Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen attacked Spanish leader Pedro Sánchez on migration during a summit debate in Brussels on Friday (16 October).
Frederiksen, who despite leading a centre-left party has taken an increasingly hard line on migration, criticised Sánchez for granting renewable one-year legal residence permits to undocumented migrants.
“I have asked the commission to look into whether one country is doing almost everything in the opposite direction of what the others are doing. In other words, you come to a country illegally, and suddenly you’re allowed to be there legally,” Frederiksen said before arriving at the second day of the Brussels summit.
In response, Sánchez told reporters after the meeting with EU leaders that Spain’s regularisation scheme “does not go against the grain” – since there are many countries with similar measures.
In April, Spain approved plans to grant legal status to around 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. These so-called regularisations are a common labour-migration policy that other countries have also used, including Italy, which has authorised nearly 500,000 non-EU work visas through 2028.
But at the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels in June, several European leaders used the meeting to criticise Spain’s regularisation.
The criticism resurfaced during this October summit, after the summer’s migrant crisis in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, which some EU governments then weaponised against Spain.
Push for stronger wording
Following a breakfast on Friday (16 October), attended by 16 EU countries backing stricter migration restrictions, Denmark, Poland and Italy had also attempted to link migration to crime in draft EU summit conclusions.
They tried to amend the summit conclusions to call on the commission for extra efforts to monitor national migration measures that can affect other member states, highlight the impact of migration on welfare and public services, as well as avoid “measures that could create incentives for illegal migration”.
However, France and Luxembourg criticised the position of the 16, and leaders had a strategic exchange and agreed to return to the topic at a later date.
According to experts from the Migration Policy Centre, it is hard to conclude whether Spain’s regularisation plans encouraged more migration to the EU.
So-called ‘pull factors’ are difficult to consider in isolation, as migration depends on work opportunities, social networks abroad and other factors, but policies can also play a role.
Regularisation could pave the way to legal work, generating “positive employment and fiscal outcomes over time,” the scholars also said.
Denmark itself is not bound by EU laws (due to an opt-out) on border control, immigration, civil and criminal law, or police cooperation, and therefore cannot vote on them in the Council.
Rhetoric versus facts
It is not the first clash between the two socialist leaders on migration, but the timing matters.
Sánchez faces elections in November, and France heads into presidential elections next spring, where it is feared anti-migrant rhetoric could roll out the red carpet for the far right.
In response to a barrage of criticism from the likes of Austria, Czech Republic and, Sánchez said that the numbers on illegal migration returns speak for themselves.
“See what is happening in Spain – some politicians are willing to replace the population only so they can be … in government,” said Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš ahead of the meeting on Friday. “I am convinced that for some countries, it is too late – and that some day we will have to defend our borders so that migrants don’t come to us from Western countries if it continues like this. And we, of course, are preparing for this.”
“It’s a road to hell,” added Babiš, who belongs to the far-right Patriots for Europe group.
His comments, Sánchez said, resembled the rhetoric of the far-right political party Vox in Spain, now polling close to 20 percent. “One thing is the rhetoric, the blablabla, and another thing is the facts,” he said.
Ceuta crisis
The situation in Ceuta escalated at the end of July 2026, when tens of thousands of people simultaneously attempted to cross over from Morocco to the autonomous enclave.
The Spanish have since deployed additional security measures to regain control over the territory.
A majority of newly arrived migrants were eventually returned to Morocco, but thousands remained in the city of 80,000 people – many of whom are unaccompanied children and teenagers.
The crisis has exposed tensions between Spain, Morocco and the EU on border control and asylum and put into question who is responsible for migrants.
French president Emmanuel Macro previously said: “Spain was the target of an attack. Call it a hybrid attack if you like, but it was an information attack. Traffickers, and probably people seeking to destabilise Spain, led many people living in poverty to believe there was an opportunity, using false information and creating an information bubble.”
Meanwhile Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni previously called for a suspension of the Schengen free movement agreement with Spain.
The whole situation triggered tit-for-tat border closures between Spain and Italy.
On Thursday (15 October), Italy decided not to renew the security checks with Spain, paving the way for a week of negotiations between Madrid and Rome to reach a final agreement.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday (16 October) that the US-Russia ‘diesel deal’ came as a surprise and could lead to further sanctions relief for Moscow.
