EurActiv

US whistleblower Snowden nominated for EU's human rights award

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:08:37 +0200

Potočnik bags UN 'Champions of the Earth' prize

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 15:53:47 +0200

The United Nations will honour Janez Potočnik, the EU's top environment official, with its Champions of the Earth prize for his efforts to promote a greener EU economy.

The prize - the UN's highest environmental accolade - is awarded to leaders from government, civil society and the private sector whose actions have had a significant and positive impact on the environment.

Potočnik, 55, will receive the prize for policy leadership in promoting resource efficiency and combating food waste.

Potočnik has called for EU member states to pursue policies and incentives to promote sustainable consumption and production, most notably in the agricultural sector, said a statement from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which awards the prize.

"It is an honour to receive this award and I wish to express to UNEP my deep appreciation for its work on sustainable development," Potočnik said. "Unless we change the way we produce and consume we will face a crisis in our natural resources. It is crucial that we make the necessary changes now rather than when we hit environmental tipping points."

Since Potočnik took office in 2010, the EU has set targets to halve food waste and nearly eliminate landfill by 2020.

Earlier this year, he even offered to write and sing a ditty in front of 1,000 people - if the same number could be persuaded to leave their cars at home for a day. Unfortunately, they could not.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said: ”Despite the challenges posed by the financial crisis and the economic downturn Mr. Potočnik played a key role in maintaining Europe's focus on the future as an advocate for a more sustainable and resource efficient economy. Science, innovation and persistence have been leitmotifs of his tenure as Commissioner for the Environment."

Google Earth, Slow Food Movement founder Carlo Petrini, and Izabella Teixeira, the Brazilian environment minister, have previously been awarded the prize.

Hungary amends its constitution to appease EU

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:28:15 +0200

Hungary's parliament has approved changes to the constitution, removing restrictions on political media campaigns ahead of next year's election and backtracking on other legal aspects the European Union has said may conflict with its principles.

The EU, the United States and human rights groups have accused Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government of using constitutional amendments to limit the powers of Hungary's top court and weaken democracy in the former Soviet satellite.

Lawmakers late on 16 September approved the amendments drafted by the government after the European Commission threatened to take legal action against the steps, some of which it said could run against EU norms and the principle of the rule of law.

Orbán, 50, whose ruling Fidesz party faces a parliamentary election in the first half of next year, had earlier dismissed criticism that the reforms were anti-democratic and promised full cooperation with Brussels to address its concerns.

The government reasoning attached to the amendments said Budapest put forward the remedies to defuse potential conflicts over the constitution after a number of clashes in past years over laws affecting the judiciary and the central bank.

It said the changes were proposed "so that certain constitutional matters cannot be used as a pretext for further attacks against Hungary going forward".

The amendments will allow political parties to run campaigns in both state-funded and private media ahead of parliamentary and European Parliament elections due next year, removing a prior restriction for such adverts to state outlets only.

But the law still says such advertisements must be published free of charge.

The amendments also remove a constitutional provision enabling the government to launch new taxes due to "unexpected payment obligations" brought on by international court rulings on public finances, a clause that the European Commission had flagged as particularly worrisome.

The new legal provisions also lay the groundwork for the merger of the financial markets regulator into the National Bank of Hungary, led by Governor György Matolcsy, Orbán's close ally and his former economy minister.

Orbán says he has saved Hungary from a Greek-style economic collapse, his reforms are democratic because he won a huge majority in a 2010 election, and he is under attack because he threatens the interests of foreign business lobbies.

His ruling Fidesz party maintained a double-digit lead over the main opposition Socialists in a survey by pollster Ipsos last month but nearly half of the country's 8 million voters are still undecided as the 2014 vote approaches.

New technologies are key to foster EU transparency and participation

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:27:24 +0200

The EU should make better use of new technologies to improve its democratic decision making, transparency and participation. This is key in an election year, at a time when the sense of trust among citizens in its institutions is at an all-time low, writes Marietje Schaake.

Marietje Schaake is an MEP for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and member of the Dutch social liberal party D66.

Whether or not governments embrace the digital era, technology influences democracy. New technologies have empowered people and have raised expectations of openness and interaction. Horizontal and hierarchical structures of power are challenged by vertical networks of empowered individuals all over the world. Governments are best advised to actively shape and reform the role they play in a digitized world. However, too often they fall behind in terms of delivering. A social media strategy alone won't do when dealing with government requires waiting in line and drawing a number at the same time.

The speed of technological advancements is much higher than that of administrative or democratic reforms. Openness and better service would also increase trust, yet too often secrecy is preferred over transparency. Reforms should lead to new standards and to permanent democratization.

Open data, which takes statistics and other data that have been collected with public resources and returns them to the general public, serves as a good example. This data often has value that is overlooked by governments. In Member States that are frontrunners, such as The Netherlands, entrepreneurship is encouraged and useful and innovative applications are built with data set given to the public. Ideally, the role of government becomes one of a platform on which citizens can build. In Estonia, citizens have access to all government services in digital form. From online voting to digital tax forms, and from digitally re-filling medicine prescriptions to using your smart phone to pay the parking meter.

Besides increasing the accessibility of large amounts of government statistical data, democratic decision-making procedures and EU documents should be more easily accessible and searchable. The European Union´s institutions can also foster soliciting input into the decision-making process. I have used web based tools to experiment with this idea and received many relevant comments when I published draft versions of report or resolutions online. This way of working should become part of the system to decrease the perceived gap between politicians and citizens and to democratise parliamentary decision making. In the US the government publishes its budget and asks people to help them find wasteful spending. In South Africa and Iceland people were asked to help write new constitutions online. It is high time the European Union follows these examples.

Currently, stakeholder consultations of the European Commission are often too complicated for individuals to answer. This creates a situation in which companies or advocacy groups with expertise and a significant interest in devoting time can influence the consultation, leaving regular citizens out in the cold. The Share Europe Online project I initiated aims to change this by giving European institutions the tools to start a dialogue with citizens about relevant policies.

While youth unemployment is at an unacceptably high level in the EU, youths themselves continue to have difficulty making their voices heard in the political debate. If EU and government institutions would be designed for smarter interaction with citizens, good ideas and solutions can come from the bottom up.

With 8 months to go until a new European Parliament is elected, and with trust levels of citizens in the EU at an all-time low, the time to use technology for more transparency, openness and interaction is now.

