Digital Brief: Crimes against journalism

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“There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”

-Daphne Caruana Galizia’s final remarks on her Running Commentary blog, October 16, 2017.

MALTA. While Climate Change, the MFF and Turkey are likely to dominate this week’s European Council Summit, the issue of the 2017 murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia also looks like it could also emerge as one of the more contentious issues. On Wednesday, a coalition of European media outlets wrote to EU leaders convening today, urging them to put pressure on the Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to ensure that a fair investigation into Caruana Galizia’s murder is allowed to take place.

“Our organisations now call on European Union leaders to urge prime minister Muscat to guarantee that all investigations and legal proceedings will be conducted impartially, promptly and effectively, and without any involvement or influence at all from any individual potentially implicated in the case,” states the letter, which includes signatories from the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the Association of European Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.

Muscat is also likely to come under pressure from fellow EU leaders today to step down from his post immediately. He is due to walk away from the role mid-January, but the EPP contingency in the Council would like to see Muscat go earlier. EPP Chairman Manfred Weber said earlier today that Muscat should leave his job with delay.

Caruana Galizia had dedicated her working life to investigating and exposing cases of corruption at the highest levels of the Maltese government. Former government chief of staff Keith Schembri has faced allegations of attempting to influence the criminal investigation by providing tipoffs to Yorgen Fenech, who is suspected of complicity in the murder.

Keith Schembri had previously masterminded Muscat to two electoral victories and Muscat’s appearance in Brussels today will be awkward, to say the least.

Elsewhere, Daphne’s son Andrew Caruana Galizia appeared as a special guest at the EESC December plenary session recently and highlighted the need for more EU involvement in the ongoing investigation.

“Many of the crimes my mother uncovered were European crimes, crimes that involved several jurisdictions. It is impossible for one single police to deliver justice for many of these crimes. EU membership allowed the free flow of money and political support at the European level, without the free flow of justice and police investigation,” he said.

Meanwhile, a contingency of MEPs and media experts, including EURACTIV founder Christophe Leclercq, recently wrote to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a bid to rally for more support for the continent’s media sector, in light of various risks to the sustainability of journalism today.

GREEN DEAL. The Commission’s commitment to tackling climate and environmental-related challenges from a tech perspective focuses on ensuring that the products and services of tomorrow are sustainable in the long term. This involves exploring the possibility for a ‘right to repair’ for electronic devices, in addition to ensuring that new technologies can be a “critical enabler” in reaching green goals.

This is important because many in Brussels are starting to make noise about the many environmental and health impacts that various burgeoning technologies could have.

Would the Commission ever directly block the emergence of certain technologies proved to have a negative environmental impact? Many in Brussels are calling on the Commission to consider exercising their ‘precautionary principle’ with regards to the future deployment of 5G across the bloc, which involves potentially taking preventive action against in the face of uncertainty or possible risk.

Enshrined in Article 191 of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s precautionary principle states that “environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source.”

This was one of the points raised earlier this week as part of an event on 5G held in the European Parliament, hosted by Bulgarian S&D MEP Ivo Hristov, who raised in particular the various health risks associated with 5G.

“Currently the EU has no assessment of the human health risk of the introduction of 5G technology,” he said. “The European Commission took the position that such an assessment was not necessary, despite warnings of the scientific community. I find this irresponsible.”

UK ELECTION. UK voters head to the ballot boxes today as polls suggest that the Conservatives look set to emerge as the largest party. However, the opposition Labour party has closed the gap on the reigning Tories, with estimates putting the distance between the two now at around 8 points. On the tech front, the whole campaign has been beset by allegations of disinformation being spread by parties, in a bid to jockey for influence. On the subject of fake news, British cybersecurity officials are investigating whether classified UK-U.S. trade documents that were shared online ahead of today’s election were acquired by hacking or were leaked.

One particular angle that the Labour party has attempted to use to its advantage is the National Health Service, which it says would be much better off under a Labour government. Along this axis, it transpired earlier this week that the health data belonging to millions of UK NHS patients has been sold under license to US companies and global pharmaceutical firms, in a move that is likely to inflame tensions between the UK government and privacy campaigners.

