Europe

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42655760

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the western German city of Giessen on Saturday as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization was set to kick off its founding convention.

Groups of protesters blocked or tried to block roads in and around the city of some 93,000 people in the early morning. Police said they used pepper spray after stones were thrown at officers at one location.

The new youth organization of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is to be set up in a meeting at Giessen’s convention center. Its predecessor, the Young Alternative — a largely autonomous group with relatively loose links to the party — was dissolved at the end of March after AfD decided to formally cut ties with it.

More in the article.

European Council data showing that 17 percent of people with disabilities experience violence, compared to eight percent of those without disabilities.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5853903

Opinion piece by Natalia Morozova, a lawyer for Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre.

Archived version

Remember how everyone recently laughed at the UN for publishing a tearful report saying that no one reads its reports? Well, I can tell you about a fresh report that will sadly be read by even fewer people than any UN document.

Because each of its 224 pages is filled with blood and torture. In every third paragraph, someone is being beaten or electrocuted. And when there’s no beating or torture, there’s a tedious explanation of Russian missile guidance systems and why international law prohibits using such systems at night for strikes on cities — even if the missiles are supposedly high-precision and aimed strictly at military targets.

This report from the Memorial Human Rights Center, titled “Ukraine: War Crimes of the Russian Aggressors,” presents the results of our trip to Ukraine in January 2025.

To give our report even a chance of getting as many views as the UN’s work, I won’t spoil where exactly we were, why we went or what we saw. But I will explain why it’s still worth reading, even if we were slow to publish.

At a time when peace plans, amnesties for war criminals and lifting various sanctions are being discussed, it is crucial to know and remember what Russia is doing in the occupied territories.

For example, Russian soldiers gouged a man’s eye out because they found a blue-and-yellow discount card from the Ukraina supermarket in his wallet. The card, they claimed, indicated sympathy for Nazism.

Other Russians mockingly staged a mass execution of several dozen people the day before withdrawing from Kherson.

Others went a step further by actually executing three brothers simply because the eldest had once served in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (the Ukrainian mission to defend its territorial integrity in 2014-2018). The middle brother miraculously survived after a bullet hit him in the jaw. He crawled out of what was literally a mass grave, made his way back to the village by back roads and told them everything.

Russian soldiers also stole cars and engaged in other forms of looting and torture as brutal as their imagination can concoct. Always with taunts of “fascist” and “Banderite scum,” and the words, “And what made you think you can live better than us?”

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This is the terror Russia establishes in the occupied territories.

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Imagine being forced [as an inmate in a Russian penal colony] to stand motionless from six in the morning until eight in the evening without shifting your weight or leaning on anything. Move, and they beat you. This goes on for months while you develop varicose veins, ulcers or gangrene. This is how they torture people at the notorious Penal Colony No. 10 in Mordovia. In addition, prisoners have dogs set on them, suffer beatings and are forced to memorize “Katyusha” and the Russian national anthem.

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We can now afford to say we warned you.

Although, as the dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin liked to say, we did not “put logic into this system.” Therefore, it is pointless to look for it: a pattern of brutality is unmistakably visible from Chechnya through Georgia and Syria to Ukraine.

Web archive link

When an unemployed father of three received a phone call in July, asking if he wanted to do a yearlong bodyguard training program in Russia, he says he jumped at the opportunity.

He said the woman on the other line identified herself as a daughter of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president. He said she told him that after completing the program, he would be given a job working security for her father’s political party, for which she held a seat in Parliament.

But within six weeks of arriving in Russia, the man, 46, sensed that something was off. His supposed bodyguard trainers gave him military fatigues and a rifle and took him to the southern city of Rostov. A short time later, he said, he was on the front line of the war in Ukraine, sleeping in trenches in mud-soaked battlefields in the Donbas region and surrounded by tanks, drones and raging gunfire.

“We had been lied to,” said the man, who said he was still stuck in Russia and requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “There was no bodyguard training. We were going to war.”

