European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a press conference in Brussels, Belgium on December 18, 2024 [AB Konseyi/Pool/Anadolu Agency]
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen marked the first anniversary of the Hamas cross-border incursion by saying: “On October 7, 2023, the world awoke to horrifying images of unspeakable savagery, scenes that will remain etched in our minds forever. On this tragic anniversary, I want to honour the memories of the victims. The European Union stands with all the innocent people whose lives have been shattered to the core since that fateful day.”
Since the EU supports Israel’s security narrative, and von der Leyen in particular has been unequivocally blatant in her support of apartheid Israel and its genocide (one now former MEP labelled her “Frau Genocide”), her statement, of course, does not include Palestinian victims of Israel’s brutality over the past 76 years.
The money follows von der Leyen’s rhetoric.
Since 7 October and the start of Israel’s genocide, the settler-colonial entity has been awarded over €238 million under the Horizon programme, with €640,000 going to Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI). Between 2014 and 2020, Israeli research institutions, many of them with links to the Israeli military, received €1.28 billion in funding from Horizon.
In June this year, the EU Research and Innovation Commissioner Iliana Ivanova determined that “Termination [of such deals] solely on the basis of nationality would be improper and would amount to discrimination prohibited under the Association Agreement.”
Ivanova’s statement was the reply to a letter sent by Flemish universities seeking guidance on how to proceed in research projects involving Israeli institutions, noting that Article 14 of the Horizon Europe grant agreement stipulates, among other ethical considerations, ensuring the rights of minorities, which clearly Israel does not. The letter does not mention genocide, it merely references “the recent binding rulings of the International Court of Justice on the situation in Gaza and the military actions of the Israeli Government.” Nevertheless, the EU was swift to distort a very basic concern regarding ethical considerations into alleged discrimination against Israel on the basis of nationality.
While Israel continues to benefit from the Horizon programme, the EU announced earlier this week that it will be investing €28.3m to stabilise the Palestinian economy across Gaza, Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. However, it has already been estimated that removing the 42 million tonnes of debris from Gaza alone will cost $700m.
The actual rebuilding of Gaza will require over $80 billion.
Citing the defunct two-state paradigm, EU Representative Alexandre Stutzman commented, “Economic progress and political resolution go hand in hand, and today’s investment is a testament to our belief that fostering stability and growth is an essential part of this vision.”
What vision, exactly? EU funding has not produced a Palestinian state, and the Palestinian Authority has grown considerably weaker, not only because of financial deficit, but because Ramallah thrives, as Israel does, on subjugating the Palestinian people. The two-state hypothesis will not be implemented because there was never any intention for it to be implemented; colonialism does not set aside any space for the emergence of a state. Israel’s genocide in Gaza confirms this, and so does the increasing incitement for the same practices to be executed in the occupied West Bank. Have EU officials yet to hear about Israeli settler leaders’ incitement, despite calls for genocide being reported on Israeli media?
Can the EU explain what €28.3m can achieve in terms of reviving the Palestinian economy, when clearing Gaza of the debris left by Israel is just the first step in establishing the foundations for a semblance of normalcy in a colonial setting? And can the EU note what an absurdly impossible scenario I have just described — a semblance of normalcy in a colonial setting — for lack of a better explanation of what it might allow Gaza to become?
Genocide is so profitable for the EU that it can allocate €28.3m for illusions, and that is without taking into account the entire farce and cost of purported Palestinian state-building. All of this just so that Israel can arrive at a point where genocide has become a security precaution and the slightest ethical concern about its killing and wounding at least 160,000 Palestinian women, children and men is condemned as “improper… discrimination” based on nationality.
Police wait for migrants to disembark in the port of Catania, Italy, 2023 | Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images. All rights reserved
Deploying ‘anti-mafia’ tactics against migrants and those standing in solidarity with them is solving nothing
In November 2023, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, gathered the country’s top prosecutors at the headquarters of the powerful anti-mafia and anti-terrorism directorate, the DNAA. The far-right leader flattered them, boasting about the Italian judiciary’s global prestige.
“Italy used to export mafia,” she said. “Now it exports anti-mafia.”
She was trying to smooth over tensions around her government’s plans to limit the powers of organised crime investigators. Yet there was more to Meloni’s statement than she perhaps realised.