“We cannot treat the agreements concerning diesel and coal as isolated cases … gas could be next. I am absolutely convinced of that,” Zelensky told reporters in Brussels, after meeting with EU leaders.
“The risks I am talking about are clear: sanctions could be progressively eased,” he warned.
EU leaders are expected to “regret” the diesel deal in their summit conclusions, while discussions on a new package of sanctions against Russia are still underway.
“It is not a time to release sanctions on Russia,” said EU Council president Antonio Costa on Friday, alongside EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Zelensky before the discussion with EU leaders.
“We will not lift any sanctions unless Russia ends the war,” confirmed von der Leyen, adding that Europe will keep working on “pressuring Russia”.
Europe has adopted 21 packages of sanctions on Russia since the beginning of the war, alongside the listing of thousands of individuals and entities, and is currently working on the 22nd.
But one Ukrainian senior diplomat told EUobserver that the coming months could be crucial to agree on more sanctions against Moscow, since February is seen as a possible deadline given the upcoming 2027 French presidential elections.
Russia’s economy has come under growing pressure from Western sanctions. Although a month-on-month decrease in exports was observed (six percent for fossil fuels, eight percent for crude oil), the US diesel deal could offer Moscow a potential lifeline.
No concessions
The diesel deal is widely seen as a way to restart peace talks. At the same time, the United States is pushing Kyiv and Moscow toward a negotiated settlement, which puts Ukraine under growing pressure to come to the table, even though any deal could force it to make painful concessions.
Zelensky, however, has warned against any deal that would compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty or territorial integrity.
“Putin plans to stick around much longer. He is building a Russia that looks like North Korea,” he wrote on X.
Instead, the Ukrainian president has turned to European “real leaders”, seeking to shore up their political and military support and strengthen Kyiv’s position in any future negotiations.
And in the words of von der Leyen, Europe is already helping Ukraine to prepare for “winter-isation”, which for Zelensky should translate into more funds and defence support.
This week, the commission disembursed €2.9bn to Kyiv to purchase drones, air defence systems, missiles, radars, electronic warfare systems and ammunition, as part of the EU’s €90bn loan, backed by EU leaders last year.
But Kyiv has warned it will need tens of billions more to continue fighting against Russia, as the war intensifies on the front lines and the number of attacks in Ukrainian cities increases.
Ukraine’s defence needs are estimated for 2026 around €23bn and Kyiv still needs to fund a hole of roughly €69.3bn for 2027.
“We will have to increase the funding once again,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday before meeting EU leaders in Brussels.
Protect Russian frozen assets
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France and Germany want more detailed “Made in Europe” rules for electric cars, and want them split off from the rest of the EU’s flagship industrial law.
The Franco-German deal, agreed after months of haggling on the margins of the EU summit in Brussels late on Thursday (15 October), says both files should then be adopted “as fast as possible and simultaneously”.
That would split the most fought-over part from the rest of the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA), which also sets “Made in EU” and low-carbon requirements for steel, cement, aluminium and clean-tech products such as batteries and solar panels.
Paris hopes the new car definition will serve as a benchmark for the rest of the IAA, which sets “Made in Europe” rules for steel, cement, aluminium and clean energy technologies.
But this still has to be negotiated with other member states, people familiar with the talks said.
“We are driven by a clear ambition: to successfully transform our automotive industry while upholding our climate goals and our production in Europe,” said French president Emmanuel Macron on social media, announcing the deal.
“This is an investment signal to industry,” said German chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Made in Europe
The paper comes as Ireland, which holds the EU’s rotating six-month presidency, is wrapping up a third compromise text on the industrial plan, which Irish officials hope will reach final agreement by mid November.
Publicly, Paris and Berlin said on Friday that their car deal will not affect climate targets and that their course “remains unchanged”.
But the paper behind the deal shows the trade-off that’s been made. Berlin accepted France’s demand for stricter “Made in Europe” rules that apply to fewer countries, while Paris agreed to looser emission rules for carmakers, as Germany had wanted.
To count as “Made in Europe”, a car would have to clear thresholds that tighten over time, and only cars meeting these rules could be bought, leased or rented with public subsidies, or bought by public authorities.
From 2028, the car must be assembled in Europe, with at least 70 percent of total value creation in components – excluding the battery.
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In 2022, the Neptune missile sank the cruiser Moskva; in 2026, it is destroying aircraft at airfields.