EU: New Deal for Somalia is not 'business as usual'

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:57:17 +0200

The European Commission pledged €650 million of additional aid for the next three years for Somalia at a conference yesterday (16 September), aimed at helping Mogadishu’s path towards peace and state building.

The New Deal for Somalia conference gathered representatives of governments, financial institutions and aid donors in Brussels to help Somalia on the path to recovery.

EU representatives at the conference stressed that the New Deal compact marked a new approach in the way the International Community works with Somalia and cannot be treated as “business as usual”.

Danish Minister for Development, Christian Friis Bach, wrote in an opinion piece published on EurActiv that the Compact was "a contract of mutual accountability” between Somalia and its international partners.

>> Read the Op-Ed by Friis Back: New Deal for Somalia is an important deal

In the same spirit, the EU's Development Commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, said that the EU wanted to launch a new approach towards Somalia: “As we seek to empower Somalia politically, we must do so by empowering its institutions and its people across the country. To this end, we will have to link together political processes, actions to establish workable security and justice systems, economic growth, and service delivery. This is the strength of the New Deal”, Piebalgs said.

Around 50 high-level delegations from all over the world, including aid groups and financial institutions, attended the talks on the new compact, which outlines the future priorities and challenges for the new Somali Government.

For the first time after nearly two decades of war, the fragile state of Somalia is on the road to recovery, but huge challenges remain ahead such as healthcare, access to water and education, employment. Terrorist attacks continue to be a stability threat, and human rights, in particular women’s rights, remain at risk, participants noted.

Speaking to Somali activist, Ifrah Ahmed, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, said his Government “has a very clear policy on the issue of violence against women, on rape […] there are a lot of activities that the Government has taken to institutionalise the rights of women within the state building process”.

The European Commission also stressed the importance of pursuing the normalisation of the relations between Somalia and the international financial institutions. “In comparable situations the IFIs fund a considerable share of the costs involved in re-establishing basic services, economic regeneration and development. At this stage we do not have this tool in our toolbox”, Commissioner Piebalgs underlined.

The EU is the biggest donor to Somalia and has provided “more than €1.2 billion to support Somali people’s basic needs and to improve the country’s security” since 2008, Commission President, José Manuel Barroso said at a press conference with the Somali President yesterday.

The additional €650 million pledged by the Commission will help support a “new phase in the life of Somalia,” he went on. The EU will “remain heavily engaged in the stabilisation of the country” through the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions, Barroso said, adding that Somalia “is not walking alone”.

Greenland report paves way for sovereign uranium mining

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:54:27 +0200

A new report commissioned by the Greenland government has concluded that the country has full sovereignty over commodities trading, including for uranium, which is regulated by international treaties on non-nuclear proliferation.

The report was kept confidential for more than six months but recently published as Greenland's parliament prepares to vote on 24 October on whether to allow the extraction of radioactive substances in Greenland.

The outcome of the vote is expected to be a clear ‘yes’.

Greenland, a former Danish colony, was granted home rule in 1979. Thirty years later, Greenland assumed self-determination with responsibility for judicial affairs, police, and natural resources, but the Danish government is still in charge of foreign affairs, financial and security policies.

For 25 years, Greenland has had a zero-tolerance policy on radioactive substances and government sources have told the Danish newspaper Politiken that Denmark and Greenland were on a collision course over uranium extraction.

Uranium is a toxic and radioactive metal which can affect a person's kidney, brain, liver and heart after exposure. But it is also a strategically important metal for the nuclear power and defense industries. Large-scale exploitation of the mineral could change Denmark's and Greenland's standing on the international stage.

“The Kingdom of Denmark would not have a legal interest in trying to prevent extraction, export and sale of uranium for peaceful purposes including energy purposes. According to our assessment, the Greenlandic government can enter these kinds of deals without consulting the Danish government,” the report says, implying that Denmark should be informed of all trade deals involving uranium.

The report also underlines that Denmark and Greenland would have to cooperate in order to ensure compliance with international conventions preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Secret committee

Nils Wang, the Chief of the Royal Danish Defense College, said that the report showed that Nuuk and Copenhagen were on a collision course.

“The new Greenlandic government has the view that Greenland has full control over its minerals, including uranium. This is not a view shared by Copenhagen. Denmark has set up a secret committee to get a clarification of what the foreign policy consequences of uranium exports from Greenland would mean. This committee has been set up by the foreign ministry’s security policy’s office which underscores that these two countries completely disagree on the issue,” Wang told Danish newspaper Politiken.

Cindy Vestergaard, an expert on nuclear weapon at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said the report would be the first of many trying to evaluate which country should decide on uranium in Greenland.

The new report is clearly in favour of the Greenlandic government, she said, adding that Nuuk would have to prove that it can prevent its uranium from being used for military purposes.

Greenland, for its part, sees uranium exploitation as a new export opportunity.

The Danish government has until now rejected commenting on the issue. Two weeks ago Greenland’s prime minister Aleqa Hammond met with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. After the meeting Hammond said, “We agreed to disagree.”

France clears road for non-nationals to run in EU polls

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:30:40 +0200

The French Interior Ministry has drafted a law that will allow non-national EU citizens to stand in the next European Parliament elections, in line with the requirements of the Lisbon Treaty. EurActiv France reports.

The government unveiled a draft law on 11 September transposing an EU directive that regulates eligibility conditions for non-national residents at the European elections, a novelty of the Lisbon Treaty allowing all EU citizens resident in another EU member state to run for a seat in the European Parliament.

Non-nationals running for the European election are still rare across the continent. Notable exceptions include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German national who was elected in France on the Greens’ list, and Anna-Maria Corraza Bildt, an Italian MEP elected in Sweden.

In France, the eligibility conditions are not the strictest – having resided in the country for six months is enough. But the requirements can be higher in other European countries. Luxemburg requires ten years residence, while Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, UK and Slovakia demand a bank deposit. France’s legal framework therefore doesn’t seem to be the worst.

After an in-depth study of the question, the European Commission concluded that submitting an application outside one’s own country was an administrative minefield. Candidates have to obtain a certificate from their home country stating they are not deprived of their eligibility rights, so raising two problems – identifying the competent authority and obtaining the certificate on time.

Under the new law, candidates will not have to obtain a certificate anymore. After candidates have submitted their applications, it will be up to the member state to verify their judicial records, and possibly annul the election after the poll has taken place if necessary.