Over the past decade, the DNAA shifted focus from fighting Italy’s mafia to tackling undocumented migration. The directorate became central to Europe’s response – a hub for national police forces and European agencies like Frontex and Europol to exchange and refine anti-migration tactics.
The DNAA’s success lay in its apparent ability to throw investigative findings behind an idea that politicians were keen to believe: that undocumented migration is essentially a matter of organised crime and should be dealt with as such. A prosecutor in Palermo branded this approach “the Italian job” – but Italy wasn’t alone in this effort.
In recent years, many European border countries have seen an explosion of court cases against people thought to facilitate migration in some way. Driving a dinghy, providing shelter or medical assistance, even receiving a distress call from a sinking boat is now enough to make someone vulnerable to prosecution.
Migrants, as always, have been the main targets. But prosecutors have also set their sights on European activists and aid workers in what can be described as a campaign to criminalise solidarity.
Since 2013 this judicial policy has been turbocharged with unprecedented funding, but its roots stretch back over two decades. The technical and legal groundwork was laid after the fall of the Soviet Union and reinforced following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States – an inflection point that saw migration become ever more intertwined with security concerns.
The policy has run long enough to be assessed. And, at least at the practical level, it has been a complete failure.
Searching for a mafia to take down
Critical smuggling scholars agree that large, hierarchical smuggling rings are rare. Their contribution to migration flows is insignificant. The vast majority of migration facilitation instead comes from loose chains of actors who do not share a common employer. A migrant finds somebody who can help with a step or two, and then finds someone new to help with the next step, building out this ‘chain’ as they go along.
European prosecutors ignore these inconvenient truths about migration, but that doesn’t change the result. Smuggling ‘kingpins’ are not ending up in the dock, and the people who do are rarely worth the judge’s time.
European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy
The failure of this policy is not lost on its proponents. They are well aware of the reports that confirm these findings. So when it comes to reducing the number of undocumented arrivals, politicians resort to much cruder methods than the formalities of court procedures, such as so-called ‘border externalisation’ policies.
These are bilateral agreements between European states and various foreign entities in what Europe labels transit countries – governments, militias, autocratic rulers, law enforcement bodies, and security services. They typically include provisions for military equipment, technology, training, political support, and fat contracts for European and local companies and aid agencies.
In return, beneficiaries commit to intercepting, incarcerating, or taking back undesired migrants. European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy, having shown some effectiveness in curbing migration flows, at least along specific routes and long enough to scrape through an election year.
So if the campaign against migration and solidarity offers, at best, a short-term dip in movement in some places but no real long term results, why is it pursued with such fervour? Authorities claim it’s about justice: smugglers exploit migrants in distress for profit and migrants infringe on a country’s sovereignty by entering without permission, both of which are morally unacceptable. They can’t just let that slide.
Campaigners take a different view: criminalisation, they argue, serves as a political tool to deflect blame from the real culprits of migrants’ suffering. “Tens of thousands have died at Europe’s borders over the last two decades,” says Sara Traylor, an activist in Palermo. “Policymakers push the false narrative that punishing facilitators of border crossings will solve this crisis. But these deaths stem directly from Europe’s closed doors and neo-colonial policies.”
Making a smuggler
Traylor co-authors “From Sea to Prison,” a report tracking the arrests of individuals accused of being “crew” on small dinghies arriving in Italy. Her group in Palermo is part of the broader European Captain Support network, a coalition of grassroots organisations providing information and legal support to those accused of maritime smuggling.
“Since 2013, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested in Italy alone,” she said. “Thousands more have faced similar fates in Greece and Spain. The UK and France have also stepped up prosecutions for those attempting to cross the Channel.”
The Captain Support network often highlights blatant miscarriages of justice. Their “Free the footballers” campaign seeks to exonerate eight asylum seekers from Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Morocco serving 30-year sentences in Italy. Included among them are professional football players. Arrested in 2015 and accused by the DNAA branch in Catania of steering a dinghy where 49 people suffocated, they were identified by witnesses who received residence permits for their cooperation. Initial testimonies had denied the presence of smugglers.
In court, it emerged that suspects were pre-selected based on their appearance on a military rescue boat. Frontex officers found them “suspicious” due to their clothes, and they had stood out to the Italian police on board “because of their lighter skin”. Witness statements collected by the police were nearly identical, with entire sections copied and pasted, and were largely retracted in court. Interpreters often didn’t speak the right languages.
