Tag: aid

Although the world's attention is fixed on the Arab Spring, human rights abuses continue in the Palestinian territories and the EU should consciously use its aid policy to push for an end to the blockade of Gaza and a moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank, argues Chris Bain of CIDSE.

The European Commission has defended its humanitarian action in Haiti, where an outbreak of cholera has killed at least 250 people following an earthquake in January that devastated the country's capital Port-au-Prince.

Some 50 donors, among whom the largest was the EU, promised a total of 7.3 billion euros for the reconstruction of earthquake-hit Haiti at a conference in New York yesterday (31 March). The EU contribution amounts to €1.235 billion, the bloc's foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton announced.

"The EU has to restructure its failed strategy [in Gaza] and seek to bring the new US administration to a similar re-appraisal and policy change," argue Michael Emerson and Richard Youngs, associate senior research fellows at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), and Natalie Tocci, senior research fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, in a January CEPS report.

The EU's foreign affairs, development and health ministers have agreed that, following the short-term humanitarian relief efforts, the focus should now shift to the rehabilitation and long-term reconstruction of the tsunami-hit regions.