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Seventeen South Africans have sent distress signals to their government this month asking to be rescued from the grinding battle in Ukraine, according to the office of President Cyril Ramaphosa. Mr. Ramaphosa has announced an investigation into how the men ended up there, and an elite police unit says it is looking into criminal charges against Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, Mr. Zuma’s daughter, who has been accused by one of her own sisters of tricking the men into joining the Russian battle.

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The sister, Nkosazana Bonganini Zuma-Mncube, said in a statement that she had a “moral obligation” to inform the authorities about Ms. Zuma-Sambudla’s involvement in the scandal. Eight of her own family members had been “lured to Russia under false pretenses and handed to a Russian mercenary group to fight in the Ukraine war without their knowledge or consent,” Ms. Zuma-Mncube said in her statement.

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The 46-year-old father of three sent The Times a photo of a military service certificate written in Russian with his picture on it. It describes him as a driver in a howitzer artillery platoon participating in Russia’s “special military operation” on Ukrainian territory, including Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. He said he had been pulled back from the front line but was told he would receive more military training soon. He is no longer in the Donbas region, he said.

“We don’t want to die here,” he said. “I am a shell of a human being, physically spent. It is complete misery.”

Web archive link

German lawmakers are set to approve spending €2.9 billion ($3.4 billion) on 11 military procurement contracts, including for drones, rifles and missiles, in deals that will go largely to domestic manufacturers.

The defense ministry asked parliament to give the green light for the orders, including the purchase of as many as 250,000 G95 assault rifles from Heckler & Koch for €765 million.

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Lawmakers are expected to approve the purchases at a closed-door meeting next week.

Germany launched a major push to modernize its armed forces following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, setting aside fiscal discipline to channel hundreds of billions of euros to boost defense readiness.

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In a break from German military procurement tradition, the ministry plans to award two competing consortia a €68 million deal to develop an AI platform to monitor NATO’s eastern flank, including in Lithuania, where Germany is ramping up a permanent battle tank brigade to deter Russia.

The first group is Airbus Defence & Space and Quantum Systems and the second is German defense startups Helsing and Arx Robotics, according to the documents, which say a larger contract is planned at a later date.

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Norwegian defense manufacturer Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace AS is among the few foreign companies set to win a deal. The military is seeking to procure €445 million for missiles for Germany’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets, according to the documents. This authorization follows a contract signed in June for the missiles.

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Kyiv's mayor Vitaly Klitschko said a 13-year-old child was among the injured and four people had been taken to hospital.

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Earlier this week a similar attack on Kyiv killed seven people, Ukrainian officials said. The latest bombardment came as Ukrainian negotiators were preparing for talks with US officials this weekend on an amended US peace plan.

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"Enemy drones are over the city, with air defence responding," the head of Kyiv's military administration, Tymur Tkachenko wrote on Telegram.

"Currently, in Kyiv there is a total of one dead and seven injured, including one child."

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The body of a man was recovered by rescuers in the Sviatoshynskyi district west of the city, Tkachenko confirmed.

Two women were among the wounded in the town of Brovary east of Kyiv, with the regional governor saying "missiles and drones" targeted residential areas.

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The regulation, already informally agreed with the Council, will establish the first-ever European defence industry programme (EDIP). The scheme seeks to strengthen the European defence technological and industrial base, and boost European defence capabilities.

Of EDIP’s €1.5 billion budget, €300 million would go to the Ukraine Support Instrument. Co-legislators also agreed to create a Fund to Accelerate Defence Supply Chain Transformation (the FAST instrument) to total an indicative amount of at least €150 million through additional financial contributions.

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MEPs also championed the “buy European” principle: for defence products to secure funding, the cost of their components originating from non-associated third countries cannot exceed 35% of the estimated total cost of components.

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The programme will set up a legal framework for European defence projects of common interest. To be eligible for funding, these will need to involve at least four member states; Ukraine will be able to participate. The legislation will also set up a Ukraine Support Instrument (USI) to help modernise the Ukrainian defence industry and ease its integration with the European defence industry.

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Austria plans to buy 12 Italian-made M-346 FA fighter jets to replace Saab 105 planes which it decommissioned at the end of 2020, the government said on Saturday.

Citing military sources, newspaper Krone said a letter of intent was due to be signed on Saturday with the Italian Defence Ministry for the planes made by Italy's Leonardo.