Yet despite evidence that at least five were paying passengers, their sentences were upheld. A final ruling this April said only a presidential pardon could address the “disparity” between the sentence “and the moral dimension of their actual culpability”.
A volunteer rests as migrants disembark in Salerno, Italy in July 2023 | Ivan Romano/Getty Images. All rights reserved
According to Traylor, this case is not extreme: police interrogations after traumatic crossings, manipulated witness statements, lack of interpreters, inadequate legal defence, and the use of intimidation or inappropriate incentives to secure cooperation are recurrent in smuggling cases.
Traylor doesn’t claim that everyone helped by the Captain Support Network is innocent in a legal sense; a few may have acted for profit, but avoiding profit motives doesn’t prevent convictions. “Criminalised individuals come from diverse backgrounds and motivations,” she said. “The only common factor is that they’re accused of helping someone to cross a border.”
“The term ‘Captains’ restores agency to those on the move, who often don’t see smugglers as morally reprehensible,” she said. “Sometimes, boat drivers are even celebrated as heroes.”
The views Traylor holds today are considered fringe. They were once mainstream.
Shifting perceptions
In 1980, the highest criminal court in Germany heard a peculiar smuggling case. The smuggler was the plaintiff, and was referred to as an “escape helper”. He had sued a refugee for unpaid fees after a failed attempt to transport him from East to West Germany.
The court ruled the fees must be paid with interest, stating the refugee had made “use of his fundamental right to freedom of movement” and that helping someone exercise this right, even for profit, “does not in principle act contrary to morality.”
The court backed the Berlin Senate’s view that smuggling becomes criminal only when “capitalising on the personal distress of others” turns into “a permanent source of considerable income”.
Since then, the notion of what warrants criminal punishment has stretched to absurd extremes. It now includes everything from walking up to a border unaided to being related to someone crossing illegally, or even posting on social media about wanting to cross.
Refugees, once seen as freedom-seekers, have become ‘undesirable’ economic threats
In June 2022, 23 migrants were killed in clashes with Spanish and Moroccan security forces while trying to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Though the victims had reached the border on foot, Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish prime minister, blamed “human trafficking mafias” for the tragedy.
Later that year, Tunisian mothers protesting the mass drowning of migrants were met with a shocking response: Vincent Cochetel, a special envoy for the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), suggested “symbolically prosecuting parents for putting at risk their children.”
Just weeks ago, the Moroccan government, eager to appease Spain in externalisation talks, arrested 60 teenagers for social media posts about swimming to Ceuta, a Spanish town on the North African coast. They even placed barriers to prevent access to the sea in towns near the enclave.
This massive shift in perceptions is often traced to the post-Soviet era: refugees from the Eastern Bloc pouring into Western Europe, once seen as freedom-seekers, transformed into ‘undesirable’ economic threats. In this period European countries tightened asylum and visa laws, forcing refugees into illegal routes.
By the late 1990s, an influx of mostly Kurdish refugees from Iraq raised alarm in Germany, where politicians started to speak of “illegal immigration organised by criminal gangs” and pressured coastal states like Italy and Greece for tougher action against smugglers. Around the same time, Italy began prosecuting Kurds arriving by boat. And in the UK, a report from the late 1990s found that courts in coastal towns were seeing “two or three trials for facilitating illegal entry every week”, with sentences ranging from one to three years.
This process accelerated dramatically after the 11 September 2001 attacks. In Western political discourse, migrants became increasingly associated with security threats and terrorism. But political rhetoric alone doesn’t explain these changes.
In his seminal study of the subject, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, French sociologist Jef Huysmans argued that security agencies played a pivotal role in constructing migration as a criminal threat. Political visions, he noted, rely on “evoking fears and emergencies” while offering “credible methods” to control these insecurities. Security agencies then step in, using their expertise to provide competing solutions to the problems politicians present.
Italy’s DNAA proved to be a master in this game.
Power grab
On 3 October 2013, over 360 people, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, drowned off the coast of Lampedusa. Authorities ignored their overloaded boat for hours, until a passenger lit a makeshift torch that sparked a fire, capsizing the vessel.