The French government has adjusted the schedule ahead of the elections based on new rules: applications must be submitted not three, but four weeks before the election. In this case, it is the fourth Friday preceding May 25 – or May 2 - which is six weeks after the end of the municipal elections in France, leaving little time for the EU campaign.

Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist from the Cevipof, a research institute on French politics, said that this could “transform European elections into a consolation prize for the losers of the local elections”.

Indeed, a number of small municipalities of 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, which are currently run by the Socialists, could swing to the right next year.

The affected former mayors could stand at the European elections, shaking up already established election slates. Indeed, Cautrès says EU election lists have already been finalised in most political parties.

UN ‘failing' women with poverty eradication targets

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:28:21 +0200

SPECIAL REPORT/ The United Nations is on track to meet many of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) it set itself over ten years ago, but the milestones affecting women are all but certain to fall beyond its reach.

The fifth of the eight MDGs pledges set by the UN’s 193 members is to achieve universal reproductive health and reduce their maternal mortality rates by three quarters of the 1990 levels.

But although rates have been halved since 2000, one maternal death was still reported every ten minutes in India in 2012, double the target rate. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa report similar or even more horrifying figures.

“It is a failure of the fight against poverty,” Eva Joly, the French Green MEP and chair of the European parliament’s development committee told EurActiv. “For sure it is not acceptable but it is also linked to other questions.”

“It is not sufficient to write [MDGs] on paper,” she added. “You need countries to take ownership of them.”

The MDG targets were based on a continuation of trends recorded between 1965 and 1990 up until 2015, so the shortfall for maternal mortality improvements indicates not just a failure of UN policy in this area, but a slowing of progress.

Even the United Nations Development Fund admits that “inadequate funding for family planning is a major failure in fulfilling commitments to improving women’s reproductive health”.

For Hafsat Abiola, a Nigerian state minister with responsibility for MDGs, funding is closely linked to other key issues such as power and gender relations.

“When I took over the MDG office in Ogun state, and saw that the amount of resources we had to achieve those MDG goals –1.69 billion Nigerian Naira (€800,000) a year – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I thought ‘this is incredible, we can do so much, but when you think that the state has about 5 million people, 60% of whom are living in poverty, our resources are just drops in the bucket.”

Abiola is the daughter of the late elected Nigerian president, Moshood Abiola, who died in custody after a military coup in 1993.

Nigerian maternal mortality rate

Nigeria’s maternal mortality rate is still around 350 women per 100,000 - compared to below 20 per 100,000 in many European countries. But Abiola says the death rate has fallen by around 70% since 2000.

“If you save a woman’s life, you have secured her children but if that woman dies, however much aid you give her children in school, their lives will not be the same,” she told EurActiv.

On a visit to China, she herself went into labour three months before her term was due, and so had to give birth in difficult circumstances. “If I had not had good health care there I might not have survived and maybe because of that I’m very sensitive to fact that we have to help mothers and save their lives,” she said.

Ogun state was the first in Nigeria to implement a conditional cash transfer aimed at helping 5,000 of the poorest pregnant women there (1,000 have so far benefitted) by paying for their nutrition, transport, communication and medical needs.

“These women can’t be using traditional birth attendants because if there are any complications at all, the attendant’s skills will not be sufficient, and by the time they have found this out, the woman will have bled to death,” Abiola said. “When the woman goes to the clinic, we have a better chance of securing her life.”

Patriarchal roles

Traditional patriarchal roles have also proved a problem. One aspect of the MDG programme in Ogun is to provide cellphones to pregnant women in remote districts of the state “but our programme monitors sometimes called the women on these cellphones and a man would pick up the phone!” Abiola exclaimed. “Their phones had already been taken from them by their partners. Something has to be done around this issue of power and rights.”

Inequalities in gender rights stretch well beyond the maternal mortality issue. A UN progress report earlier this year found that women were more likely to be engaged in vulnerable employment than men by ratios of 85% to 69% in sub-Saharan Africa, and 44% to 26% in northern Africa.

Gender disparities in education were supposed to be eradicated by 2005 – or 2015 at the latest – but in northern Africa, girls account for 79% of out-of-school children, in south Asia, 55% and in West Asia, 65%.

Abiola, who was honoured as a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the 2003 World Economic Forum, said that she had been working to get a domestic violence bill passed in Ogun, criminalising violence against women.

“We don’t have a problem getting girls into schools,” she said. “But in society as a whole it is more commonly accepted that women should be seen and not heard, that the man is the head of the household, and women should give way and let them take decisions.”

Nigerians - and all African men should remember the legacy of slavery, when three-fifths of enumerated slaves were counted for representation purposes, Abiola argued.

“No black person on earth - especially not in Nigeria - would think that makes sense today," she said. "But at the same time, many would say that women are essentially three-fifths of a man, and they again use religious texts to justify denying equal rights."

"These things have to change,” she said.

Google lifts lid on Glass device amid privacy fears

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:27:38 +0200

US-based multinational Google yesterday (16 September) gave a peek preview of its in-development 'Glass' technology to journalists in Brussels, though the device remains several years from market launch amidst ongoing privacy concerns.

Google Glass is a computer worn around the head with an optical display, part of a mission to produce a mass-market ‘wearable’ computer.

The device displays information in a smartphone-style, hands-free format that responds to the Internet using voice commands.

It is being developed by Google X which has worked on other futuristic technologies such as driverless cars, and is still in development with a cohort of early-adopters in the US. These ‘explorers’ as the company dubs them, are trying out the machine and giving feedback to Google on how it can be improved.

Yesterday, Google presented the unfinished product to journalists in Brussels showing how voice-controlled commands using the glass can take photos, scan the internet for information and navigate locations in real time.

Glass still under development

Earlier this year (June 18) the chairman of the EU's Data Protection Authorities, the so-called Article 29 Working Party, Jacob Kohnstamm, signed a letter on behalf of 24 EU member states and 12 international regulatory bodies raising privacy concerns about Google Glass in an open letter to CEO Larry Page.

“Fears of ubiquitous surveillance of individuals by other individuals, whether through such recordings or through other applications currently being developed, have been raised,” they wrote. "Questions about Google’s collection of such data and what it means in terms of Google’s revamped privacy policy have also started to appear."

The letter called for information on how Google Glass complies with data protection laws, what information Google collects via Glass, how it intends to use this information and what part of that information is shared with third parties.