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In the frame of this agreement, European Aerospace corporation Airbus and AED, a Brussels-based organisation representing Europe’s aerospace, space, defence, and security industries, have set the base to launch a series of studies in order to create a valuable industrial proposition to replace the current Portuguese F-16 fleet with a truly European solution, the Eurofighter programme.

“In a time where European sovereignty and industrial autonomy is at the forefront of our strategy, Airbus strongly believes that the Eurofighter is the best option for this replacement,” said Jose Luis de Miguel, head of region Europe Airbus Defence and Space. “Our relationship with Portugal is based on decades of cooperation, not only in the civil sector, but also in the military, through the C295 Medium Transport programme, and our intention is to continue building on that mutual trust.”

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"We have not given up cooperation [with Russia] in any area, regardless of any external pressure," Orban told Putin.

“German taxpayers' money would be used to consolidate the European aviation industry unilaterally in France,” assesses Germany's aerospace industries' association

The United States is poised to recognise Russia’s control over Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian territories to secure a deal to end the war.

One well-placed source said: “It’s increasingly clear the Americans don’t care about the European position. They say the Europeans can do whatever they want.”

While welcoming voluntary CSAM scanning, scientists warn that some aspects of the revised bill "still bring high risks to society without clear benefits for children."

european funds recovery initiative Search Search... Digital Omnibus: How Big Tech Lobbying Is Gutting the GDPR HOME Related News

Digital Omnibus: How Big Tech Lobbying Is Gutting the GDPR Last week we at EFRI wrote about the Digital Omnibus leak and warned that the European Commission was preparing a stealth attack on the GDPR

Since then, two things have happened:

The Commission has now officially published its Digital Omnibus proposal.

noyb (Max Schrems’ organisation) has released a detailed legal analysis and new campaigning material that confirms our worst fears: this is not harmless “simplification”, it is a deregulation package that cuts into the core of the GDPR and ePrivacy.

What noyb has now put on the table

On 19 November 2025, noyb published a new piece with the blunt headline: “Digital Omnibus: EU Commission wants to wreck core GDPR principles”

Here’s a focused summary of the four core points from noyb’s announcement, in plain language:

New GDPR loophole via “pseudonyms” and IDs

The Commission wants to narrow the definition of “personal data” so that much data under pseudonyms or random IDs (ad-tech, data brokers, etc.) might no longer fall under the GDPR.

This would mean a shift from an objective test (“can a person be identified, directly or indirectly?”) to a subjective test (“does this company currently want or claim to be able to identify someone?”).

Therefore, whether the GDPR applies would depend on what a company says about its own capabilities and intentions.

Different companies handling the same dataset could fall inside or outside the GDPR.

For users and authorities, it becomes almost impossible to know ex ante whether the GDPR applies – endless arguments over a company’s “true intentions”.

Schrems’ analogy: it’s like a gun law that only applies if the gun owner admits he can handle the gun and intends to shoot – obviously absurd as a regulatory concept.

arzh-CNnlenfrdeitptrues european funds recovery initiative Search Search... Digital Omnibus: How Big Tech Lobbying Is Gutting the GDPR HOME Related News

Digital Omnibus: How Big Tech Lobbying Is Gutting the GDPR Last week we at EFRI wrote about the Digital Omnibus leak and warned that the European Commission was preparing a stealth attack on the GDPR

Since then, two things have happened:

The Commission has now officially published its Digital Omnibus proposal.

noyb (Max Schrems’ organisation) has released a detailed legal analysis and new campaigning material that confirms our worst fears: this is not harmless “simplification”, it is a deregulation package that cuts into the core of the GDPR and ePrivacy.

What noyb has now put on the table On 19 November 2025, noyb published a new piece with the blunt headline: “Digital Omnibus: EU Commission wants to wreck core GDPR principles”

Here’s a focused summary of the four core points from noyb’s announcement, in plain language:

New GDPR loophole via “pseudonyms” and IDs The Commission wants to narrow the definition of “personal data” so that much data under pseudonyms or random IDs (ad-tech, data brokers, etc.) might no longer fall under the GDPR.