Days later, in an official resolution, EU leaders declared that the tragedy “had shocked all Europeans”. To avoid more deaths, they pledged to “step up the fight against trafficking and smuggling.”
DNAA prosecutors were already at work to make that happen. The previous day they had met in Rome for the first in a series of “coordination meetings to fight maritime illegal immigration”. These meetings came to be attended by Frontex, Europol and Eurojust representatives alongside Italian law enforcement. The DNAA leveraged the credibility it had gained from decimating Cosa Nostra to assert its ability to tackle this new security threat.
That anti-mafia prosecutors could claim jurisdiction over undocumented migration, though, wasn’t a given. Before 2013, the DNAA’s remit was limited to trafficking, where people are forced across borders for exploitation, often through organised networks. Smuggling, however, involves voluntary crossings and is an offence against border laws, not people.
The Lampedusa disaster blurred this line: the journey was so deadly it seemed no one would take it willingly. With the public still emotional and desperate for solutions, the DNAA made the most of this confusion.
Handbooks said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for statements against boat drivers
After the first meeting, the agency published guidelines expanding Italy’s jurisdiction into international waters for anti-smuggling operations. By invoking laws ranging from the slave trade era to the American war on drugs, they framed migration as part of a broader criminal continuum.
These guidelines referenced provisions of the 1958 Geneva Convention allowing high-seas police operations against the slave trade and piracy; the 2002 EU Facilitators Package that criminalises aiding undocumented entry and stay; and even the Reagan-era Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act.
Subsequent governments codified the DNAA’s expanded role. After the 2015 Paris attacks, the agency was granted the anti-terrorism mandate (“thanks to the work we did from 2013 on,” said Franco Roberti, then DNAA chief). Two years later it was assigned migrant smuggling.
With the jurisdictional groundwork in place, the DNAA moved on to securing arrests. Working with police and European navies, they formalised the investigative methods at work in the case of the Libyan football players.
Law enforcement handbooks advised identifying smugglers based on details like clothing and attitude toward the police. They also said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for information and witness statements against boat drivers. Because civil rescue ships operated by NGOs interfered with this activity, in a 2017 coordination meeting attended by EU law enforcement the DNAA top brass discussed charging them with aiding and abetting smuggling.
The arrests made through these methods led to outlandish stories eagerly reported by the media: smugglers branding migrants’ heads with knives, boat drivers tossing a toddler overboard to hinder rescue efforts of their own sinking boat, and human rights activists making under-the-table deals with traffickers. Though debunked in court, these accounts made lasting impressions on the public. And because they targeted people arriving in Italy on dinghies, those arrested weren’t even smugglers or traffickers.
The only high-profile target of the DNAA was the alleged trafficking kingpin Medhanie Yedhego Mered, an Eritrean accused of organising numerous sea journeys from Libya. The investigation, a collaboration between the DNAA and the UK’s National Crime Agency, culminated in a dramatic press conference announcing Mered’s arrest in Sudan.
However, it soon emerged that the man flown to Palermo from Khartoum on a military jet was actually Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, a carpenter from Asmara. Prosecutors held him in prison for three years before partly admitting the mistake.
Calogero Ferrara, the DNAA prosecutor behind the case and the proponent of the “Italian job” approach, responded by wiretapping Guardian journalist Lorenzo Tondo, who exposed the error, and later sued him for libel. He recently called to strengthen international legislation against migrant smuggling.
In a 2022 interview, even Franco Roberti, the former DNAA boss, recognised that the anti-migration strategy put in place after the Lampedusa shipwreck was a failure. But, he attributed it to a lack of cooperation from foreign police rather than any conceptual shortcoming. Lessons were not learnt.
Doubling down
After yet another shipwreck killed at least 94 people 150 metres from the Italian shore in February last year, Giorgia Meloni’s government doubled down once again. This time it established unprecedentedly high prison terms for those convicted of smuggling. Last January, she asked the DNAA to start investigating regular migration flows for potential document fraud as well.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, recently visited Italy to learn more about the Italian model of combating irregular migration. At a joint press conference, Meloni said that she and “Starmer agree that the first thing to do is to step up the fight against the trafficking in human beings”. She emphasised that Italy’s strategy was inspired by Giovanni Falcone, the judge murdered by the Sicilian mafia in 1992 shortly after founding the DNAA, and called for a stronger role for Interpol and Europol in anti-smuggling efforts.