“Glass continues to be reviewed for privacy considerations as part of Google’s comprehensive privacy program, including designing Glass with privacy in mind and ensuring Google has appropriate consent from Glass users,” an official reply from Google said.

Questions about privacy are one of the issues that explorers using the the product are monitoring, though the way Google Glass takes photos, and interacts with the internet are not substantially different from the way consumers currently use smartphones.

EU, Russia reach ‘political’ deal on OPAL gas pipeline: sources

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:27:07 +0200

EU and Russia have agreed a deal on the use of Germany's OPAL link to Gazprom's Nord Stream gas pipeline, a Russian energy ministry spokeswoman said yesterday (16 September).

No one from the European Commission, the EU executive, was available for immediate comment on the deal, which ends months of talks on OPAL, which runs from the offshore section of Nord Stream through Germany to the Czech border (see background).

A deal could help to ease tensions between Russia and the EU, although the bigger issue of the European Commission's competition investigation into Gazprom remains unresolved.

"The ministry and the EU have reached an agreement on the OPAL pipeline. The agreement is to the satisfaction of both sides. They aim to sign the deal by the end of October," a Russian spokeswoman said.

Two EU sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a working party meeting had reached a political deal, which still needed legal endorsement.

Neither the Russian ministry nor the EU sources disclosed details and would not say whether Russia was getting the full access to the pipeline that it had been demanding.

Relations between Russia and the EU have been soured by Brussels' efforts to introduce more competition to the energy market and reduce Russian dominance of the bloc's gas supplies.

Gazprom's access to the 470-kilometre OPAL pipeline has been limited because of the EU's Third Energy Package legislation, which aims to prevent firms that already dominate supply from also controlling distribution networks.

Russia backs down from costly customs dispute, for now

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:26:33 +0200

SPECIAL REPORT/ A letter to the head of Russian customs from the EU's top tax official, Algirdas Šemeta, has put a last ditch and temporary stop to a costly dispute that had seen European cargo emptied at the border, the EU commissioner told EurActiv.

Earlier this year, the Russian Federation decided to forgo a UN convention that guarantees a country's tax revenue from goods travelling through its territory, called TIR, claiming that it was owed 20 billion rubles (€650 million) in unpaid levies.

Russia, Europe's third largest trading partner, then decided to impose its own national guarantees on goods entering the country from the European Union and other territories.

European officials denied that Russia was owed any unpaid taxes, and speculation has been rife as to Russia's motivation for the move.

Sources have openly questioned whether the new national tax guarantees were designed to temporarily boost the Russian budget or an internal dispute between the customs ministry and the body in charge of dealing with TIR requests, The Association of International Road Transport Carriers (Asmap).

But on Friday (13 September) - the day before a negotiating deadline - Andrey Belyaninov, the head of the Federal Customs Service, announced that the national guarantees would only apply to customs offices "subordinate to the Siberian and Far Eastern regional Customs departments" until 1 December.

In other words, European haulers would no longer have to pay the extra guarantees beyond TIR and have their goods taken out and re-registered at the Russian border.

But the Russian minister may yet re-impose the decision after 1 December, when Asmap's contract with the government runs out.

Šemeta, the European tax and customs commissioner, believes that EU-level pressure brought the temporary end to the dispute.

"I think it due to direct European pressure that Russia decided to stop the measure," Šemeta told EurActiv at the margins of an International Road Transport Union (IRU) conference in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Only in Siberia

"I sent a letter on the tenth of September to the Russian customs minister Andrey Belyaninov. The ambassador passed the letter on to the minister on the 13th and he decided that the measure would only apply to Siberia and to the Far East from the 13th," he said.

The Russian decision to forgo TIR and impose national guarantees was supposed to enter into force on 14 September.

Šemeta hopes that the decision to postpone the measure will buy the EU enough time to settle the issue with Belyaninov. "Until December we have the time to negotiate and have an agreement with Russia," he said.

"I want an agreement that will protect European carriers. The [Russian] measure is clearly against the UN's TIR convention," the EU's top tax official added.

The border dispute has already caused significant disruption, due to European haulers having to pay extra guarantees and cargo arriving hours and sometimes days late.

TIR system

Under the TIR system, haulers pay an average of $70 (€52) per trip. While the Russian customs ministry has said that the new national system would be cheaper, the IRU estimates that new national guarantees would cost between $300 and $3000, if additional costs such as service brokers were taken into account.

The IRU is one of the largest actors in the TIR system, issuing some three million 'carnets' - or guarantees - around the world every day.

IRU Secretary General Umberto de Pretto expressed dismay at the Russian minister's decisions. "The IRU issues [what equates to] about €1 billion in bank guarantees for haulers every day. Do you think that as the secretary general of this organisation I'm going to allow these to continue in a situation like this?" he said.

"It's really pushing things to the limit."

Part of the Russian Federal Customs Ministry's motivation for halting its compliance with TIR was that the number of customs complaints was rising. To add to the confusion, before the current flare up, the IRU had considered Russia a model of effectiveness under the TIR system due to its low number of payment disputes.

Increasing disputes

"Russia said the number of disputes was increasing. There are only eight [ongoing] disputes. Eight cargo loads. And you're going to call into question an entire international agreement?" de Pretto told EurActiv. "If you want to claim that you are owed €650 million you have to provide documentation."

The IRU secretary-general added that if the dispute continued, many EU countries would have "good grounds" to lodge a complaint with the World Trade Organization, of which Russia only became an official member in August last year.

Lithuania, an important transit region for cargo travelling between the EU and Russia, is the world's highest per-person beneficiary of TIR. Lithuanian officials had therefore lobbied Russia heavily to continue using the international convention.

But within a matter of days, Russia decided to increase controls on vehicles entering the country from Lithuania, pulling cargo out and leaving it by the roadside as customs officials carried out their own checks.

"This appeared to be retribution," said Marek Retelski, the head of the TIR department at the IRU.

New Deal for Somalia is no 'business as usual', says EU Commission

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:49:59 +0200

Brussels says an independent Catalonia would need to leave EU

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:37:18 +0200

Re-setting the way to a decarbonised Europe

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 14:18:03 +0200

In its EU Energy Roadmap 2050, the European Commission recognises that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the only technology available to mitigate CO2 emissions from large-scale fossil fuel use. The EU badly needs a successful CCS programme by 2020 and can no longer afford delays, writes Graeme Sweeney.