Moreover, other concerns with regards to US interest in UK health data have been raised recently, as documents released as part of a freedom of information request revealed the extent to which the US e-commerce giant Amazon is able to take advantage of NHS data. The company had contracted a controversial deal with the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care earlier this year that allows Amazon to access NHS data in order to improve its products and services, such as for the Alexa voice assistant.

DATA PROTECTION. The French data protection authority, the CNIL, yesterday published a report examining data protection in the context of democracy, technology and citizen participation.

Staying with the CNIL, on Tuesday, the data protection advocacy group NOYB, which was established by renowned activist Max Schrems, revealed that it has reported three GDPR complaints to the CNIL, alleging a series of cookie violations.

In Brussels, the EU data protection watchdog, the EDPB, has released guidelines on the criteria of the right to be forgotten in the search engines cases under the GDPR.

HUNGARIAN FACEBOOK FINE. The Hungarian Competition Authority, the GVH, has announced that it has fined Facebook 3.6 million euros for alleged violations of the country’s competition law, for advertising its services as being free of charge on its home page and Help Centre.

HUNGARIAN CULTURAL LAWS. EURACTIV’s Željko Trkanjec and Vlagyiszlav Makszimov report this week that the Hungarian government’s new package of laws on cultural activity is an attack on cultural freedom, according to the opposition LMP party. LMP referred its complaint to the general ombudsman saying that the government is attempting to make cultural institutions dependent on local authority funding and impose other restrictive measures, lawmakers Antal Csárdi and Péter Ungár told a news conference.

HANDKE BOYCOTT. Trkanjec also reports that the Office of Željko Komšić, Chairman of the Presidency of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), has informed the Embassy of BiH in the Kingdom of Sweden that no authorisation is given for any presence on behalf of BiH on the ceremony of the Nobel Prize for literature. It is given to Peter Handke, who was a fervent advocate of Serbian policy during the war in former Yugoslavia. Croatia, Turkey, Albania and Kosovo also announced that their ambassadors will not attend the ceremony. Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić Radman told EURACTIV that “the fact that Handke attended the funeral [of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević] makes us believe even more firmly that the Nobel prize went to the wrong man.

BATTERIES GALORE. On the heels of Tesla’s recent announcement of opening its first European Gigafactory near the Berlin-Brandenburg airport, the federal state of Brandenburg is getting its next big investment, reports EURACTIV’s Sarah Lawton. The BASF Group is planning to spend around half a billion euros to build a factory to produce cathodes for car batteries. The Commission’s approval to unlock €3.2 billion of state aid for European battery production helped the project clear a decisive hurdle.

EU SPACE CENTRE.  EURACTIV’s Ondřej Plevák reports that the future EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), which will be based on the existing European GNSS Agency (GSA), will be headquartered in the Czech Republic as of 2021 and will hire between 600 and 700 new employees, transport ministry representatives confirmed yesterday (11 December).

Based in Prague, the GSA has been managing Europe’s global satellite navigation system Galileo. The new agency will be in charge of Copernicus which, along with Galileo, have become global references in satellite positioning and earth observation, among other things, the Czech News Agency reports.

On my radar.

Things are quieting down before the end of the year, but next week, the Council Horizontal Working Party on cyber issues get together to discuss a range of hot topics, such as cyber threats and China. On the agenda, some items have been marked as ‘secret,’ perhaps suggesting the sensitivity of the discussions taking place. 

What else I’m reading this week:

• What Germans googled the most in 2019 (DW)
• Facebook ads push misinformation about HIV prevention drugs, LGBT activists say, ‘harming public health’ (Washington Post)
• These are the worst hacks, cyberattacks, and data breaches of 2019 (ZDNet)

Read more with Euractiv

MEP: Commission 'irresponsible' on 5G health risks

The European Commission is “irresponsible” in not addressing the health risks associated with the future rollout of next-generation mobile network, Bulgarian MEP Ivo Hristov has said.