Starmer concurred, spelling out the goal of his Italy trip: “to share intelligence, share tactics, shut down smuggler routes, and smash the gangs”.
And around we go.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.
Call for industry reform as latest results support belief that products are being bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup
The honey industry faces new demands to overhaul its supply chain after more than 90% of sampled products bought from large British retailers failed pioneering authenticity tests.
The UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network sent 30 samples last month from Britain for a novel commercial test based on the DNA profiles of genuine honey. Five were from UK beekeepers and 25 from big retailers, including supermarkets.
The tests found that 24 out of the 25 jars of honey from retailers were considered suspicious.
…
An EU investigation published last year found 46% of imported sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent, including all 10 honey samples from the UK.
The EU is working on advanced testing techniques to detect honey fraud and has passed new legislation to provide improved labelling of country of origin on jars of honey.
Greenpeace activists light up a mock bomb labeled “CO2” during a campaign in front of the German Chancellery in Berlin on March 25, 2009. (Photo: Michael Gottschalk/DDP/AFP via Getty Images.
As attendees gathered in the south of France Thursday for the start of a European Union-hosted summit on carbon capture and storage, an international coalition of green groups warned against funding “reckless, unscientific, and lobbyist-driven” false climate solutions and instead urged investment in “a just transition that prioritizes renewable energy, energy demand reduction, and energy efficiency.”
“Today the Industrial Carbon Management Forum (ICMF) kicks off in Pau, France,” 43 organizations wrote in a letter to the European Commission. “This forum has been revealed to be dominated by fossil fuel interests to the exclusion of civil society stakeholders and other expert voices with critical views.”
🚨 As the #ICMForum kicks off, civil society groups blow the whistle on the Europen Union’s reckless, unscientific, lobbyist-led Carbon Capture and Storage plans!
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) October 10, 2024
The letter points to a report published Thursday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which concluded that “most of Europe’s planned carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications are too expensive to work on a commercial basis and are nowhere near ready to be rolled out.”
According to the report, Europe’s planned CCS projects will cost an estimated €520 billion ($569 billion), which IEEFA energy finance analyst and report author Andrew Reid said “will force European governments to introduce eye-wateringly high subsidies to prop up a technology that has a history of failure.”
The green groups’ letter also notes widespread criticism of CCS, which has been panned by Food & Water Watch—whose European branch signed the letter—as a “false climate solution” and a “lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.”
The signers wrote that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “has labeled CCS as one of the most costly and least effective emissions reduction methods, and an Oxford study found high-CCS pathways could cost $30 trillion more globally than renewable alternatives,” the signers wrote, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The letter continues:
As well as being prohibitively expensive, plans for carbon capture and storage (CCS) at scale face overwhelming technical challenges and the records show 50 years of failure. Even with $83 billion in investment since the ’90s, research found that nearly 80% of large-scale projects fail. The industry itself has acknowledged that for all these efforts, only 52 metric tons of carbon dioxide have ever been stored long-term, highlighting the unlikeliness of achieving the E.U.’s stated goal of storing 280 metric tons of CO2 by 2040…
The union has already spent over €3 billion ($3.3 billion) on CCS and hydrogen projects—hydrogen is often paired with CCS to attempt to capture the carbon dioxide emissions released during hydrogen production from fossil fuels in order to label hydrogen a low-carbon fuel. However, this ignores the ineffectiveness of CCS to reduce emissions and the continued use of fossil fuels in the process.
“We cannot afford to give further investments to the fossil fuel industry to gamble with our future and our tax money,” the green groups stressed. “Money allotted to CCS would be better spent on the communities and countries that need it most and on ensuring a full and fair phaseout of fossil fuels.”
In stark contrast, E.U. Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said during the opening session of the CCS summit that the 27-nation bloc’s climate target plan “underlines that industrial carbon management is not just an alternative, it is a vital complement to renewable energy and energy efficiency.”
The letter’s signers are calling on E.U. policymakers to:
Stop wasting money on CCS projects and commit to a full phaseout of fossil fuels;
Reject the influence of the fossil fuel industry;
Commit to a full consideration of the scientific and real-world evidence of CCS’ failures, limitations, and challenges; and
Invest instead in real climate, health, and nature solutions that deliver a transition to a clean, healthy, and safe economy.
