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In response to the much talked about letter from the six Members of the European Parliament led by Ivan tefanec MEP, the Vice President of the European Commission Josep Borrell Fontelles has underlined three areas that the European Union, the organisation of 27 European states, would be observing in the coming days.

The letter was sent on July 6, 2023, two days before the commencement of a fact-finding mission of an EU delegation and can be considered as a reference point for discussions in the future.

Here are the three things to take note from the letter.

Josep Borrell Fontelles has confirmed that his office is following the political situation in Bangladesh ahead of upcoming elections closely. The European Commissions Vice President, noting that the EU encourages everyone in Bangladesh to exercise political rights and participate in the parliamentary elections, has stressed the necessity of a genuine dialogue between the main parties, not to mention the ruling Awami League and BNP.

Most importantly, Vice President Fontelles has made it clear that the democratic process is not limited to a parliamentary election, instead ensuring ample space for civil society, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly are the crucial elements of it. He also called for avoiding violence at all costs.

Recent statistics suggest Bangladesh had a trade surplus of around 23 billion euros in 2022 with European Union, thanks to the Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme enjoyed by the country. European countries remain the largest export destination for Bangladeshs readymade garments (RMG) products. Though Bangladesh is set to lose the GSP after 2023, Bangladeshi producers have been asking for GSP+ to enjoy preferential arrangements from 2024 to 2034.

To avail of the GSP, Bangladesh has to respect the basic human and labour rights principles outlined in the 15 core conventions and according to the letter by Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union will be sharing a report on Bangladeshs progress soon.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is among the 15 core conventions for EUs GSP, 3rd among the seven conventions on Human Rights. Article 25 of the ICCPR reads: Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 and without unreasonable restrictions [] to vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors.

This is to note that the EU had concerns regarding both the 2014 and 2018 elections in Bangladesh. After 2018, the EU statement read: Violence has marred the election day, and significant obstacles to a level playing field remained in place throughout the process and have tainted the electoral campaign and the vote. Therefore, it is quite clear that the last two elections cannot be considered genuine periodic elections and they did not reflect the free expression of the will of the electors for the significant obstacles to a level playing field as mentioned in the EU statement.

If the upcoming election in Bangladesh, scheduled in January 2024, follows the patterns of the last two elections, Bangladesh cannot be considered a country that respects the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and basic human rights.

Hence, not having a fair poll might cost Bangladesh its access to EBA and this also goes for any future GSP+ application, should Bangladesh decide to apply, the letter reads.

Another not much talked about but crucial issue in Bangladeshs politics is the health of former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia. The first woman premier of Bangladesh has been suffering from a number of complications after spending a significant amount of time in the jails since 2018. Josep Fontelles claimed that the EU has been closely following the health situation of Mrs Zia and it is crucial from the EU perspective that she has access to the best possible medical treatment.

Yet, the government of Bangladesh, led by her rival Sheikh Hasina, has been barring her from accessing treatment abroad citing the terms of local laws. Any major deterioration of her health has the potential to trigger violent protests in the country as, despite the corruption charges, she is the chairperson of BNP and has a huge following among the people.

It is noteworthy that the laws cited to bar her from availing treatment abroad are not exercised equally. Haji Selim, a parliament member of Sheikh Hasinas party, who was convicted by a court, left for Bangkok in 2022, for better treatment.

The letter coming from the highest level of the European Commission provides the readers with viewpoints of the EU regarding Bangladeshs upcoming elections and space for opposition, media and civil society. It is highly likely that a 2014-like election is going to disrupt Bangladeshs economy if the EU decides to utilise its economic levers.

[Photo by European Parliament, via Wikimedia Commons]

Aaqib Md Shatil is a Research and Communication Officer of the Sydney Policy and Analysis Centre. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect TGPs editorial stance.

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Three Things to Note from Josep Borrell's Response to the ... - The Geopolitics

A total of 300 small and medium-sized enterprises in the Republic of Moldova, mainly in rural areas, will receive European grant funding through the EU for SMEs project (EU4SMEs) to create, develop, expand or internationalise their businesses.

The European Union has allocated 8 million in non-reimbursable funding for this very purpose to co-finance seven state programmes, implemented by the Organisation for Entrepreneurship Development (ODA).

Jnis Maeiks, Ambassador of the European Union to the Republic of Moldova, said that this new grant will improve SMEs access to non-reimbursable funds and provide opportunities for the much-needed productive investment.

The launch of the European assistance project took place at one of the first beneficiaries of EU assistance the Cabigrup SRL company from Bcioi, which specialises in the production of wine, bottles and decorative boxes for alcoholic products.

The EU for SMEs project aims to contribute to resilient, sustainable and inclusive economic development and to support the green transition in the Republic of Moldova. It will also improve the investment climate, employability and business environment for SMEs, especially in rural areas.

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Press release

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300 new enterprises in Moldova to receive financial support from the ... - euneighbourseast.eu

It will be the first time that the European Union directly funds the making of items, such as artillery.

