Euobserver.com

Belgium will begin Covid-19 vaccinations on 5 January in the "best case scenario", its prime minister Alexander De Croo and health minister Frank Vandenbroucke told parliament on Thursday. Vandenbroucke defended waiting for the European Medicines Agency to certify the Pfizer/BioNTech drug. The first 300,000 people to be vaccinated will be in elderly care homes and hospitals. The next tranche will go to over 65-year olds, then at-risk 45-to-65s.

After the UK approved the use of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNtech, the pressure is mounting on the EU. But how are these vaccines approved in the bloc - and what is the legal liability?

Disgraced former Hungarian MEP József Szájer tried to derail a European Parliament resolution against Hungary over rule of law in 2018, but an EU court official has said his case was likely "unfounded".

Brussels is now considering withdrawal from the controversial Energy Charter Treaty, if negotiations to modernise it fail. A leaked European Commission proposal, dated October, revealed that loopholes remain regarding the protection of fossil-fuel investment.

In the coming days the European Commission seems poised to green-light the acquisition of Fitbit by Google. The deal is a major threat to human rights and must be stopped in its tracks.

Brussels is increasingly expected to serve as the European Union's sheriff on rule of law - but its ability to enforce adherence to democratic norms and values remains weak.

The European Commission, along with EU agencies and the Greek government, have agreed to build and operate a new reception centre on the Greek island of Lesbos. A European Commission spokesperson said the new centre will be "fully aligned with EU standards" and completed by early September 2021. The latest centre comes after the EU hotspot known as Moria, an overcrowded and unsanitary camp in Lesbos, burned to the ground.

The former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a key architect of European integration in the early 1970s, has died at the age of 94 after contracting Covid-19, The Guardian reports. Giscard, who served as France's leader from 1974 to 1981, had recently been hospitalised in Tours with respiratory problems, and was released only to return to hospital in mid-November. He died at his family home.

Belgium sent packing 15,000 EU nationals who wanted to live there over the past ten years on grounds they could not financially support themselves and had become a burden to the state, according to a study by the University of Liege, reported by The Brussels Times. The figures, albeit small, showed the limits of EU free movement, with 21 out of the 27 EU states having similar laws in place.

Dozens of members of the European People's Party have called for a vote on expelling MEP Tamas Deutsch, the head of delegation of the Hungarian ruling party Fidesz. In a letter, MEPs say "with growing dismay and impatience, we witness the increasing radicalisation and verbal abuses of certain Fidesz MEPs" after Deutsch compared group leader Manfred Weber's comments to the Gestapo and to Hungary's communist-era secret police, the AVH.

Slovakia's Supreme Court has extended the sentence of Miroslav Marček, a former soldier convicted of murdering investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee in 2018, from 23 years to 25 years. The new sentence cannot be appealed and was extended due to the severity of the crime, prosecutors said. By contrast, the killers of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, in 2017, have still not been convicted.

Amnesty International condemned what it called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's "execution spree" in a report Wednesday, noting that 57 people were killed in October - twice the figure for all of 2019. But for his part, French president Emmanuel Macron declined to criticise Egypt when he met Sisi in Paris Tuesday, saying: "Just as I don't accept being lectured on how to govern my country, I don't lecture others".

The EU has set out how to undo the damage caused by four years of US president Donald Trump's rule, by trying to "make multilateralism great again".

The Szájer affair exposes the extent to which Hungary's government is able to control the political narrative in the country, where independent media has been under attack for a decade.

"We are confident a solution can be found," a senior commission official said, adding that money from the recovery fund could start flowing in June, as originally planned.

The pandemic has both hampered access to mental health services, while increasing demand for psychological support, particularly in countries with the most severe coronavirus lockdowns. Meanwhile, experts warn that 'teletherapy' is not a universal fix.

Some MEPs now want a formal inquiry into Frontex, plus member states, and the European Commission over allegations of illegal pushbacks. Dutch MEP Tineke Strik says she has so far received backing from the Greens, liberals and far-left GUE.

Not just gas drilling, but also Turkey's human rights abuses will weigh in on EU leaders' talks on future relations, the EU foreign service has said.

The EU will rise more united and stronger than ever, Alexander Schallenberg, Austria's Europe minister, told the 2020 Prague European Summit. Although national instincts drove the initial reaction to Covid-19, he said, the shift toward solidarity among members occurred quickly.

The impact of Covid-19 on the scale, demography and length of current protests cannot be underestimated. Newspapers have hailed them "the biggest demonstrations since the fall of communism in 1989".