“The current fossil fuel industry influence on the E.U.’s carbon capture policy undermines the E.U.’s ability to meet its climate goals and responsibilities, and is damaging its reputation and leadership,” the groups asserted. “Rejecting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and investing in climate action that can actually deliver emissions cuts and steer a just transition from the fossil fuel economy is crucial if the E.U. is to deliver real solutions for climate, nature, and people.”
Oil storage tanks and a container terminal are seen in the Port of Le Harve, northern France on June 12, 2023. (Photo: Peter Titmuss/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“E.U. leaders must make a choice: Stand with the people and the planet, or continue propping up an economy that’s driving us towards climate catastrophe,” said one advocate.
Warning that policymakers in the European Union are undermining the bloc’s own climate goals by continuing to subsidize fossil fuel extraction, climate scientists and other experts from across Europe were among the signatories of an open letter released Wednesday, demanding that officials redirect hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to “turbocharge climate solutions.”
The coalition United for Climate Justice spearheaded the letter, which comes ahead of a planned march in Brussels on Saturday, October 5.
“These subsidies go against Europe’s plans for a sustainable and just transition and fuel the devastating heatwaves we have seen this past summer in our continent,” reads the letter. “Europe is now the fastest warming continent; we have reached a turning point and cannot afford to delay any further.”
Groups including Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, and Greenpeace E.U. pointed to goals the bloc has set in recent years, including the 8th Environmental Action Program, which entered into force in 2022 and included a commitment to “phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.”
📜 More than 130 organisations and academics have endorsed an open letter to demand an immediate end to fossil fuel subsidies in the EU. 🛑 It’s time to walk the talk and put a stop to billions of euros fueling the climate crisis!#StopFossilSubsidiespic.twitter.com/sfXVyuNr6F
The subsidies, which were estimated at more than €400 billion ($441 billion) in 2023, also stand in the way of meeting climate targets put forward in the European Green Deal, said the signatories. The plan aims to make Europe “the first climate-neutral continent,” with no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 and “interim targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 and by 90% by 2040,” notes the letter.
“This will not happen without an immediate phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies,” said the groups bluntly, “as a step towards a fossil-free Europe.”
By continuing to subsidize fossil fuel projects, they added, the E.U. is also flouting its own Parliament’s declaration of a climate emergency in 2019.
To act in line with the declaration and its climate commitments, said the groups, the E.U. must:
Set a timeline for the phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025, providing technical and financial assistance to member states facing challenges in meeting phaseout deadlines and offer incentives for achieving milestones ahead of schedule;
Adopt comprehensive methodological guidance for member states that accurately and transparently accounts for both explicit and implicit subsidies associated with fossil fuels; and
Develop a binding framework to monitor and report on member states’ progress towards phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, with noncomplying members facing consequences such as financial penalties and reduced access to E.U. funding.
The bloc’s fossil fuel subsidies “distort energy demand, perpetuate dependence on polluting energy sources, and undermine European energy security, while subsidizing industries that contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions,” said the groups.
Phasing out the subsidies would “future-proof the European economy, reducing climate-related financial risks,” they added.
The letter comes weeks after Storm Boris dumped record-breaking rains on European countries including Romania, Austria, and Poland, leading to deadly flooding.
“The E.U. cannot claim leadership on climate action while continuing to support polluting industries with billions,” said Angela Huston Gold, spokesperson for United for Climate Justice. “E.U. leaders must make a choice: Stand with the people and the planet, or continue propping up an economy that’s driving us towards climate catastrophe. The recent disastrous floods in Central and Eastern Europe are yet another wake-up call. We must end our fossil fuel dependency and therefore eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies.”
Also last month, the Portuguese government declared a “state of calamity” over wildfires that killed at least seven people. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the E.U.’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) determined the Europe is the fastest-warming continent.
“Year after year, commitments have been made and left unfulfilled, and we can no longer accept inaction,” said the signatories of Wednesday’s letter, who also included Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, and Paul Stubbs of the Institute of Economics in Croatia. “Until these necessary changes occur, people will continue to take to the streets to make our voices heard and hold you accountable.”