The European Parliament on Thursday backed the use of as much as 500 million from the EU budgetto finance the bloc's industrial production capacities for ammunition, such as ground-to-ground missiles and artillery.

The regulation, known as the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), was proposed by the European Commission in May, but was fast-tracked through the EU legislative process, with almost all the political groups voting in favour of it.

"We should not refrain from defensive capabilities support like the one that we are giving with this regulation, to ensure that Ukraine would not run out of the ammunition they need to defend from the aggression,"Brando Benifei, an Italian socialist MEP told Euronews.

Ville Niinist, a European lawmaker from Finland said in an interview that there is a specifically inserted paragraph "making sure that these extra resources with the increases of ammunition production are meant for Ukraine".

"And then secondly, to then also supply our own storages that have been depleted by supporting Ukraine," he added.

It is the first time that the EU directly finances weapons production.But not every MEP is happy about it, particularly on the Left.

"This means that we now have a situation in which the European Union funds not just research and development for arms, but not just by arms, but is also going to fund directly the production of weapons from companies that are making excessive profits already," Marc Botenga MEP told Euronews.

"The war in Ukraine for weapons companies has been a blessing, you know, so they're making excess profits and we're going to basically subsidise their production. It's a big mistake."

The money for the European military industry will come from two EU defence funds, but national governments can also top this up by amending their pandemic Recovery and Resilience Plans.

The bill's final adoption by member states will likely happen before the summer break.

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European Parliament backs EU funds for weapon & ammunition ... - Euronews

We are living through an information revolution. The traditional gatekeepers of knowledge librarians, journalists and government officials have largely been replaced by technological gatekeepers search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and social media feeds.

Whatever their flaws, the old gatekeepers were, at least on paper, beholden to the public. The new gatekeepers are fundamentally beholden only to profit and to their shareholders.

That is about to change, thanks to a bold experiment by the European Union.

With key provisions going into effect on Aug. 25, an ambitious package of E.U. rules, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech (beyond the outright bans in places like China and India). For the first time, tech platforms will have to be responsive to the public in myriad ways, including giving users the right to appeal when their content is removed, providing a choice of algorithms and banning the microtargeting of children and of adults based upon sensitive data such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require large tech platforms to audit their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights and the physical and mental health of minors and other users.

This will be the first time that companies will be required to identify and address the harms that their platforms enable. To hold them accountable, the law also requires large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is a crucial element that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will get access to any of that data.

Journalists have traditionally been at the front lines of enforcement, pointing out harms that researchers can expand on and regulators can act upon. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which we learned how consultants for Donald Trumps presidential campaign exploited the Facebook data of millions of users without their permission, was revealed by The New York Times and The Observer of London. BuzzFeed News reported on the offensive posts that detailed Facebooks role in enabling the massacre of Rohingyas. My team when I worked at ProPublica uncovered how Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate in employment and housing ads.

But getting data from platforms is becoming harder and harder. Facebook has been particularly aggressive, shutting down the accounts of researchers at New York University in 2021 for unauthorized means of accessing Facebook ads. That year, it also legally threatened a European research group, AlgorithmWatch, forcing it to shut down its Instagram monitoring project. And earlier this month, Twitter began limiting all its users ability to view tweets in what the company described as an attempt to block automated collection of information from Twitters website by A.I. chatbots as well as bots, spammers and other bad actors.

Meanwhile, the tech companies have also been shutting down authorized access to their platforms. In 2021, Facebook disbanded the team that oversaw the analytics tool CrowdTangle, which many researchers used to analyze trends. This year, Twitter replaced its free researcher tools with a paid version that is prohibitively expensive and unreliable. As a result, the public has less visibility than ever into how our global information gatekeepers are behaving.

Last month, the U.S. senator Chris Coons introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, legislation that would require social media companies to share more data with researchers and provide immunity to journalists collecting data in the public interest with reasonable privacy protections.

But as it stands, the European Unions transparency efforts rest on European academics who will apply to a regulatory body for access to data from the platforms and then, hopefully, issue research reports.

That is not enough. To truly hold the platforms accountable, we must support the journalists who are on the front lines of chronicling how despots, trolls, spies, marketers and hate mobs are weaponizing tech platforms or being enabled by them.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa runs Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines that has been at the forefront of analyzing how Filipino leaders have used social media to spread disinformation, hijack social media hashtags, manipulate public opinion and attack independent journalism.

Last year, for instance, Rappler revealed that the majority of Twitter accounts using certain hashtags in support of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, had been created in a one-month period, making it likely that many of them were fake accounts. With the Twitter research feed that Rappler used now shuttered, and the platforms cracking down on data access, its not clear how Ms. Ressa and her colleagues can keep doing this type of important accountability journalism.

Ms. Ressa asked the European Commission, in public comments filed in May, to provide journalists with access to real-time data so they can provide a macro view of patterns and trends that these technology companies create and the real-world harms they enable. (I also filed comments to the European Commission, along with more than a dozen journalists, asking the commission to support access to platform data for journalists.)

