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As regards information displayed on this page, the Island of Heligoland, the territories of Bsingen, Ceuta, Melilla, Livigno, Campione d'Italia and the Italian waters of Lake Lugano are subject to the same rules as non-EU countries.

As soon as you buy a product from a non-EU country, then effectively you become an importer and become liable to Customs and Excise Duty as well as Value Added Tax (VAT) payments. If the terms of sale do not specify another arrangement, the goods would normally be held by the Customs Authority at entry, pending the payment of duty and tax.

Customs officers examine packages arriving from outside the EU in order to:

On the basis of the data provided in the customs declaration, the supporting documents that accompany it and any information which they may request, the competent customs officers determine, impose and collect Customs duties that are due.

Customs duty is calculated as a percentage of the customs value of the goods:

See how the customs value is calculated in the EU Member States.

Customs Duty is not due for goods, provided directly to the buyer when their value does not exceed 150 euros.

This exception does not apply to perfumes and toilet waters, tobacco or tobacco products and alcoholic products which are subject to special limits on the quantity provided.

The import VAT is calculated as a percentage (VAT rate) of the taxable amount.

You can check the VAT rates applied in each country.

VAT is not due when the total value of all goods in a consignment (value not inclusive of customs duties or transport costs) is less than a threshold. The threshold may vary from 10 euros to 22 euros, depending on the EU country. Certain countries however, exclude mail orders from the exemption. This exception does not apply to tobacco or tobacco products, to perfumes or toilet waters and alcoholic products.

The import VAT may either be included into the overall delivery price or not.

The goods will be held by the Customs Authority at entry into your country, pending the payment of excise duty.

Rates of excise duty are set by each individual Member State. See the applicable rates for alcoholic beverages and tobacco products.

See which EU Member States apply excise duty exemptions for small gifts.

Cigarettes and hand rolling tobacco must bear health warnings and fiscal marks, and containers of spirits that are larger than 35cl must bear a duty stamp.

The Customs Declaration provides information to the Customs authorities about the goods that you are importing.

This declaration must be submitted by a person established in the EU or his representative who is able to present the goods to customs. In the ordinary case this could be the buyer, the company that ships the goods or the carrier who acts as a representative.

See national rules and procedures applicable to customs declarations.

If you are the person who submits the Customs Declaration, a courier company may offer to make the declaration on your behalf, but there is normally a charge for this service.

If you are not the person who submits the Customs Declaration, you should verify with the supplier that it is submitted.

The Customs Declaration should indicate correctly the nature of the goods and their value not taking into account taxes, charges, transport or other additional costs.

Some commercial websites will offer to show a value on the Customs Declaration that is much lower than the actual price paid so that the customer does not have to pay duty and/or VAT when the goods enter the Member State of import. It is in the customer's own interest to make sure that the declaration has been submitted and is accurate. If no declaration is made, or the information in it was found to be inaccurate, the acceptance of the declaration, and thus the delivery of the package to the receiver may be delayed or even not take place as the Customs officials are entitled to make further enquiries and impose penalties and sanctions as the case may be. The packages sent by post have to be accompanied by a CN22 or CN23 Declaration, as required by the special rules of the universal postal service.

The Customs Authority in your country is entitled to open and examine any package if it considers this appropriate. Packages might even be seized by Customs and, when appropriate, destroyed.

The customs clearance is the documented permission to pass that the national customs authority grants to the imported goods.

The customs clearance is typically given to a shipping agent to prove that all applicable customs duties have been paid and the shipment has been approved.

The shipping provider may charge a customs clearance fee or customs handling fee for processing the import declaration, an advancement fee for paying the duty and VAT on behalf of the recipient, an airline handling fee for loading and unloading the goods, a security fee for screening or x-raying the goods and a fee for preparing the customs declaration.

These charges will vary from company to company.

When goods are brought into the European Union by postal operators such additional charges are limited to the costs of the customs clearance procedure.

Member States cannot impose charges related to customs clearance higher than the actual costs incurred.

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Buying goods online coming from a non-European Union country

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Sustainability Policy Proposals Affecting The E-Cig Sector In The European Union" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The report identified the 11 EU initiatives we consider to be the most impactful for the sector. According to our analysis, among the initiatives we are tracking, the new rules on batteries, plastics, and electronics are likely to substantially increase the regulatory burden on the sector.

