“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” What the US president said Saturday night in Warsaw about hopes for a change of power in the Kremlin still caused a verbal back-and-forth between Washington and Moscow over the weekend. Whether it was a slip of the tongue or deliberate ambiguity on the part of the US government, the Biden quote concluded a diplomatic marathon in Europe.
At the European Council, the heads of state and government had previously opened up the possibility for Ukraine to participate in joint gas purchasing. Read the Feature by Eric Bonse, Isabel Cuesta Camacho, and Manuel Berkel to find out what steps should be taken to counter high energy prices.
The US and Europe are moving closer together again, not just on energy security. In Brussels, the two sides announced an agreement on another economically important issue – a new Privacy Shield for transatlantic data protection. Falk Steiner analyzes what could still get in digital companies and intelligence services’ way.
The enforcement of the Digital Markets Act is anything but clear. Read the News to find out what will happen next for public authorities and digital companies once the negotiations have been concluded.
The Profile of Shada Islam is about the fine art of diplomacy. The migration expert wants to convey a sense of diversity and opposes a eurocentric view of people in need of help.
The EU and the US have agreed on an improved Privacy Shield. “We’ve agreed to unprecedented protections for data privacy and security for citizens,” US President Joe Biden said Friday at a press conference with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We are very pleased that we found an agreement in principle on a new framework for transatlantic data flows,” von der Leyen said. This would make data traffic across the North Atlantic “predictable and trustworthy”, “balancing security, the right to privacy and data protection,” she said. There is great joy about this among those involved, but it could be premature. For, according to Ursula von der Leyen, this is an agreement in principle. The European Data Protection Supervisor had a sober reaction: In principle, he welcomed the announcement, explained Wojciech Wiewiórowski. But such an agreement would have to meet the requirements set by the European Court of Justice.
Since the European Court of Justice declared the EU Commission’s previous agreement with the US invalid in its Schrems II ruling in summer 2020, the transatlantic transfer of personal data subject to the GDPR has been on legally shaky ground. In the coming days, the Irish data protection regulator DPC is due to announce a decision in the Facebook case. This could mean that the standard contractual clauses (SCC) used by many companies as an alternative to the Privacy Shield or comparable mechanisms will no longer be a legal option – quite a few lawyers expect this to happen.
The pressure on the negotiators on both sides grew with each passing day: US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had been talking for months about an imminent outcome, while EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders remained cautious about reaching an agreement soon. In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, however, the transatlantic alliances have become much closer again, and the dependence of the two unequal partners on each other in terms of data protection is obvious. But the main problem remains unsolved for the time being, even with the political agreement.
The agreement, called the “Enhanced Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework“, is to be underpinned by the corresponding actions in the coming weeks – and according to all available statements and documents on the agreement, this does mean concessions to the criteria of the European Court of Justice on the US side. However, these are apparently only to be made by presidential decree, the so-called executive orders.
This means that the agreement now reached faces a tough future: Many lawyers believe that the level of US data protection can only meet the ECJ requirements if the US President and the US Congress take action and create a suitable legal basis. Data subjects in the US who are protected under EU law would have to be able to take effective action against data processing that is inadmissible from an EU perspective. Since the judges in Luxembourg would thus be encroaching on US intelligence powers, this reading of the previous rulings would require not only the goodwill of the US president. It would also require the goodwill of the US Congress to actually guarantee an adequate level of data protection according to European standards, especially in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). So far, however, it has seemed inconceivable that US congressmen would curtail the powers of the FBI, NSA, or CIA based on a ruling by the highest EU judges.
Maximilian Schrems, who has already twice successfully sued the Commission’s so-called adequacy decision before the European Court of Justice, based on the previous Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield agreements, wants to take action again. He announced that a purely political agreement would not be enough. “We could play the same game a third time now; in the end, the European Court of Justice will decide.”
Here, there is unusual agreement between data protection activists and the business community: While they welcome the announcement, this is the urgently needed first step, says Rebekka Weiß from Bitkom. “Now, it’s a matter of translating this political will into a resilient legal regulation. Businesses need legal certainty quickly so that the existing data blockade can finally be dissolved.”
And other players, such as the Professional Association of Data Protection Officers (BvD), are also expressing caution: Not all issues could be resolved, says Thomas Spaeing, national chairman of the BvD. “In this respect, it remains to be seen to what extent this new agreement will hold up in court. I think one should not have too high expectations until details of the agreement are known.”
