Warrants of ICC are binding, Borrell says

BRUSSELS: The European Union on Wednesday published a list of seven countries it considers “safe,” in a bid to speed up migrant returns by making it harder for citizens of those nations to claim asylum in the bloc.
The European Commission said it was proposing to designate Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Kosovo, Bangladesh, Colombia, and India as “safe countries of origin.”
The move, criticized by rights groups, is set to allow EU governments to process asylum applications filed from citizens of those countries more quickly — by introducing a presumption that such claims lack merit.
“Many member states are facing a significant backlog of asylum applications, so anything we can do now to support faster asylum decisions is essential,” said Magnus Brunner, the EU’s commissioner for migration.
Brussels has been under pressure to clamp down on irregular arrivals and facilitate deportations, following a souring of public opinion on migration that has fueled hard-right electoral gains in several countries.
On Wednesday, the commission said EU candidate nations would also in principle meet the criteria to be designated as safe countries.
But it also laid out exceptions, including when they are hit by a conflict — something that would for example exclude Ukraine.
The EU had already presented a similar list in 2015 but the plan was abandoned due to heated debates over whether or not to include Turkiye, another candidate for membership.
The list published Wednesday can be expanded or reviewed over time and was drawn up looking at nations from which a significant number of applicants currently come, the commission said.
Several member states already designate countries they deem “safe” with regard to asylum — France’s list for instance includes Mongolia, Serbia and Cape Verde.
The EU effort aims to harmonize rules and ensure that all members have the same baseline.
States can individually add countries to the EU list, but not subtract from it.
Asylum cases will still have to be examined individually, ensuring that existing safeguards remain in place and asylum-seekers are not rejected outright, the commission added.
The plan has to be approved by the European Parliament and member states before it can enter into force.
But it has already come under fire by human rights groups.
EuroMed Rights, an umbrella group, said some of the countries featured in the EU list suffered from “documented rights abuses and limited protections for both their own citizens and migrants.”
“Labelling them ‘safe’ is misleading — & dangerous,” it wrote on X.
Irregular border crossings detected into the European Union were down 38 percent to 239,000 last year after an almost 10-year peak in 2023, according to EU border agency Frontex.
But led by hawks including Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands, EU leaders called in October for urgent new legislation to increase and speed up returns and for the commission to assess “innovative” ways to counter irregular migration.
Currently less than 20 percent of people ordered to leave the bloc are returned to their country of origin, according to EU data.
Last month the commission unveiled a planned reform of the 27-nation bloc’s return system, which opened the way for member states to set up migrant return centers outside the EU.
Italy’s interior minister Matteo Piantedosi Wednesday hailed the EU’s latest move as “a success for the Italian government.”

BRUSSELS: The European Commission said Wednesday that it had given formal approval for Leqembi, a long-awaited new treatment for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, to be sold in the EU under strict conditions.
The authorization was granted Tuesday based on a favorable decision by Europe’s medicines watchdog, which after initial misgivings endorsed the treatment last November for a set category of patients.
Leqembi, developed by US multinational Biogen and Japanese-based Eisai, is the brand name of an active substance called lecanemab that is used to treat adults with mild memory and cognitive problems resulting from the early stages of the common type of dementia.
The first such medicine to be allowed in the EU, the drug was approved in line with the “positive scientific assessment of the European Medicines Agency,” the commission said in a statement.
The EMA “concluded that the benefits of this medicine outweighed the risks, in a particular population of patients with such disease and as long as risk minimization measures are applied,” the commission said.
“Therefore, the authorization decision also sets strict conditions on the use of Leqembi, as well as clear risk mitigation requirements,” it said.
The EMA endorsed the drug only for patients with a lower risk of potential brain bleeding: those who have “only one copy or no copy of ApoE4,” a type of gene known as an important risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Lecanemab has been hailed by Alzheimer’s researchers and charities for being the first approved treatment that tackles the early stages of the disease, rather than managing the symptoms.
It works by using antibodies that bind to and clear the proteins that normally build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia.
The treatment has been shown to decrease cognitive decline by a quarter in people in the early stages of the disease.
Leqembi, together with another Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm, received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2023.