In the EU the e-cigarette industry is increasingly under regulatory compliance pressure with new rules that introduce obligations. Not only will companies be required to adapt to a new framework that applies to all other industries, but industry-specific negative environmental externalities and greenwashing techniques are in the spotlight more and more.

The aim of this report is to analyse EU legal developments related to the environment that are most likely to impact the e-cigarette sector.

Key Topics Covered:

1 Executive Summary

2 Scope of this report

3 EU sustainability policy agenda

4 Overview of sustainability and the tobacco and nicotine sectors

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/4lqfab

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European Union e-Cigarette Sustainability Policy Proposals Report 2022: The New Rules on Batteries, Plastics, and Electronics - ResearchAndMarkets.com...

MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russia is wasting large volumes of natural gas by burning it in a huge orange flare near the Finnish border at a time when it has sharply cut deliveries to the European Union, scientists and analysts said on Friday.

Analysts from Rystad, an energy consultancy based in Norway, described it as an environmental disaster and estimated the amount of gas being burned off into the atmosphere was equivalent to about 0.5% of daily EU needs.

The spectacular flare can be seen in satellite images of Portovaya, site of a compressor station for the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

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Russia has cut flows through Nord Stream 1 to just 20% of capacity and plans to shut it down entirely for three days next week, citing maintenance issues with turbines. The EU accuses it of using gas as a weapon to fight back against Western sanctions over Ukraine.

Flaring is a common practice in oil and gas production, but the current level is unusually high and the timing is sensitive because of the Russian supply cuts.

Russian energy giant Gazprom did not reply to a request for comment.

Rystad analysts wrote: "Exact flaring volumes levels are hard to quantify but are believed to be at levels of around 4.34 million cubic meters per day. This equates to 1.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) on an annualized basis and is equal to around 0.5% of the EU's gas demand needs."

The flaring was first reported in Finland, which borders Russia, earlier this month.

Professor Esa Vakkilainen at the LUT University, Lappeenranta, said Gazprom may have been burning as much as 1,000 euros worth of gas per hour for the past two months, while flaring was damaging the atmosphere.

"So this is also a big environmental problem, especially for the North Pole area where this soot has definitely an effect on global warming," he said.

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia, the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will strive to be carbon neutral no later than 2060, while the EU and other countries have urged Moscow to bring the goal forward by a decade.

Gazprom cut its natural gas output by more than 13% from the start of the year until mid-August to around 275 billion cubic metres. Its gas exports outside the former Soviet Union have declined by over 36% to 78.5 bcm amid the standoff with the West over Ukraine.

While most domestic experts have said that Gazprom could simply turn off the taps to regulate production, the company still has to burn off excess gas.

"The flaring is an environmental disaster with around 9,000 tonnes of CO2 being emitted daily," Rystad said.

"The flaring flame is highly visible, perhaps indicating that gas is ready and waiting to flow to Europe if friendly political relations resume."

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Reporting by Ilze Filks and Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Hugh Lawson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Russia burns gas into the atmosphere while cutting supplies to EU - Reuters

The European Unions International Promotion of LGBTI Rights: Promises and PitfallsBy Markus ThielRoutledge, 2021

Activists and political leaders in the Global North have turned to LGBT rights as a key agenda item in foreign policy as part of the liberal order, both normatively and in the provision of aid. This is despite the lack of cohesive policy or consistent and binding change on LGBT rights in their own jurisdictions. At the same time, scholars have been increasingly critical about these interventions, as have some sexual and gender minority activists in the Global South. In my own work I have documented the preemptive emergence of state homophobia in Uganda and the sociopathic dynamic of sovereign states in general (Bosia 2015) to criticize these foreign policy initiatives. And since the publication of Development, Sexual Rights, and Global Governance (Lind 2010), scholars including Rahman (2014), Mason (2018), and Rao (2020) have pioneered critical and decolonizing approaches in the study of global LGBT rights. Referencing this scholarship, The European Unions International Promotion of LGBTI Rights offers the first examination of the elaboration and effectiveness of EU foreign policy on LGBT rights, both through EU institutions and those of member states, and particularly hones in on the dynamics that challenge LGBT rights interventions. EU scholar Markus Thiels innovation includes a thoroughly researched description of international policy processes and initiatives on LGBT rights to examine their implementation, reception, and effectiveness in accession states in Europe, neighboring states not considered available for a direct EU embrace, and states liberated from European colonial empires.