Ukraine has run out of Patriot missiles, while parts of Kyiv are without electricity following new air raids.
The order to slow down Starlink came from the White House, Reuters reported.
What is new in the “captured” part of Kharkiv region? Ukrainian soldiers capture a Russian soldier in its centre.
Drones sank a ship off the Bulgarian coast, and Sofia turned to Nato.
Maps of the day– Kharkiv region
Videos of the day – a Russian drone destroyed a grocery store in Odesa while it was fully operational; a strange drone with a strange name
In 2022, the Neptune missile sank the cruiser Moskva; in 2026, it is destroying aircraft at airfields. On Thursday, the Ukrainian president released a report saying that a strike on the Borisoglebsk Russian military airfield in Voronezh region had destroyed four Su-34M strike aircraft on the ground and damaged two more.
Volodymyr Zelensky also released a satellite image, which is the lead photograph of Friday’s Ukraine Battlefield update.
The airfield lies around 340 km from the front line and was built to accommodate even the largest aircraft types in the Russian air force’s inventory: the Tu-160 and An-124.
In this war, however, it serves as a base from which smaller Su-34s take off for glide-bomb attacks. It is therefore a place from which otherwise almost invulnerable aircraft operate, bombing Ukrainian army positions directly on and near the front line.
Ukraine does not yet have fighter jets capable of shooting down enemy aircraft at the distances from which they release their bombs, while the Patriot system has no missiles of the type that have already shot down several Su-34s in mid-air. The destruction of four aircraft and at least damage to two more is therefore a major success.
Several aspects are noteworthy: the weapon used; the apparent capacity to react exceptionally quickly; the Russian military’s continuing reluctance to build protected aircraft shelters at airfields; as well as its carelessness during operations. Crucially, the impact on operations is easy to calculate in this case.
Zelensky confirmed that the successful attack was carried out using a Neptune missile. It is one of the Ukrainian arms industry’s most successful achievements.
It was originally designed to fight enemy ships. It is launched from ground-based launchers and flies close to the terrain on its way to the target. The manufacturer completed the first battery shortly before the invasion began.
Until it sank the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship in April 2022, it was not known whether the Ukrainians had made it operational. The sinking of the cruiser Moskva provided a clear answer.
Since then, the missile has been repeatedly upgraded. The aim was not only to extend its range, but also to enable it to strike ground targets. Both have been achieved, as the attack on Borisoglebsk demonstrates.
As almost always, local residents managed to record the moment of its arrival and impact on the target:
Ukrainian forces carried out a missile strike on Russia’s Borisoglebsk airbase tonight, with at least one massive explosion and post-strike fire seen. pic.twitter.com/aA1xxZlhCl
The photographs below most likely show the consequences. There are signs of fire at the aircraft stands marked one and six. The damaged aircraft probably stood there.
Two Su-34 wrecks are clearly visible at positions two and five, while at positions three and four, alongside a crane clearing debris, there is mainly a large burnt-out area and the outline of one Su-34.
Even the Russians do not keep so many aircraft together for long at an airfield relatively close to the front line during wartime. The Ukrainians therefore had a very short window between detecting the target and carrying out the attack. That they succeeded points to highly accurate intelligence and a very short response time.
Even so, it was very careless of the Russians to park at least four, but more likely as many as six, valuable combat-ready aircraft so close together, even for a short time.
Russian Z-bloggers criticised the fact that, despite repeated assurances that hardened shelters were being built, there are still none at Borisoglebsk airfield.
By 2022, Russia had built 147 aircraft, including prototypes. Exact production figures since the start of the invasion are not known, but according to Polish analyst Jaroslaw Wolski, Russia lost between a quarter and a third of its annual production on Thursday, which is estimated at between 18 and 24 aircraft. This is more likely an upper estimate, and average actual production over the entire period of the invasion is probably lower.
Meanwhile, the Oryx website has counted 44 Su-34s lost to date; with the additional six, the total has now reached 50.
Russia has therefore produced no more than around 200 aircraft of this type, a quarter of which it has lost in combat, while at least half of the remainder are unfit for combat as a result of wear and tear.
The Russian Z-channel Fighterbomber said on Friday that the annual flying time of a Russian air force fighter jet amounted to thousands of hours: “No, not hundreds, not one thousand, but thousands. Divide that by the number of days in a year and you will see how much each individual fighter jet works on average per day.”
