International

´Geoblocking´ is the practice whereby internet-based retail outlets exclude purchasers from outside their own EU member state. The European Commission wants to put an end to this and is proposing a legal ban. Today the European Parliament reached agreement on its negotiating position, as the measure will be settled by what’s known as the co-decision procedure, under which the Council, which directly represents the member state governments, and the EP must agree on the final text. SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong is no defender of geo-blocking, but he fears that the proposed legal requirements could make life difficult for smaller shops. “Organisations representing small and medium-sized enterprises – SMEs in the jargon – are complaining that the rules are so complicated that in setting up a website you hardly know where you stand. This is especially true for shops serving a local market, such as a neighbourhood baker’s, which might run a website to inform local customers. All of a sudden such small traders could come in for unpleasant surprises and find themselves forced to offer their wares to people in other member states.” De Jong, however, has a solution. “Today we also reached agreement in principle on a supplementary ‘SME test’” – in other words, an assessment of the likely effects of the measure on smaller firms – “which will be negotiated in parallel with the negotiations on the measure as a whole.”

AkzoNobel is threatened with being taken over by American predatory capitalists. Recently Unilever also fell into American hands via a hostile takeover. In principle there’s nothing exceptional about any of this. What’s unusual is that Jeroen van der Veer, ex-head of Shell and currently chairman of the board of directors of both Philips and ING, is worried about it. “Hostile takeovers are the dark side of capitalism,” I heard him say on TV.

In the light of President Erdogan’s continuing assault on the democratic norms by which, as a member state of the Council of Europe, Turkey has agreed to abide, political group leaders in the body’s parliamentary assembly have refused an invitation to attend talks on the situation with the Turkish authorities. United Left Group leader and SP Senator Tiny Kox is in complete agreement with this unanimous decision.

Today the SP stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the dockers who serve the Hemweg power station in Amsterdam. The dockers and their union, the FNV, are demanding that attention be paid to their plight and that of many other Dutch workers and their families who depend on the coal-fired power station for their livelihoods. “Closure of the coal-fired power stations is a necessary step in the fight against climate change, but that’s no reason to leave the thousands of workers dependent on them to their fate,” argue SP Member of Parliament Sandra Beckerman and her colleague Cem Lacin.

SP Euro-MP Anne-Marie Mineur describes herself as pleased by the outcome of her fact-finding mission to Sri Lanka. Under pressure resulting from her visit, Labour Minister John Seneviratne has stated that he will ensure that 50% of the financial gains from additional trade with the European Union will go directly to the island nation’s workers and that he is prepared to make this an enforceable target. He has received support in this from the employers’ organisation Board of Investors (BOI).

SP Member of Parliament Renske Leijten wants it made compulsory for multinational corporations (MNCs) to declare how much tax they pay and where they pay it. A range of studies and reports have demonstrated that MNCs use a variety of structures to ensure that they pay as little tax as possible. Developing countries are among those who are losing many billions every year in tax receipts as a result.

SP Member of Parliament Sadet Karabulut is deeply concerned about the American attack on Syria. ‘The civil war in Syria has been raging for six years and has brought nothing but misery,’ she says. ‘Hundreds of thousands have died and at least five million have fled to neighbouring countries. The chemical attack in Syria was a cowardly, completely unacceptable deed and a serious breach of international law. Those responsible must be identified and brought to justice.’

The European Parliament voted today on the proposal for new legislation aimed at improving type approval in cars. The proposals were prompted by the Dieselgate scandal. SP-Euro-MP Dennis de Jong is far from pleased with the outcome, as he explains: “Dieselgate showed that we need better monitoring. The shady software in diesel-powered cars could and should have been exposed a great deal sooner. However, I’m opposed to the idea that we now need European inspectors in order to improve on national supervision. Instead, member states should be monitoring each other. European inspectors belong in a federal state and so we don’t need them.”

At the international terrorism conference in St Petersburg this week, which SP Senator Tiny Kox attended in his capacity as president of the United Left Group of members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), he warned those present not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. "In far too many countries," Kox argued, "antiterrorism legislation comes at the cost of human rights, the constitutional state, and democratic institutions. That goes for a great many former Soviet Republics but also for a country such as France, where the state of emergency has been repeatedly renewed, in contravention of a PACE resolution proposed by myself and approved by the assembly a year ago."