This would mean a shift from an objective test (“can a person be identified, directly or indirectly?”) to a subjective test (“does this company currently want or claim to be able to identify someone?”).

Therefore, whether the GDPR applies would depend on what a company says about its own capabilities and intentions.

Different companies handling the same dataset could fall inside or outside the GDPR.

For users and authorities, it becomes almost impossible to know ex ante whether the GDPR applies – endless arguments over a company’s “true intentions”.

Schrems’ analogy: it’s like a gun law that only applies if the gun owner admits he can handle the gun and intends to shoot – obviously absurd as a regulatory concept.

Weakening ePrivacy protection for data on your device

Today, Article 5(3) ePrivacy protects against remote access to data on your devices (PCs, smartphones, etc.) – based on the Charter right to the confidentiality of communications.

The Commission now wants to add broad “white-listed” exceptions for access to terminal equipment, including “aggregated statistics” and “security purposes”.

Max Schrems finds the wording of the new rule to be extremely permissive and could effectively allow extensive remote scanning or “searches” of user devices,ces as long as they are framed as minimal “security” or “statistics” operations – undermining the current strong protection against device-level snooping.

Opening the door for AI training on EU personal data (Meta, Google, etc.)

Despite clear public resistance (only a tiny minority wants Meta to use their data for AI), the Commission wants to allow Big Tech to train AI on highly personal data, e.g. 15+ years of social-media history.

Schrems’ core argument:

People were told their data is for “connecting” or advertising – now it is fed into opaque AI models, enabling those systems to infer intimate details and manipulate users.

The main beneficiaries are US Big Tech firms building base models from Europeans’ personal data.

The Commission relies on an opt-out approach, but in practice:

Companies often don’t know which specific users’ data are in a training dataset.

Users don’t know which companies are training on their data.

Realistically, people would need to send thousands of opt-outs per year – impossible.

Schrems calls this opt-out a “fig leaf” to cover fundamentally unlawful processing.

On top of training, the proposal would also privilege the “operation” of AI systems as a legal basis – effectively a wildcard: processing that would be illegal under normal GDPR rules becomes legal if it’s done “for AI”. Resulting in an inversion of normal logic: riskier technology (AI) gets lower, not higher, legal standards.

Cutting user rights back to almost zero – driven by German demands

The starting point for this attack on user rights is a debate in Germany about people using GDPR access rights in employment disputes, for example to prove unpaid overtime. The German government chose to label such use as “abuse” and pushed in Brussels for sharp limits on these rights. The Commission has now taken over this line of argument and proposes to restrict the GDPR access right to situations where it is exercised for “data protection purposes” only.

In practice, this would mean that employees could be refused access to their own working-time records in labour disputes. Journalists and researchers could be blocked from using access rights to obtain internal documents and data that are crucial for investigative work. Consumers who want to challenge and correct wrong credit scores in order to obtain better loan conditions could be told that their request is “not a data-protection purpose” and therefore can be rejected.

This approach directly contradicts both CJEU case law and Article 8(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Court has repeatedly confirmed that data-subject rights may be exercised for any purpose, including litigation and gathering evidence against a company. As Max Schrems points out, there is no evidence of widespread abuse of GDPR rights by citizens; what we actually see in practice is widespread non-compliance by companies. Cutting back user rights in this situation shifts the balance even further in favour of controllers and demonstrates how detached the Commission has become from the day-to-day reality of users trying to defend themselves.

EFRI’s take: when Big Tech lobbying becomes lawmaking

For EFRI, the message is clear: the Commission has decided that instead of forcing Big Tech and financial intermediaries to finally comply with the GDPR, it is easier to move the goalposts and rewrite the rules in their favour. The result is a quiet but very real redistribution of power – away from citizens, victims, workers and journalists, and towards those who already control the data and the infrastructure. If this package goes through in anything like its current form, it will confirm that well-organised corporate lobbying can systematically erode even the EU’s flagship fundamental-rights legislation. That makes it all the more important for consumer organisations, victim groups and digital-rights advocates to push back – loudly, publicly and with concrete case stories – before the interests of Big Tech are permanently written into EU law.