UK Foreign Secretary calls on Putin to intervene in Belarus migrant crisis

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 14 November 2021

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LONDON - The Foreign Secretary has urged Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to intervene in the “shameful manufactured migrant crisis” unfolding at the border between Belarus and Poland.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Liz Truss says Russia has a “clear responsibility” to end the escalating migrant stand-off, adding the UK “will not look away”.

A large number of migrants are in a makeshift camp on the Belarusian side of the border, with Polish authorities reporting daily new attempts by the migrants to breach the divide.

The Belarusian defence ministry has accused Poland of an “unprecedented” military build-up on the border, saying migration control did not warrant the concentration of 15,000 troops backed by tanks, air defence assets and other weapons.

The European Union has accused Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, of encouraging illegal border crossings as a “hybrid attack” to retaliate against the bloc’s sanctions on his government for its crackdown on domestic protests after his disputed 2020 re-election.

Belarus denies the allegations but says it will no longer stop refugees and migrants from trying to enter the EU.

Ms Truss has called on the Kremlin to intervene in the crisis, writing: “Russia has a clear responsibility here. It must press the Belarusian authorities to end the crisis and enter into dialogue.”

Russia and Belarus have a union agreement envisaging close political and military ties.

Ms Truss added the stand-off “marks the latest step by the Lukashenko regime to undermine regional security.

“He is using desperate migrants as pawns in his bid to create instability and cling on to power, regardless of the human cost,” she wrote.

“The United Kingdom will not look away. We will stand with our allies in the region, who are on the frontier of freedom.”

Her comments come after a small team of British armed forces personnel was deployed to Poland amid growing tension at the border.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said on Thursday a “small team” was deployed to the area to provide “engineering support”.

Journalists who took on Putin and Duterte win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 08 October 2021

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By Nerijus Adomaitis and Victoria Klesty

OSLO - Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, journalists whose work has angered the rulers of the Philippines and Russia, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, an award the committee said was an endorsement of free speech rights under threat worldwide.

The two were awarded "for their courageous fight for freedom of expression" in their countries, Chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen of the Norwegian Nobel Committee told a news conference.

"At the same time, they are representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions," she added. "Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda."

Muratov dedicated his award to six contributors to his Novaya Gazeta newspaper who had been murdered for their work exposing human rights violations and corruption.

"Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natasha Estemirova - these are the people who have today won the Nobel Prize," Muratov said, reciting the names of slain reporters and activists whose portraits hang in the newspaper's Moscow headquarters.

Ressa, who has faced years of legal cases in the Philippines over the work of her Rappler website, said the prize would help her organisation's mission.

"We're going through a dark time, a difficult time, but I think that we hold the line," she said.

"We realise that what we do today is going to determine what our tomorrow is going to be."

FIRST FOR JOURNALISTS IN 86 YEARS

The prize is the first Nobel Peace Prize for journalists since the German Carl von Ossietzky won it in 1935 for revealing his country's secret post-war rearmament programme.

Muratov, 59, is the first Russian to win the peace prize since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Gorbachev himself has long been associated with Novaya Gazeta, having contributedsome of hisNobel prize money to help set up the paperin the early post-Soviet days when Russians anticipated new freedoms.

Ressa, 58, is the first winner of a Nobel prize in any field from the Philippines. Rappler, which she co-founded in 2012, has grown prominent through investigative reporting, including into large scale killings during a police campaign against drugs.

In August, a Philippine court dismissed a libel case against Ressa, one of several lawsuits filed against the journalist who says she has been targeted because of her news site's critical reports on President Rodrigo Duterte.

The plight of Ressa, one of several journalists named Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2018 for fighting media intimidation, has raised international concern about the harassment of media in the Philippines, a country once seen as a standard bearer for press freedom in Asia.

In Moscow, Nadezhda Prusenkova, a journalist at Novaya Gazeta, told Reuters staff were surprised and delighted.

"We're shocked. We didn't know," said Prusenkova. "Of course we're happy and this is really cool."

Russian journalists have faced an increasingly difficult environment in recent years, with many being forced to register as agents of the state.

"We will leverage this prize in the interests of Russian journalism which (the authorities) are now trying to repress," Muratov told Podyom, a journalism website. "We will try to help people who have been recognised as agents, who are now being treated like dirt and being exiled from the country."