It wrote this in connection with its claim that, although the Ukrainian air force was incapable of fighting the Russian one, it and Ukrainian drones were nevertheless “consuming the resources of all our fighter jets, which have essentially been continuously in the air for five years, taking turns with one another”.
Fighterbomber did not mention Su-34s in this context, but these aircraft bear the main burden of front-line missions, meaning they too are heavily used: “This inevitably leads to malfunctions and crashes, resulting in repairs that take an aircraft out of combat readiness, with another aircraft taking over its tasks …”.
Fighterbomber concluded that although “we have many aircraft, there are still too few of them”.
Since this year, Russia has been able to mount six glide bombs under each Su-34, rather than four. The loss of six aircraft — since even damaged aircraft cannot fight, at least temporarily — therefore means at least 36 fewer precision-guided bombs against Ukrainian positions each day.
This assumes, of course, that every aircraft flies only one mission per day. In practice, they fly more, making this a significant relief for soldiers on the front line.
Ukraine has run out of Patriot missiles, while parts of Kyiv are without electricity following new air raids. A shortage of the most advanced surface-to-air missiles, which alone can effectively shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, is nothing new. Ukrainian batteries have previously had nothing to fire, leaving them to watch Russian air raids helplessly.
CNN reported most recently that this had happened again. Russian missiles consequently damaged three Kyiv power plants again on Wednesday morning.
The destructive air raid was repeated on Friday morning. It led to emergency power cuts. “Power outages have been recorded in Kyiv, as well as in Kyiv, Volyn, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv regions. Work to restore supplies has already begun wherever the security situation permits,” NEC Ukrenergo said.
The NV website reported that 370,000 customer connections in Volyn region alone had been left without power.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the heating season officially began in Kyiv on Thursday. However, as NV wrote, this was not possible in two Kyiv districts because energy workers had not had time to deal with the consequences of the attacks.
At the same time, a dispute is under way between Volodymyr Zelensky and the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. According to the president, Kyiv’s leadership had “almost entirely” failed to meet the deadlines of the so-called Resilience Plan, which was intended to prepare the city for winter. Klitschko rejects this, but he had already come under criticism from the media in previous months.
The order to slow down Starlink came from the White House, Reuters reported. The respected news agency said, citing sources within the administration itself. However, it has no information on who specifically issued such an order.
The restriction concerns the military component of the system, called Starshield. Elon Musk also drew attention to this in a post, which essentially confirms the accuracy of the Reuters report.
No reliable information on whether the system was functioning was available on Friday.
What is new in the “captured” part of Kharkiv region? Ukrainian soldiers capture a Russian soldier in its centre. In the context of the entire war, this is an insignificant episode, but the Russian defence ministry still insists that it has captured 65 villages and 1,200 square km of territory in the north-eastern part of Kharkiv region, and has moreover encircled some Ukrainian units.
A video has appeared online from the village of Buzove — its location is highlighted in red on the map of the Ukrainian Petrenko account — where a group of Ukrainian soldiers captured a Russian hiding in bushes by the road. There was also a dead Russian soldier there.
For comparison, this is how Russian maps — specifically those of the state news agency Ria Novosti — depict the same territory. Buzove is not named on the map, but it lies roughly halfway between the village of Reznikove — marked by a black assault-rifle symbol in a white circle — and Ivanivka, which is a short distance to the left and below. According to the Russians, the village is 12 km in a straight line from the nearest Ukrainian positions.
Drones sank a ship off the Bulgarian coast, and Sofia turned to Nato. Drones attacked in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone as recently as last week. One of the vessels sank and all 10 sailors are presumed dead.
Earlier this week, the HS Dignity, flying the flag of Guinea-Bissau, was sunk 31 km off the Bulgarian coast. According to the BBC, 10 people were missing.
As many as 18 drones damaged the Ukrainian vessel Chelsea-3, which was sailing from Turkey to a Ukrainian port along the Black Sea coast to avoid the Russian military.
🛳️ Route of the vessel hit by drones off Bulgaria's coast overnight
Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said that the Chelsea 3 is Ukrainian-owned and sails under the Maltese flag.
The crew — seven Ukrainians and eight Azerbaijanis — was rescued.