Thiel places the challenge to the EUs foreign policy on LGBT rights within the context of an insufficiently realized European normative power, despite the foundation of the EU in values. He lays out the challenge thus: In that sense, Normative Power Europe (NPE) is constituted of both the somewhat autonomous common institutions (such as the European Commission or the Parliament) which in a regular manner vocally pronounce normative ideas and expectations and the member governments, which may be more or less normatively motivated (p.35). Within this context of limited sovereign or norms-bounded power at the regional or national levels, Thiel notes that the EU meets a variety of internal and external pressures. These include the Potemkin nature of pro-LGBT policies adopted by candidate states, abandoned or outright reversed soon after admission to the EU; the admixture of homophobic and xenophobic policies within the EU that make NPE hectoring at best and neocolonial and racist at worst; and the transformation of once radical sexual and gender minority demands to be consistent with the heteronormative and neoliberal agenda central to EU policy making.

The text is organized across four institutional dimensions. First, Thiel examines the inconsistent embrace of LGBT rights within member states themselves. These differences are most obvious between the old democracies of Western Europe who founded the EU and the new members in Central and Eastern Europe, but they also divide older Europe along a North-South axis, with Italy and Greece lagging on measures like full marriage equality (not accounted for are the lag in extending marriage in Germany and Northern Ireland). Of particular concern are the opposition of some member states, including Poland and Hungary, to the centrality of LGBT rights to European values. Next, Thiel turns to EU interventions in the arena where Brussels (the EU capital) has been the most effective: accession to the union itself. LGBT rights were on the agenda for institutional reform within the mandate to implement democratic decision-making processes prior to admission, with the EU providing expertise and support for these transformations. Consequently, the wave of admissions in the first decade of the 21st century was characterized by the elimination of impediments to citizenship such as criminalization of sexual conduct. Later, however, the effect of these Potemkin changes, as Thiel describes them, was reversed in states central to the expanded EU. Hungary and Poland specifically have targeted LGBT+ citizens in rhetoric and policy. The application of such standards also have been variously exploited by candidate states as well as being undermined by the EUs own geopolitical priorities as other issues associated with accession came to dominate over LGBT inclusion.

Finally, Thiel turns to the EUs role in the world, focusing on development aid and conditionality in relationship to once colonial states, and on the role of the EU within international institutions such as the UN. Through the former, the text lays out evidence of suboptimal policy making as it arrives through the same colonial ideologies about civilization that the EU is hoping to suppress. From the perspective of sexual and gender minorities, Thiel notes that moves to condition aid on EU normative priorities has been opposed by activists in the Global South, as it included aid in civil society as well. At the same time, some recipient governments have characterized the EUs approach as colonial domination. Political leaders in the Global South have used opposition to the EUs agenda to solidify their own standing as leaders of an ongoing struggle for National Liberation from colonial rule, noting the distinctiveness of the national values they are constructing in confrontation with the dangers of Europes decadence.

We might read the book under review to imply that the EU has been most successful in achieving change at the level of Inter-Governmental Organizations. At the UN in particular, Thiel identifies the key role of the EU and its member states in placing LGBT rights on the institutions normative agenda, including the appointment of an Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Thiel, however, also calls our attention to the limitations of the EU approach, including the inconsistent support among EU states and an emerging coalition of hostile states within the EU.

While Thiel provides a clear outline of EU policy making in a way that takes account of sequences and competing perspectives, his analysis of responses to EU policy in his three cases in the Global South Uganda, Indonesia, Jamaica are less clear. For example, with regards to Uganda he troubles the consequences of US and Evangelical interventions just after 2000 and their direct participation in networks and extensive financial assistance for AIDS programing. Far from reacting to LGBT activism globally or locally or embracing cultural homophobia, as the text implies, Ugandas political leadership after 2000 espoused the goals of these US actors to target and marginalize sexual and gender minorities in ways that created a gay peril and a homophobia that did not exist prior, spurring local activism and global attention. But shifts in EU and especially US intervention after 2012 also prevented the reintroduction of a draconian anti-LGBT bill and provided more extensive direct financial aid to programs that supported sexual and gender minority organizing.

