European Union

After years of debate, the EU unveils its first high-level policy document on the Roma. Now it’s up to national governments to fill in the outline.

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Angela Kocze has been a firsthand witness to all the calamities that have befallen her fellow Roma over the two decades since Central and Eastern Europe rid itself of communist rule.

Nevertheless, Kocze is the rare voice to somehow muster “cautious optimism” about the first unified European Union policy to target the plight of the Roma, Europe’s largest, most-despised and most-marginalized minority.

by Elizabeth Pond. Originally published by our partner site, World Policy Blog.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Just days before Christmas, Hungary's new right-wing government, which now controls a near-invincible two-thirds of parliament, succumbed to temptation: It rubber-stamped a draconian-sounding new media law that looked as if it would slip a leash of censorship around the necks of both traditional and online media.

Now, I’m not talking about the seeming inability of print and broadcast news outlets to successfully adapt to newfangled inventions like the Internets and Electronic Mail, but rather their slavish dedication to a peculiar worldview where the Cold War never ended.

At a recent EU summit in Brussels, the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke with other officials about the implementation of the European volunteer service or, the “European Peace Corps.” Although sending volunteers overseas to help out in developing countries has been around for decades, as a volunteer myself working for an organisation funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), I can’t help but feel that it still goes largel

BRATISLAVA – It’s always nice to hear what a colleague’s up to nowadays.

However, I was both pleased and troubled to recently find one featured in The New York Times, as the “curtain-raising” anecdote of an unhealthy trend emanating from Brussels.