Dr. Graeme Sweeney is chairman of the advisory council of the European technology platform of Zero Emissions Fossil Fuels Power Plants (ZEP).

With the world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, global energy demand is projected to rise by 40% over the next two decades alone. To meet this demand the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that 75% of all energy will still be derived from fossil fuels in 2035, significantly contributing to rising CO2 emissions.

The EU Energy Roadmap 2050 set out objectives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. In this Roadmap, the European Commission recognised that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the only technology available to mitigate CO2 emissions from large-scale fossil fuel use across a wide range of industries. Without CCS, Europe will miss its 2050 objectives.

CCS is indispensable to decarbonising power generation and energy intensive industries including iron, steel and cement. By applying CCS, it becomes possible to reduce full life-cycle CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion at power stations and industrial sites by 65-85%. According to the IEA, delaying CCS deployment by just 10 years would increase the cost of decarbonising the global power sector by over €750 billion. These numbers underline the grave economic impact of failing to quickly deliver CCS.

We need a successful CCS demonstration programme by 2020 to reach our long-term decarbonisation goals. Demonstration projects will allow CCS to become cost effective and competitive with other low carbon technologies which will essentially drive down costs. However, we must consider the time necessary to achieve the needed capacity and infrastructure. The IEA has stressed that the next seven years will be critical to the accelerated development of CCS. Failing to act now is taking a major gamble. The technology is indeed available today, but we cannot be complacent about the need to deploy and optimise CCS technology. A Europe with CCS cannot be built overnight.

If CCS is essential for achieving EU decarbonisation goals, it is also providing a vast potential for economic growth and jobs. The development of CCS core infrastructure will ensure a stream of high quality work for a skilled workforce for many years to come, along with the potential to export our know-how derived from these projects around the globe. In the UK alone, CCS clusters could create 27,000 jobs from 2020 rising up to 70,000 jobs by 2035. However, the EU is currently falling behind on the commitments needed to secure the deployment of necessary CCS projects. The Green Paper on the EU 2030 Energy and Climate Policy framework has failed to reflect the urgency for this ground-breaking and unequivocal technology.

What Europe needs is an immediate reset and a comprehensive and coordinated approach to setting in motion the roll-out of CCS. First and foremost, the EU 2030 Energy and Climate Policy Framework needs to fully integrate CCS and provide a long-term signal for investors. Member States should be required to develop roadmaps and national strategies for achieving decarbonisation targets, similar to those set for the renewables sector.

The ETS should remain the central tool of EU climate policy, providing a predictable and robust carbon price and a long term driver for CCS. However, further structural measures and a tightened cap in 2030 will be needed to strengthen the EU ETS in the long term. We will first need short-term measures to support CCS demonstration and early deployment projects until CCS becomes commercially viable, such as Feed In Tariffs (FiTs) at Member State level. Where FiTs are not possible, CCS certificates could be an option, if carefully designed for a defined volume. But predictable long term financial incentives and a regulatory framework that is fit-for-purpose will also be essential.

If urgent policy action is taken, CCS can still be widely deployed by 2030 but the window of opportunity is closing fast. As Member States enter the debate over the 2030 Energy and Climate Policy framework, they should consider that failing to act now will mean Europe will miss its ambitious 2050 decarbonisation goals. It will also cost Europe an additional €75 billion to address climate change – while damaging its competitiveness and missing out on huge potential job creation and economic growth. Business-as-usual is not an option. This is the moment to reset EU energy and climate policy by kick-starting European CCS development.

A truly multilingual capital for the European Union

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 12:28:06 +0200

To meet Brussels’s exceptional linguistic challenge, the 'Marnix Plan' wants to mobilise Brussels’s diverse linguistic competence into an exciting collaborative project, writes Philippe Van Parijs.

Philippe van Parijs is a Belgian philosopher, professor at the universities of Louvain, Leuven and Oxford, a prominent 'Brusseler' and founder of the Marnix Plan.

The European Union praises its linguistic diversity, the multiplicity of the native languages of its citizens. But linguistic diversity is a curse if it is not coupled with multilingualism, or the learning of other people’s languages.

In Brussels, as in most European cities, linguistic diversity is growing. A representative sample of 2500 registered residents (0.2% of the population of the Brussels region) sufficed to reveal the presence of 104 distinct native languages, up from only 72 in a similar sample ten years earlier. Over the same period, the proportion of Brusselers unable to speak either French, Dutch or English at more than a basic level rose from 2 to 8% of the population (see Rudi Janssens, Meertaligheid als cement van de stedelijke samenleving). No need to explain that this generates a major challenge in terms of job opportunities, social cohesion and civic participation.

In most places, the best way to address this challenge consists of accelerating the acquisition of the single dominant and official language of the nation. In Brussels, this is not an option.

First of all, Brussels has two official languages. One of them is French, the dominant language in the city: one third of all Brusselers has French as their sole native language; one third as one of their native languages (jointly with Dutch, Arabic or other languages); and over half of the remaining third learned it at a later stage in life.

The other official language is Dutch, the native language of the majority of this country of which Brussels is the capital, and the sole official language of the region surrounding Brussels, Flanders. Moreover, Brussels is the main seat of the European institutions and the main location of the EU-wide civil society. It has witnessed the growing importance of English as the European lingua franca. Overall, 89% of the Brusselers claims to speak French well or very well, 23% does so for Dutch and 30% for English.

Against this backdrop, Brussels’s challenge is clearly exceptional and requires an exceptional response. In 2001, a group of European intellectuals was mandated by European Commission president Romano Prodi to think about how Brussels could “best fulfill the needs and role of a European capital”.

In its final report — the first quasi-official document that dared to use as a title Brussels, Capital of Europe —, the group suggested the creation of an institute for multilingualism: “Brussels is the city with the highest concentration of people speaking different languages, the highest quality and expertise in translation and interpretation services and a population that has learned to respect, learn and diffuse bilingualism as a common practice. The proposal is to create from this comparative advantage an opportunity for development that would benefit both Belgium and the European institutions,” the report read.

More than a new institution, however, Brussels needs a bottom-up initiative aimed at mobilising intelligently the linguistic wealth and goodwill available locally, not least among its many ‘Europeans’. This requires early learning and stimulating teaching of more than one language in all Brussels schools, but also drawing on an effective collaboration between all types of schools, media, social partners, voluntary associations and — above all — families. Such a bottom up initiative will be publicly launched on 28 September under the name ‘Marnix Plan for a Multilingual Brussels’.

