go. There is a bottom line and that is the wide access to justice obligation, she added.

Ms Ryall, who sits on the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC) but was speaking in a personal capacity last night, pointed to several ACCC cases where it was determined that national rules must not block or widely restrict access to justice for environmental and citizen groups.

She added that several recent European Court of Justice decisions indicate that wide access to justice requirement trumps the flexibility or discretion of states to set access to justice criteria.

She said that an examination of European case law reveals that the role of environmental groups is almost sacrosanct, meaning that any rowing back on their standing rights is going to cause some tension with European Union law.

Citizens also pushed out

Dr Ryall also raised concerns with proposals to change standing rights requirements for citizens who would have to show that they are directly affected by a proposed development in a way which is peculiar or personal to them. This, she said, appears to be especially restrictive.

The proposed legislation also calls for applicants to prove that they had prior participation in the planning process through the likes of sending submissions on live planning applications in order to qualify to take a case.

In addition, shesaid, that there is no real clear justification for the proposed changes in theHeads of the Bill apart from to talk about alleged unnecessary judicialreviews that are costing everybody money.

That, in my view, isnt enough of a justification. We need to see clearly are there really unnecessary JRs and, if so, how many? And if there are delays in the system, whats causing these delays? Dr Ryall added.

Be careful what you wish for

She warned the Governmentthat it needs to be careful with what you wish for as the proposed changesare unlikely to speed up the system and will instead trigger more litigation.

The more you change the law and the more you play around with the rules, the more litigation you are going to have, and if you are playing with EU law, you are probably going to create the situation where references will need to be made to Luxembourg and thats going to take 18 months [before] it comes back, she said.

She stressed that the Government should instead look to improve the quality of decision making in the first instance by better resourcing the Board and local authorities to hire experts and other staff to process development applications in a timely and efficient manner.

A public consultation on the Heads of the Bill was launched on 9 December with a deadline of 13 January, providing concerned parties just 23 working days over the holiday period to provide feedback.

Following pressure from environmental groups, opposition politicians, and Committee members, the Minister agreed on Tuesday to extend the deadline until 27 January 2020.

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Planning Bill out of touch with international and EU law - The Green News