As Daphne Keller, the director of the program on platform regulation at Stanfords Cyber Policy Center, argues in her comments to the European Union, allowing journalists and researchers to use automated tools to collect publicly available data from platforms is one of the best ways to ensure transparency because it is a rare form of transparency that does not depend on the very platforms who are being studied to generate information or act as gatekeepers.

Of course, the tech platforms often push back against transparency requests by claiming that they must protect the privacy of their users. Which is hilarious, given that their business models are based on mining and monetizing their users personal data. But putting that aside, the privacy interests of users are not being implicated here: The data that journalists need is already public for anyone who has an account on these services.

What journalists lack is access to large quantities of public data from tech platforms in order to understand whether an event is an anomaly or representative of a larger trend. Without that access, we will continue to have what we have now: a lot of anecdotes about this piece of content or that user being banned, but no real sense of whether these stories are statistically significant.

Journalists write the first draft of history. If we cant see what is happening on the biggest speech platforms in the globe, that history will be written for the benefit of platforms not the public.

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Opinion | Give Journalists What They Need To Hold Big Tech ... - The New York Times

WHO/Europe and the European Commission have joined forces to support countries in the European Union working to improve long-term care. The new partnership, which will inform WHO/Europes work in the European Region, will focus on improving access and quality of long-term care services while providing important support to informal caregivers, who often play a crucial role in care provision.

Within the European Region, 135 million people are living with disabilities, and nearly 1 in 3 older people cannot meet their basic needs independently. Access to good-quality, integrated, long-term care is essential for these people to maintain their functional ability, enjoy basic human rights and live with dignity.

Integrated delivery of care happens when people can access the care they need in a timely and comprehensive way, with services ranging from prevention, treatment, long-term care to rehabilitative or palliative care. These can be provided in health and long-term care facilities, in their homes or in the community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of care systems, including inadequate long-term care services and poor integration with health-care delivery. In the European Union alone, the initial waves of the pandemic resulted in approximately 200000 deaths among residents of long-term care facilities.

The lessons of the pandemic are clear. But are we better prepared now to face a challenge of this scale? What we know is that we need to invest more in our health systems, including in the way we deliver long-term care to those who need it, said Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, WHO/Europes Director of Country Health Policies and Systems.

Improving access and quality of care across our communities will be key, in addition to supporting caregivers, irrespective of whether they are family members, volunteers or part of the workforce. We are proud of this new partnership with the European Union in this important area of work, and we look forward to leveraging all the tools we have at our disposal to protect peoples health, regardless of where they live, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat added.

"Many long-term care challenges are not just national or European, but global. We are therefore happy to join forces with WHO, building also on their extensive expertise in supporting reforms towards integrated care and adapting health systems to the needs of an ageing population. The strategic partnership with WHO is a step forward towards ensuring access to high-quality affordable long-term care for all, said Ms Katarina Ivankovi Kneevi, Director for Social Rights and Inclusion at the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission.

While access to long-term care services varies across countries within the Region, available data from European Union countries indicate that only 1 in 3 older people with care needs can access care in the community.

As the population ages, the demand for long-term care is expected to rise. By 2024, the WHO European Region will have more older adults (65+ years) than children and adolescents, with an estimated 2 out of every 3 older people requiring care and support at some point in their lives.

The new partnership will develop tools to support countries long-term care reform efforts and help to monitor progress towards improved service coverage, more affordable care and better coordination of health and long-term care services across peoples life-course.

The partnerships activities will align with WHO/Europes upcoming work to support the development of integrated care for healthy ageing, including a regional framework for action on integrated health and care systems to aid coordination, collaboration, joint learning, innovation and monitoring of integrated care delivery and age-friendly communities.

The majority of care in the European Region is provided informally by families and local communities. Through their efforts, informal caregivers help to bridge gaps in service coverage and ensure care for those unable to access or afford formal care services.

The partnership will also support these informal caregivers by developing a set of open-access tools that can help them as they care for others.

The COVID-19 pandemic put enormous pressure on health and care workers and informal caregivers alike. Two out of 3 caregivers in the European Union reported deteriorating mental and physical health due to intensified caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic.

Workforce shortages, as highlighted in WHO/Europes regional report Health and care workforce in Europe: time to act, are also affecting the quality and quantity of long-term care across the Region. Urgent investments are required to address these shortages, focusing on training, recruitment, retention, and protection of the long-term care workforce.

Additionally, around 3 out of 4 informal caregivers are women, and it is estimated that women make up 80% of the formal care workforce. Despite their immense contributions to society, these caregivers often face insufficient recognition, challenging working conditions, excessive care burden, and chronic stress.

"Millions of women providing care for family members today sacrifice work opportunities, leisure time and, far too often, their health, Dr Azzopardi-Muscat explained. That is why investing in fairer care systems is so crucial to promoting gender equality. It is also the smart investment, especially if we are to create well-being economies that put peoples quality of life at the heart of economic recovery.

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WHO/Europe and European Commission establish new partnership ... - World Health Organization