Sophie in ‘t Veld (D66/Renew) has a similar view of the new agreement: “I am curious how the new agreement is supposed to be ECJ-proof if it comes along without changes to US law,” says the Dutch MEP. Hopefully, this time the Commission made sure that the agreement is viable, hopes in ‘t Veld: “A Schrems III ruling would be a declaration of bankruptcy by the Commission as Europe’s competent executive.”
The Union is struggling with high gas prices, which also raise the price of electricity generated by gas-fired power plants. One possible means of relieving the burden could be joint purchases of fuel. At the European Council that ended last Friday in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron called joint procurement “the best instrument to lower the prices of our gas“. He pointed to the example of the COVID vaccines, which the Brussels authority ordered on behalf of member states. Support also came from Greece and Poland.
According to Macron, the Commission received a clear mandate for this with the final declaration of the summit on Friday: There are to be voluntary joint purchases of gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and hydrogen. A joint platform is to be set up for this purpose. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on the other hand, emphasized the voluntary nature of the cooperations.
The opening of the joint procurement platform to selected neighbors could prove to be at least as important as the cooperation between the EU states themselves. According to the final declaration, it should also be open to the countries of the Western Balkans and the “three associated eastern partners” – meaning Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. The former is already supplied with natural gas via European pipelines.
Kiev immediately noted Brussels’ signals over the weekend and tried to further strengthen mutual ties. Ukraine could contribute to the solidarity and balancing mechanism with its gas storage facilities, Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko wrote on Facebook on Saturday. His country has the largest underground storage facilities in Europe.
The second bone of contention at the summit was the question of how states can respond to high energy prices. The debate centered on price caps for individual energy sources, a change in market design that links the price of electricity to high gas prices, and taxing the extra profits of energy suppliers who get paid according to the high price of gas but have only low generation costs themselves with their coal-fired power plants or wind farms.
Spain and Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy and Belgium, were in favor of a price cap. France, but also Poland and Greece, advocated energy market reforms. Germany and the Netherlands, where the TTF trading point for gas is based, were particularly reluctant to intervene in the market.
The heads of state and government finally agreed to have the controversial issue of an electricity price cap examined by the EU Commission. Regarding the reform of the market design, Scholz said that this would have to be examined, but he did not expect a quick solution. It was a matter of detaching the price of electricity from fossil fuels and strengthening the role of renewable energies.
A serious dispute is said to have developed between Spain and Portugal on the one hand and the remaining EU partners on the other. Electricity prices on the Iberian Peninsula have recently risen particularly sharply – to as much as €540 per megawatt-hour. One reason is the peninsula’s poor connection to the rest of the continent via electricity and gas pipelines. This makes it difficult to reduce electricity prices at peak times. Some industries have temporarily stopped production because of the high cost of electricity.
Brussels is therefore granting Spain and Portugal the right to temporarily suspend the pricing mechanism on the electricity market to achieve a price reduction. However, this is to be done under the supervision of the Commission.
The situation on the Iberian Peninsula is special, said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She justified the exception with the high share of renewable energies.
Reports of a tangible dispute with Spanish head of government Pedro Sanchez were rejected by Chancellor Scholz. At the height of the debates, Sanchez is said to have threatened a veto and angrily left the room. In the end, Sanchez was “very successful”, Scholz summarizes, saying he was “happy to support” Spain and Portugal.
According to EU diplomats, however, it was primarily the liberal Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo who made an agreement possible. De Croo had proposed that a possible price cap be examined by the Commission and that the industry be consulted. In the end, Scholz was also able to agree to this.
Under the new scheme proposed by Spain and Portugal, electricity from gas-fired power plants would be subject to a maximum price, yet to be defined, for which compensation would subsequently be paid. This is intended to prevent the power plants from shutting down. The Spanish government expects the EU Commission to confirm the joint proposal with Portugal in a few days or weeks. It should be possible to implement the measures to ease the burden on consumers’ wallets within a month. with Isabel Cuesta Camacho, Manuel Berkel
There will be few who have so consciously found their way to Europe. Born in Pakistan, Shada Islam moved to Belgium as “diplomatic baggage” at age 18 because her father was transferred to the embassy there. She is happy to be an “accidental but happy European”. She went to school in the USA and also lived in Great Britain, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Indonesia has become her second home, she has traveled extensively in China and is also very familiar with India, Japan, and Malaysia. However, she eventually found a home in Brussels. Although chance also played a role, it was here that she became a European by choice – out of conviction: “I think that the history of the EU, the coming together and reconciling of former adversaries, is still held in high esteem around the world today. And that Europeans are sometimes not fully aware of it.”