Philippe de Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde (1540-1598) was born and grew up in Brussels. Best known as William the Silent’s chief adviser in the revolt against Spanish rule, he spoke seven languages and wrote books in French, Dutch and Latin. In one of them, he formulated what may well be the first plea for the simultaneous learning of several languages through immersion at a young age. This is the book he is shown holding in the statue that represents him at the front of a primary school built in the 1890s for the boys of the Marolles, one of Brussels’s poorest neighbourhoods. Marnix himself targeted children of princes and noblemen. Our Marnix Plan is meant for all Brusselers, not the least for the children of recent foreign origin who now form the majority of Brussels’s pupils.

The Marnix Plan for a Multilingual Brussels aims to develop among all layers of the Brussels population the coherent learning of several languages, combining a priority for French, Dutch and English with the encouragement of the transmission of all native languages.

To make this happen will require changes in the school curriculum. But school cannot do everything. The Marnix Plan is above all an attempt to identify the many relevant existing initiatives, to stimulate new ones and to weave them all into an exciting common project. It is about spreading knowledge and enthusiasm though its website and its public events. It is about convincing all Brusselers that learning languages and helping other learn languages should be a normal daily activity, economically valuable for each of them, absolutely crucial for the lasting dynamism of the capital of Europe, and moreover enriching and gratifying in all sorts of ways.

Why Somaliland does not attend ‘New Deal for Somalia’ conference

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 11:41:26 +0200

While supporting the New Deal process and welcoming of the donors’ engagement, Somaliland has chosen not to participate in the Conference as the country’s national needs and priorities are very different to Somalia’s, writes Mohamed Behi Yonis.

Mohamed Behi Yonis is Minister of Foreign Affairs & International Cooperation, Republic of Somaliland.

Despite facing many pressing problems, both in Europe and elsewhere, it is encouraging to see that EU leaders are going to focus on my region today, in a Conference – the New Deal for Somalia, that will sanction a clear and improved framework for international donors’ engagement with the Somali people.

The Horn of Africa has for a long time been seen as one of the world’s most troubled regions. It has been defined on the front pages of Europe’s newspapers by conflict, repression, famine, terrorism and piracy. Thanks to international support, Somalia has made important progress since 2012 but it remains very fragile and in need of further assistance to achieve stability, security and good governance.

To that end, Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs, and Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, will gather in Brussels with a number of donors and beneficiaries.

Somaliland whole-heartedly welcomes the New Deal for Fragile States process, inaugurated in Busan in 2011 by a group of donors and post-conflict countries, as it offers a more effective mechanism to deliver development assistance to our country.

However, while supporting the New Deal process and welcoming of the donors’ engagement, we have chosen not to participate in the Conference. Somaliland and Somalia find themselves at two very different stages of development, and we therefore feel that our presence at this particular Conference, co-hosted by Somalia, would not be appropriate. We Somalilanders have governed ourselves in conditions of peace and stability for the last 22 years, and our country is at the “transformative” stage of development, whereas Somalia has yet to recover from more than two decades of civil war and much of its territory remains outside government control. Somaliland’s national needs and priorities are very different to Somalia’s.

This does not mean that we do not wish to engage with the EU —Somaliland is extremely grateful to the EU for its strong support and friendship across a whole range of important issues.

And it does not mean that we are not willing to speak and cooperate with Somalia. In 2012 the international community agreed to support a Dialogue between Somaliland and Somalia and we held three rounds of talks so far. The objective is to clarity our future relationship and in the short-term we hope to cooperate on issues like security and trade.

Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia in 1991, after a civil war in which 50,000 Somalilanders were killed, and our capital, Hargeisa, was reduced to rubble by bombs.

That independence was strongly endorsed by a referendum in 2001, and by the results of 5 democratic nation-wide elections held since that time.

We have built a separate state, which meets in full the criteria of customary international law for statehood, and which our peaceful and hard-working citizens are proud of.

We will not cooperate in attempts to rebuild the former unified state of Somalia, if it purports to include Somaliland. Nor can we cooperate in any effort to use aid as a lever to force Somaliland to become part of Somalia.

In line with our support for the New Deal process, the Somaliland Government and civil society have together adopted a document based on New Deal principles, the Somaliland Special Arrangement (SSA). This is fully compatible with our National Development Plan, and therefore reflects our own priorities.

Our intention is that the SSA will form a distinct and separate component of the broader Somali New Deal Compact, facilitating coordination between the donor community and Somaliland at the level of both government and civil society. The Federal Government of Somalia has had no input into this document.

We wish to settle our differences with Somalia peacefully and without outside pressure. It is in our interests to see Somalia recover its former stability, provided that it does not compromise our own stability, nor our people’s desire for Somaliland to be recognised as an independent state.

We support the New Deal, and hope to be able to work with the EU in the future to build not only a strong, stable and democratic Somalia, but a strong, stable, democratic and independent Somaliland too.

Temp chief: Workers face 'a la carte' employment

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:48:03 +0200

The European labour market is being overhauled in a thorough 'individualist' revolution that is moving workers away from fixed-term contracts and towards collaboration and subordination, argues Denis Pennel.

Denis Pennel is managing director of Eurociett, the European Confederation of Private Employment Agencies. He has just published a book in French 'Travailler pour soi' (Working for oneself)

He spoke to Daniela Vincenti. The interview was carried out in French.

Quel avenir pour le travail à l’heure de la révolution individualiste ?

C’est la fin du travail tel que nous le connaissons. Car une révolution bouleverse actuellement le monde du travail: l’aspiration des individus à un travail épanouissant et adapté à leur projet de vie, qui contraint décideurs politiques et partenaires sociaux à repenser la relation d’emploi et le modèle social.

Après le politique (et l’avènement de la démocratie représentative), le religieux (de plus en plus de pratiquants abandonne le dogme pour se fabriquer une religion à la carte), les mœurs (une relation amoureuse peut se contractualiser sous différentes formes telles que union libre, PACS, mariage civil/et ou religieux…), la vague d’individualisation de nos sociétés s’attaque aujourd’hui au monde du travail et en touche toutes les composantes : attitude, contrat, conditions, espace et temps de travail, management, gestion des carrières. Les travailleurs ne veulent plus appartenir, ils veulent choisir !