SPOTLIGHT

Reiss-Andersen said the Nobel committee intended the award to send a message about the importance of rigorous journalism at a time when technology has made it easier than ever to spread falsehoods.

"We find that people are manipulated by the press, and ... fact-based, high-quality journalism is in fact more and more restricted," she told Reuters.

It was also was a way to shine a light on the difficult situations for journalists, specifically under the leadership in Russia and the Philippines, she added.

"I don't have insight in the minds of neither Duterte, nor Putin. But what they will discover is that the attention is directed towards their nations, and where they will have to defend the present situation, and I am curious how they will respond," Reiss-Andersen told Reuters.

The Kremlin congratulated Muratov.

"He persistently works in accordance with his own ideals, he is devoted to them, he is talented, he is brave," said spokesman Dmitry Peskov. read more

The award will give both journalists greater international visibility and may inspire a new generation of journalists, said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

"We normally expect that greater visibility actually means greater protection for the rights and the safety of the individuals concerned," he told Reuters.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.

French fishermen threaten to blockade Calais in fishing rights row

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Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 06 October 2021

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PARIS - French fishing industry representatives have threatened to block the port of Calais and stop exports to the UK in the run-up to Christmas, in the escalating dispute over fishing rights.

French fishermen say they feel deceived by the UK Government for failing to grant them enough post-Brexit fishing licences to access British waters.

“As far as French fishermen in northern France are concerned, in the absence of any results, the blocking of the port of Calais and exports to the United Kingdom for the period leading up to Christmas is an option,” said Olivier Lepretre, president of the powerful fishing committee for the northern Hauts-de-France region.

French fury was sparked after the Government in London announced last month that it had approved just 12 of the 47 applications it had received from French small boats.

Those denied licences were unable to prove a track record of fishing activity in the six-to-12 nautical mile zone in the years before the UK’s departure from the EU, according to a UK Government spokesman.

But the Hauts-de-France fishing committee said the French have worked “meticulously” to provide that evidence, calling the British allocation an “unacceptable decision” on Tuesday.

Mr Lepretre’s threat came a week after he held talks with French maritime minister Annick Girardin, who has asked the European Commission for possible retaliatory measures.

Ms Girardin met virtually with France’s Europe minister Clement Beaune and MEPs Pierre Karleskind and Nathalie Loiseau to “defend the rights of our fishermen”, according to a Wednesday tweet by Ms Loiseau.

“They don’t have to pay the price for #Brexit,” she posted, pledging “calmness, firmness and determination”.

A day earlier, Mr Beaune said France would “take European or national measures to exert pressure on the UK”, and hinted that Britain’s imported energy supply could be disrupted in retaliation for a lack of access to UK waters.

The UK’s Brexit minister, Lord Frost, said it was “unreasonable” to suggest the UK was acting in bad faith when it came to allocating post-Brexit fishing licences to French boats, accusing France of being disingenuous over the UK’s position on fishing access.

“We have been extremely generous and the French, focusing in on a small category of boats and claiming we have behaved unreasonably, I think is not really a fair reflection of the efforts we have made,” he told a Conservative Party conference fringe event on Tuesday.

“The Government has this year issued a large number of licences to EU vessels seeking to fish in our exclusive economic zone (12-200 nautical mile zone) and our territorial sea (six-12 nautical mile zone),” a UK Government spokesman told the PA news agency.

The spokesman added that the approach had been “fully in line” with the UK’s commitments in the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) agreed as part of the Brexit divorce deal.

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said the UK will be “calm but resolute” in the row.

“Of course, what the French need to adjust to is the new reality as we have left the EU, we have got a free trade deal – it includes scope on fishing but they can’t expect to have the kind of quotas they had previously, unlimited access,” he told TalkRadio on Wednesday.

The cross-Channel tensions over fishing have been long-running, with earlier rows leading to Navy ships being scrambled to Jersey amid concerns of a blockade of the island.

It is also not the first time the French have used the energy supply threat to try to gain ground in the Brexit row.

In May, Ms Girardin warned that France was ready to take “retaliatory measures” after accusing Jersey of dragging its feet over the issuing of licences to French boats under the terms of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deal.

Jersey gets 95% of its electricity supply from France, with just under half of the UK’s electricity imports, as of 2020, coming from the same source.