Her work as a journalist was fundamental to her knowledge of the world. For two decades, she was the EU correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a weekly newspaper renowned in the East and Southeast Asian region. The contacts she made with high-ranking officials helped her gain a foothold as a think-tanker in 2007. At the European Policy Center and Friends of Europe, she established and led the Asia, Integration and Migration work areas. As a sideline, she also held a visiting professorship in international relations with a focus on Europe, Asia, and Africa at the College of Europe in Warsaw’s Natolin district.
In 2020, she decided to start her own business and founded the New Horizons Project: “I see myself as a ‘one-woman think-tank’.” Since then, she has focused on diversity, which she sees as one of the pillars of the European idea. This interest, however, does not contradict her previous areas of interest but is a much-needed addition to understanding geopolitics in a contemporary way.
Thus, she never tires of denouncing the mismatch between values, words, and deeds in matters of European migration policy. If the EU continues to allow migration to be militarized by aggressors, if Islamophobia moves further and further into the political center and, as in France, is misused as an advertising tool in election campaigns, then Europe will have to accept a considerable loss of respect and trust on the world stage.
For when the EU abandons its principles of inclusion, diversity, and solidarity so lightly, it undermines any critical competence through its hypocrisy and its “eurocentric view“. Assessing people in need of help as a security threat is linked to “our perceptions of other nationalities, which are often colored by stereotypes”. This makes it all the more important that this view is updated by movements such as Black Lives Matter and Brussels So White.
It is the balance between sharp analysis and confident, forward-looking perspective that defines Shada Islam’s work. To achieve her goals, she learned from her father, one must “speak truth to power – but with a degree of elegance”. She embodies this motto to this day. Julius Schwarzwälder
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” What the US president said Saturday night in Warsaw about hopes for a change of power in the Kremlin still caused a verbal back-and-forth between Washington and Moscow over the weekend. Whether it was a slip of the tongue or deliberate ambiguity on the part of the US government, the Biden quote concluded a diplomatic marathon in Europe.
At the European Council, the heads of state and government had previously opened up the possibility for Ukraine to participate in joint gas purchasing. Read the Feature by Eric Bonse, Isabel Cuesta Camacho, and Manuel Berkel to find out what steps should be taken to counter high energy prices.
The US and Europe are moving closer together again, not just on energy security. In Brussels, the two sides announced an agreement on another economically important issue – a new Privacy Shield for transatlantic data protection. Falk Steiner analyzes what could still get in digital companies and intelligence services’ way.
The enforcement of the Digital Markets Act is anything but clear. Read the News to find out what will happen next for public authorities and digital companies once the negotiations have been concluded.
The Profile of Shada Islam is about the fine art of diplomacy. The migration expert wants to convey a sense of diversity and opposes a eurocentric view of people in need of help.
The EU and the US have agreed on an improved Privacy Shield. “We’ve agreed to unprecedented protections for data privacy and security for citizens,” US President Joe Biden said Friday at a press conference with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We are very pleased that we found an agreement in principle on a new framework for transatlantic data flows,” von der Leyen said. This would make data traffic across the North Atlantic “predictable and trustworthy”, “balancing security, the right to privacy and data protection,” she said. There is great joy about this among those involved, but it could be premature. For, according to Ursula von der Leyen, this is an agreement in principle. The European Data Protection Supervisor had a sober reaction: In principle, he welcomed the announcement, explained Wojciech Wiewiórowski. But such an agreement would have to meet the requirements set by the European Court of Justice.
Since the European Court of Justice declared the EU Commission’s previous agreement with the US invalid in its Schrems II ruling in summer 2020, the transatlantic transfer of personal data subject to the GDPR has been on legally shaky ground. In the coming days, the Irish data protection regulator DPC is due to announce a decision in the Facebook case. This could mean that the standard contractual clauses (SCC) used by many companies as an alternative to the Privacy Shield or comparable mechanisms will no longer be a legal option – quite a few lawyers expect this to happen.