Cette vague d’individualisation – couplée à la mondialisation, la tertiarisation de nos économies, l’essor des TIC et les évolutions démographiques – dessine une nouvelle réalité du travail faite de diversification des contrats, personnalisation des conditions de travail, porosité croissante entre vie privée et vie professionnelle, essor du travail indépendant. Le modèle unique a vécu, vive le travail à la carte ! Chacun veut désormais pouvoir « rester soi » au travail. Désormais, c’est le travail qui doit s’adapter aux contraintes personnelles et choix individuels (et non plus l’inverse).

Comment nos enfants travailleront-ils demain ?

Demain l’emploi sera fragmenté, individualisé, à la carte. La relation de subordination sera remplacée par une relation de collaboration, dans laquelle la maîtrise et l’aménagement des tâches par les salariés eux-mêmes seront déterminants. Le modèle unique fondé sur le CDI et l’échange subordination du salarié contre salaire est devenu caduque. On le constate déjà par la diversification des contrats de travail (près de 40 en France, en Belgique ou en Italie !) et par l’essor de nouvelles formes d’emploi (auto-entreprenariat, portage salarial, crowdsourcing…). Ma conviction est qu’on a sans doute atteint aujourd’hui, en France et en Europe, le point culminant du salariat.

Quelle sera la forme d’emploi dominante ?

Le CDI n’est bien évidemment pas amené à disparaître mais sa part dans la population active va diminuer. Au profit d’autres contrats de travail salarial mais surtout, je pense, d’autres formes de travail de nature plus indépendante. Afin de pouvoir rester soi tout en travaillant !

Quels types d’organisation du travail vont-ils s’imposer dans les entreprises ?

Deux grands types opposés d’entreprises pourraient coexister à l’avenir : d’une part, l’entreprise en réseau, quasi virtuelle ; d’autre part, de grands groupes intégrés, conglomérats à tendance néo-paternaliste. Le premier archétype possible d’entreprise est une alliance de petites structures et de « nuées » de travailleurs indépendants qui se regroupent puis se défont en fonction de projets délimités dans le temps. Cette structure d’entreprise est une réponse à l’impératif de réactivité, au besoin de recourir à des expertises de plus en plus pointues, au manque de visibilité des marchés, à la complexité des processus de production.

A l’opposé, on pourrait assister à la constitution de larges firmes mondiales, véritables conglomérats répartis sur de nombreux pays, où l’appartenance à l’entreprise est cultivée à son paroxysme. Les salariés se sentent plus des citoyens de la marque de leur employeur que de leur pays. L’entreprise a développé toute une gamme de services et de prestations sociales pour fidéliser ses salariés : mutuelle santé, système de retraites complémentaires, centre de vacances, coaching, formations professionnelles, mobilité interne. Ces entreprises vont recréer de la sécurité pour leurs employés, les protégeant face à un marché du travail incertain et à un délitement des Etats providence.

Est-ce que l'Union européenne a mis en place la bonne stratégie pour développer la compétitivité des travailleurs de demain?

L’attention est aujourd’hui trop focalisée sur la conjoncture du marché de l’emploi et pas assez sur son évolution structurelle. Car nous vivons moins une crise de l’emploi qu’une mutation du travail : une multitude de faits convergents démontrent que le futur du travail est déjà parmi nous: diversification des contrats, personnalisation du temps de travail, porosité croissante entre vie privée et vie professionnelle, essor du travail indépendant…

Face à la montée de l’individualisme, il est impératif de moderniser l’organisation du marché du travail à la société post-industrielle. C’est en cela que la flexicurité est un bon concept, à condition de comprendre que les employeurs et les travailleurs ont tout autant besoin de flexibilité que de sécurité.

Faut-il d’autres politiques? Lesquelles?

Il faut refonder notre contrat social, inventer de nouvelles formes de sécurité afin de réconcilier l’individu et le collectif, et de combiner flexibilité et sécurité. Pour au final replacer l’individu au cœur de la relation d’emploi. Notre modèle social a été conçu à une époque révolue, industrielle, de production de masse et de plein emploi, où les travailleurs (essentiellement des hommes) étaient en CDI.

Or aujourd’hui, les gens changent de travail beaucoup plus fréquemment, alternent périodes de travail et de chômage, beaucoup sont en temps partiel ou en contrats flexibles, passent du salariat au travail indépendant… Et la population active n’a jamais été aussi diverse !

Pour combiner flexibilité et sécurité, il faut imaginer de nouvelles réponses en termes de sécurisation des parcours professionnels. Faire en sorte que ce n’est pas parce que vous changez d’emploi ou de statut professionnel que vous perdez vos droits ou avantages sociaux. D’où l’importance de développer la portabilité et la transférabilité des droits afin que ces derniers ne soient plus attachés à une entreprise ou à un emploi mais à la personne, qui pourra les capitaliser tout au long de son parcours professionnel. Aujourd’hui, ce sont moins les emplois qu’il faut protéger que les personnes !

Croatia signals move to end extradition row with EU

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:44:17 +0200

Croatia will move fast to amend its extradition law to avoid possible European sanctions, public radio reported on 13 September, weeks after a legislative change to protect veterans of its 1991-95 war from prosecution abroad.

European Commission sources told Reuters on 12 September that Brussels might punish Croatia as early as this week in a row over the extradition rules, which has marred the first months of the Balkan state's EU membership.

Sanctions would threaten the EU's aid programme for Croatia, notably for border control improvements vital to the country's bid to join the bloc's passport-free Schengen zone, the sources said.

A few days before Croatia joined the EU on 1 July, it changed the law to effectively ensured that veterans of the independence war could not face prosecution elsewhere in the EU.

The Commission has threatened to invoke an article in Croatia's accession treaty known as the safeguard clause, which allows Brussels to impose punitive measures if EU rules are broken.

According to the radio, the government will propose changes to the extradition law this week and parliament could approve them before the end of the month.

Government officials were not available for comment, but a senior parliamentary official and member of the ruling Social Democrats, Pedja Grbin, said the procedure should not take too long.

"Changing of a law is not a complex procedure," he said.

The government promised last month to apply the European Arrest Warrant in full from next year, in an effort to avoid sanctions, but the EU's top justice official, Viviane Reding, said the promise was not enough and demanded swift action.

She said the lack of compliance could lead to delays in the country joining the Schengen zone, which Zagreb has said is a priority.

Tweaking the rules

No inquires against Croatian war veterans have been launched anywhere in the EU.