Thiels text is a valuable resource for scholars of LGBT rights generally and the EU normative agenda in particular, and despite the brevity of its three Global South case studies, it provides one of the best researched descriptions of the policy process and challenges faced by the EU as a regional and global actor. For those whose interest in activist strategies and responses is piqued by this texts focus on EU policy, critical readings of EU and US global interventions on LGBTQI+ rights from Eastern European, migrant, and Global South perspectives, trans, nonbinary, and queer scholars, and women and scholars of color include the collection Murderous Inclusions, organized for the Feminist Journal of International Politics by Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco (2013); the contributions of Rahman, Grey and Attai, Stevens and Chaudhry, and others in The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics (2020), as well as Rahmans 2014 book; Masons collection on queer development studies (2018); Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Commonwealth (Lennox and Waites 2018); EU Enlargement and Gay Politics (Slootmaekers, Touquet, and Vermeersch 2016); and the work of Dean Cooper-Cunningham in Security Dialogue (2022) and elsewhere that focuses on the activist response to what he calls Putins Heteronormative Internationalism.

In conclusion, Thiels scholarship points to the importance of sexual and gender identity politics as central to, and not on the margins of, global and international politics. Unique in studying the EU as a global and not just regional development actor, Thiel ties together questions of institutional leverage and mixed sovereignty with processes of western domination and decolonization, centering LGBT rights as a complex site of intervention where the liberal order comes undone.

References

Bosia, M.J. (2015). To Love or to Loathe: Modernity, Homophobia, and LGBT Rights. M.L. Picq and M. Thiel, eds, Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations. Routledge, New York and London.

Bosia, M.J., S. McEvoy, and M. Rahman (2020). The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics. Oxford University Press, New York.

Cooper-Cunningham, D. (2022). Security, Sexuality, and the Gay Clown Putin meme: Queer Theory and International Responses to Political Homophobia. Security Dialogue, online first.

Haritaworn, J., A. Kuntsman, and S. Posocco, eds. (2013). Murderous Inclusions. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4.

Lennox, C., and M. Waites (2018). Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Commonwealth. Human Rights Consortium, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London, London.

Lind, A. ed. (2010). Development, Sexual Rights, and Global Governance. Routledge, New York.

Mason, C.L., ed. (2018). Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies. Routledge, New York and London.

Rahman, M. (2014). Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity. Palgrave, London.

Rao, R (2020). Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. Oxford University Press, New York.

Slootmaekers, K., H. Touquet, and P. Vermeersch, eds. (2016). EU Enlargement and Gay Politics. Palgrave McMillan, London.

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Review The European Union's International Promotion of LGBTI Rights - E-International Relations

Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera speaks as she takes part in an extraordinary meeting of European Union energy ministers in Brussels, Belgium July 26, 2022. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/File Photo

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MADRID, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Spanish lawmakersratifiedthe minority government's energy-saving decree on Thursday, but whether the unpopular measure will help Spain meet its European commitment to cut gas usage by 7% remains to be seen.

Introduced on Aug. 10 as part of the European Union's push to wean itself off Russian gas, the emergency energy savings range from mandatory temperature limits for air-conditioning or heating to turning off lights in public buildings and shop windows. More measures are likely to be announced in September.

Parliament, where the ruling leftist coalition lacks a working majority and has to rely on smaller regional parties to pass legislation, backed the decree by 187-161 votes - a sizeable margin for this legislature.

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The main opposition parties have criticised the measures, that can now remain in force,as improvised, inefficient and harmful for the economy.

Touted by the government as showing solidarity with the rest of Europe, the measures have been a hard sell in a country that does not depend on Russian gas and has suffered from brutal summer heatwaves in its worst drought in decades.

"(The measures) imply a saving for those who apply them," Energy Minister Teresa Ribera said before the vote. "They also are an inspiration for other European partners."

She has said the measures reduced electricity use by 6% during their first week.

But as the drought has limited hydro-electric output, power plants have burned twice as much gas so far this month than a year ago, pushing Spain's overall gas usage 4% higher, according to data from gas grid operator Enagas.

Marcel Coderch, head of the Barcelona-based Association of Energy Resources Studies, said there was an additional incentive for power utilities to use more gas due to a special cap on the input cost of gas and coal used by power plants.

Brussels authorised the scheme exclusively for Spain and Portugal in June to rein in soaring electricity retail prices in the Iberian peninsula that has little energy interconnection with the rest of Europe. Spain imports most of its gas from the United States and Algeria.

The lower price of Spanish electricity has also caused France to import more, Coderch added. Such imports tripled in July, according to Enagas.

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Reporting by Inti LandauroEditing by Andrei Khalip and Mark Potter

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Spain approves energy-saving plan, but will it cut gas use? - Reuters