The pressure on the negotiators on both sides grew with each passing day: US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had been talking for months about an imminent outcome, while EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders remained cautious about reaching an agreement soon. In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, however, the transatlantic alliances have become much closer again, and the dependence of the two unequal partners on each other in terms of data protection is obvious. But the main problem remains unsolved for the time being, even with the political agreement.
The agreement, called the “Enhanced Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework“, is to be underpinned by the corresponding actions in the coming weeks – and according to all available statements and documents on the agreement, this does mean concessions to the criteria of the European Court of Justice on the US side. However, these are apparently only to be made by presidential decree, the so-called executive orders.
This means that the agreement now reached faces a tough future: Many lawyers believe that the level of US data protection can only meet the ECJ requirements if the US President and the US Congress take action and create a suitable legal basis. Data subjects in the US who are protected under EU law would have to be able to take effective action against data processing that is inadmissible from an EU perspective. Since the judges in Luxembourg would thus be encroaching on US intelligence powers, this reading of the previous rulings would require not only the goodwill of the US president. It would also require the goodwill of the US Congress to actually guarantee an adequate level of data protection according to European standards, especially in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). So far, however, it has seemed inconceivable that US congressmen would curtail the powers of the FBI, NSA, or CIA based on a ruling by the highest EU judges.
Maximilian Schrems, who has already twice successfully sued the Commission’s so-called adequacy decision before the European Court of Justice, based on the previous Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield agreements, wants to take action again. He announced that a purely political agreement would not be enough. “We could play the same game a third time now; in the end, the European Court of Justice will decide.”
Here, there is unusual agreement between data protection activists and the business community: While they welcome the announcement, this is the urgently needed first step, says Rebekka Weiß from Bitkom. “Now, it’s a matter of translating this political will into a resilient legal regulation. Businesses need legal certainty quickly so that the existing data blockade can finally be dissolved.”
And other players, such as the Professional Association of Data Protection Officers (BvD), are also expressing caution: Not all issues could be resolved, says Thomas Spaeing, national chairman of the BvD. “In this respect, it remains to be seen to what extent this new agreement will hold up in court. I think one should not have too high expectations until details of the agreement are known.”
Sophie in ‘t Veld (D66/Renew) has a similar view of the new agreement: “I am curious how the new agreement is supposed to be ECJ-proof if it comes along without changes to US law,” says the Dutch MEP. Hopefully, this time the Commission made sure that the agreement is viable, hopes in ‘t Veld: “A Schrems III ruling would be a declaration of bankruptcy by the Commission as Europe’s competent executive.”
The Union is struggling with high gas prices, which also raise the price of electricity generated by gas-fired power plants. One possible means of relieving the burden could be joint purchases of fuel. At the European Council that ended last Friday in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron called joint procurement “the best instrument to lower the prices of our gas“. He pointed to the example of the COVID vaccines, which the Brussels authority ordered on behalf of member states. Support also came from Greece and Poland.
According to Macron, the Commission received a clear mandate for this with the final declaration of the summit on Friday: There are to be voluntary joint purchases of gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and hydrogen. A joint platform is to be set up for this purpose. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on the other hand, emphasized the voluntary nature of the cooperations.
The opening of the joint procurement platform to selected neighbors could prove to be at least as important as the cooperation between the EU states themselves. According to the final declaration, it should also be open to the countries of the Western Balkans and the “three associated eastern partners” – meaning Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. The former is already supplied with natural gas via European pipelines.
Kiev immediately noted Brussels’ signals over the weekend and tried to further strengthen mutual ties. Ukraine could contribute to the solidarity and balancing mechanism with its gas storage facilities, Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko wrote on Facebook on Saturday. His country has the largest underground storage facilities in Europe.
The second bone of contention at the summit was the question of how states can respond to high energy prices. The debate centered on price caps for individual energy sources, a change in market design that links the price of electricity to high gas prices, and taxing the extra profits of energy suppliers who get paid according to the high price of gas but have only low generation costs themselves with their coal-fired power plants or wind farms.
Spain and Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy and Belgium, were in favor of a price cap. France, but also Poland and Greece, advocated energy market reforms. Germany and the Netherlands, where the TTF trading point for gas is based, were particularly reluctant to intervene in the market.