But the country's opposition HDZ party, which ruled in the 1990s and between 2004-2011, has accused the leftist-led government of tweaking the rules to protect former Croatian intelligence chief Josip Perkovic.

Perkovic worked for communist Yugoslavia's secret service, the UDBA, and led intelligence services after Croatia became independent. He faces charges in Germany over the 1983 murder of a Yugoslav dissident in Bavaria.

Prime Minister Zoran Milanović has denied any link to the German case and said Croatia had only sought to exercise the same privileges as its EU peers.

EU members could request exemptions from the European Arrest Warrant before 2002, but the Commission says that only applies to states that were in the bloc at the time. Croatia could have asked for exemptions when it was negotiating its entry to the EU, but did not do so.

EU food aid cuts to hit Portuguese poor

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:34:56 +0200

Spending cuts to EU food aid programmes could leave Portugal's growing ranks of poor with even emptier plates, experts say.

Western Europe's poorest country is likely to lose 40% of the €20 million in food aid it gets from Brussels every year, according to Isabel Jonet, who heads the Food Banks charity.

Her institution supports 390,000 poor people out of Portugal's 10.5 million population. They have been helped by the EU's "Food for the Needy" program which is due to be replaced by the Fund for European Aid.

The new fund will have fewer resources for food, Jonet said. And the cash-strapped government has made no preparations to deal with the problem, she added.

"Unlike in other countries, Portugal does not yet have a plan to make up for the changes or for a delay in the new scheme coming through, so there may be an interruption in our distribution of food," Jonet said.

The number of those in need in Portugal has risen, as unemployment has hit record highs this year.

The economy has struggled through its worst recession in decades due to austerity measures imposed under an €8 billion EU and International Monetary Fund bailout.

"Unfortunately more and more people need this help by the day. Although small, it makes a huge difference," said a tearful Maria Mendes, 50, picking up food staples at a charity that caters for 300 people in Lisbon's old neighborhood of Graca.

Official data released in July showed that last year, 22% of the Portuguese were suffering from material deprivation, including almost 9% from severe deprivation.

The minimum wage in Portugal is €566 a month, compared with neighboring Spain's €753.

People are considered materially deprived when their income is not enough to meet basic needs like having a meal of fish or meat every other day, pay for rent, or warm their homes.

The government says it is looking at the food aid issue but gave no concrete promises to answer Jonet's concerns.

"We are working to ensure that the funds are enough to keep such a fundamental project going," Social Affairs Minister Pedro Mota Soares said. "Let's finish the negotiation process in Europe and then we'll see where we stand."

Although the current Food for the Needy scheme ends this year, there is no set deadline for the European Parliament and European Council to agree on the aid fund which will replace it.

At stake is about a third of the 44 tonnes of food that Portugal's Food Bank distributes through a network of charities and public partners every day. The rest comes from the food industry and citizens' donations.

Asked to comment on Jonet's concerns, Jonathan Todd, a European Commission spokesman for employment and social affairs, said he could not provide a country breakdown as the new fund's regulations were still being discussed.

He confirmed that the current program would end this year, and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived that will replace it envisages co-financing by member states.

But overall, the new fund should increase the resources available to make assistance broader than just food, he said.

Cry for help

Meeting deficit targets and reining in public debt may be the main concerns of lenders trying to get Portugal's economy back on its feet, but for many Portuguese the economic cure has been painful.

"Requests for help are piling up. We have many new unemployed and members of middle-class families who lost their jobs and now need help," said Susana Ambrosio, director of the Maria Roque Pereira Foundation, a Food Bank partner where Mendes gets her food basket.

Mendes, who had to quit her supermarket job after being diagnosed with cancer, has a husband who is unemployed and two children studying, had a message for the EU food policy makers.

"Please think about those who struggle, many of them are not speaking up because they are ashamed. Please consider all the other bad things the government is already doing to us," she said.

Cameron could lose premiership over UKIP surge, poll shows

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:24:27 +0200

British Prime Minister David Cameron's hopes of being re-elected in 2015 suffered a setback yesterday (15 September) when a poll showed an anti-European Union party had split the centre-right vote in dozens of decisive constituencies, leaving the path to Downing Street for Labour Ed Miliband.

The poll focused on 40 of Britain's 650 parliamentary seats where Cameron's Conservative party won with the slimmest of margins at the last national election in 2010.

According to polling data from Lord Michael Ashcroft, the billionaire former Tory party deputy chairman, the main opposition Labour party had made little progress in the constituencies despite being ahead in opinion polls nationwide.

But a surge in support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) was siphoning off support from the Conservatives, pointing to a Labour election victory, the poll showed.

If an election were held today, Labour would win 32 of the 40 battleground seats surveyed and would win overall power in Britain with a majority of about 60%, it said.

The survey, the first of its kind in two years, will worry the Conservatives who are preparing for their annual conference and have cut Labour's lead in some opinion polls to just three percentage points nationwide at a time when the economy is showing signs of recovery.

But Lord Ashcroft said the new data showed the underlying picture was more complex and that the Conservatives faced a "formidable" challenge to stay in government, let alone win an overall majority.

The Conservatives govern in coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrat party.

"The picture is seldom uniform across the country; the national headline figures can sometimes mask what is happening in marginal seats where elections are won and lost," he said.

"Labour's lead in these seats has grown from nine to 14 points over the last two years, largely because of the defection of Tory (Conservative) voters to UKIP," he said, noting UKIP had tripled its share of votes in such marginal seats since 2010.

Anti-EU, Anti-immigration

UKIP, which has no seats in the British parliament but is represented in the European Parliament, campaigns for Britain to leave the EU and for an end to what it calls "open-door immigration".

It has tapped into public disenchantment with what many Britons regard as the EU's excessive influence over their lives and into fears that immigration levels are too high.

The party did well in local elections earlier this year, winning one in every four votes cast, and is forecast to do well in European Parliament elections next year.

But Britain's "winner takes all" election system means it is unlikely to win a large number of seats in the national parliament in 2015.

Some lawmakers in Cameron's Conservatives want him to forge an electoral pact with UKIP to guard against a split vote and are likely to increase their calls for him to do so before 2015.

But Cameron and Nigel Farage, UKIP's leader, have had strained relations since 2006 when the Conservative leader said UKIP was full of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists".

Responding to pressure from within his own party and UKIP, Cameron earlier this year promised Britons an in/out EU referendum by the end of 2017 if re-elected.

Nearly 13,000 people were surveyed for the poll.