The heads of state and government finally agreed to have the controversial issue of an electricity price cap examined by the EU Commission. Regarding the reform of the market design, Scholz said that this would have to be examined, but he did not expect a quick solution. It was a matter of detaching the price of electricity from fossil fuels and strengthening the role of renewable energies.
A serious dispute is said to have developed between Spain and Portugal on the one hand and the remaining EU partners on the other. Electricity prices on the Iberian Peninsula have recently risen particularly sharply – to as much as €540 per megawatt-hour. One reason is the peninsula’s poor connection to the rest of the continent via electricity and gas pipelines. This makes it difficult to reduce electricity prices at peak times. Some industries have temporarily stopped production because of the high cost of electricity.
Brussels is therefore granting Spain and Portugal the right to temporarily suspend the pricing mechanism on the electricity market to achieve a price reduction. However, this is to be done under the supervision of the Commission.
The situation on the Iberian Peninsula is special, said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She justified the exception with the high share of renewable energies.
Reports of a tangible dispute with Spanish head of government Pedro Sanchez were rejected by Chancellor Scholz. At the height of the debates, Sanchez is said to have threatened a veto and angrily left the room. In the end, Sanchez was “very successful”, Scholz summarizes, saying he was “happy to support” Spain and Portugal.
According to EU diplomats, however, it was primarily the liberal Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo who made an agreement possible. De Croo had proposed that a possible price cap be examined by the Commission and that the industry be consulted. In the end, Scholz was also able to agree to this.
Under the new scheme proposed by Spain and Portugal, electricity from gas-fired power plants would be subject to a maximum price, yet to be defined, for which compensation would subsequently be paid. This is intended to prevent the power plants from shutting down. The Spanish government expects the EU Commission to confirm the joint proposal with Portugal in a few days or weeks. It should be possible to implement the measures to ease the burden on consumers’ wallets within a month. with Isabel Cuesta Camacho, Manuel Berkel
There will be few who have so consciously found their way to Europe. Born in Pakistan, Shada Islam moved to Belgium as “diplomatic baggage” at age 18 because her father was transferred to the embassy there. She is happy to be an “accidental but happy European”. She went to school in the USA and also lived in Great Britain, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Indonesia has become her second home, she has traveled extensively in China and is also very familiar with India, Japan, and Malaysia. However, she eventually found a home in Brussels. Although chance also played a role, it was here that she became a European by choice – out of conviction: “I think that the history of the EU, the coming together and reconciling of former adversaries, is still held in high esteem around the world today. And that Europeans are sometimes not fully aware of it.”
Her work as a journalist was fundamental to her knowledge of the world. For two decades, she was the EU correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a weekly newspaper renowned in the East and Southeast Asian region. The contacts she made with high-ranking officials helped her gain a foothold as a think-tanker in 2007. At the European Policy Center and Friends of Europe, she established and led the Asia, Integration and Migration work areas. As a sideline, she also held a visiting professorship in international relations with a focus on Europe, Asia, and Africa at the College of Europe in Warsaw’s Natolin district.
In 2020, she decided to start her own business and founded the New Horizons Project: “I see myself as a ‘one-woman think-tank’.” Since then, she has focused on diversity, which she sees as one of the pillars of the European idea. This interest, however, does not contradict her previous areas of interest but is a much-needed addition to understanding geopolitics in a contemporary way.
Thus, she never tires of denouncing the mismatch between values, words, and deeds in matters of European migration policy. If the EU continues to allow migration to be militarized by aggressors, if Islamophobia moves further and further into the political center and, as in France, is misused as an advertising tool in election campaigns, then Europe will have to accept a considerable loss of respect and trust on the world stage.
For when the EU abandons its principles of inclusion, diversity, and solidarity so lightly, it undermines any critical competence through its hypocrisy and its “eurocentric view“. Assessing people in need of help as a security threat is linked to “our perceptions of other nationalities, which are often colored by stereotypes”. This makes it all the more important that this view is updated by movements such as Black Lives Matter and Brussels So White.
It is the balance between sharp analysis and confident, forward-looking perspective that defines Shada Islam’s work. To achieve her goals, she learned from her father, one must “speak truth to power – but with a degree of elegance”. She embodies this motto to this day. Julius Schwarzwälder