It is almost certain that Russia was behind the attacks. Even the government, which is otherwise sympathetic towards Russia, is convinced of this and has summoned the Russian ambassador. Sofia has also asked Nato to deploy aircraft to protect vessels in the Black Sea.
Videos of the day
A Russian drone struck an ordinary grocery supermarket in Odesa while it was fully operational.
Russian forces carried out a drone strike on a Ukrainian supermarket in Odessa this morning.
A Geran-4 slammed into a busy Tavria V supermarket in Mayaky, injuring multiple people and setting the building ablaze. pic.twitter.com/iuDmascrvV
The drone in this video not only looks unusual, but also has a highly unusual name — Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich. This design allows vertical take-off, after which the drone transitions to conventional flight, increasing its speed and range compared with ordinary FPV drones. According to the manufacturer, its range reaches 50 km.
Це — новий російський дрон-камікадзе «Князь Владимир Святославич». Був.
Ворогом цей безпілотник заявлений як «ударний для середніх дистанцій». Але до цілі він не долетів — один із підрозділів «Дронопаду» збив його перехоплювачем, який ми передали бійцям завдяки вашим донатам.… pic.twitter.com/UXN9lFLkTP
By Tuesday (13 October), Russia had demonstrably lost 24,192 pieces of heavy equipment (24,170 on Monday, 5 October). Of these, 19,155 (19,133) were destroyed by Ukrainians, 1,002 (1,003) were damaged, 1,194 (1,194) were abandoned by their crews, and 2,841 (2,840) were captured by the Ukrainian army. This includes 4,453 (4,452) tanks, of which 3,358 (3,357) were destroyed in combat.
Ukraine lost 12,259 (12,238) pieces of equipment, of which 9,652 (9,633) were destroyed, 713 (711) damaged, 695 (695) abandoned, and 1,199 (1,199) captured. This includes 1,471 (1,466) tanks, of which 1,131 (1,126) were destroyed in combat.
Note: Neither side regularly reports its own fatalities or destroyed equipment. Ukraine publishes daily figures for Russian casualties and destroyed equipment, which cannot be independently verified. This overview uses data from the Oryx project, which has compiled a list of equipment losses documented exclusively by photographs since the beginning of the war.
The European Commission’s likely anti-asylum proposal to tackle sudden large arrivals may come before the end of the year, after warm endorsements by some 17 EU states during a breakfast on Friday (16 October) ahead of the second-day of the EU summit in Brussels.
Beyond the warm words, the discussions exposed a clear ambition among the 17 to give member states the power to close EU borders and temporarily and selectively suspend asylum applications, according to an EU diplomat.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the diplomat said there had been a lot of support for the so-called European emergency response framework, proposed by EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen during her State of the Union address last month.
Speculation on what exactly such a framework entails remains unclear, amid alarm among human rights defenders that the EU is seeking legal tools to curb asylum rights – echoing Polish temporary emergency measures that have suspended asylum registration along the Belarus border since March 2025.
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Europe is heading into an electoral moment without recent precedent. Four of its five most populous member states, Spain, France, Italy and Poland, are due to vote within the next 12 months – starting with Spain on 29 November.
If voters move further right, the combined effect could reshape the Union far more profoundly than any single national election.
Two shifts stand out. First, the firewall between the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the hard-right is crumbling, even in Germany, its last bastion.
Hard-right parties sit in the governments of Italy, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Croatia, while Slovenia’s government relies on outside support from one.
Second, competition from the far-right is pushing established radical-right parties to harden their positions.
In Catalonia, Aliança Catalana is challenging Vox; in France, Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête, despite scoring single digits, is pressing on Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; in Italy, Roberto Vannacci’s National Future is challenging Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy; and in Poland, Grzegorz Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown is cannibalising the Confederation.
Under pressure, established conservatives tend to move towards these parties rather than hold the line, as Spain’s Partido Popular and France’s Les Républicains illustrate. Positions once on the margins become mainstream.
The implications go beyond immigration.
Le Pen and Vox leader Santiago Abascal advocate “national priority” in access to welfare and public services. Under pressure from the League and National Future, Meloni’s government has introduced a 30-percent cap on first-year classrooms for pupils without Italian citizenship, based on their birthplace or prior schooling.
A leaked AfD strategy paper reportedly goes further, proposing that national constitutions override EU law and reducing the Court of Justice to a forum for disputes between governments.
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Human rights NGOs in Europe are not doing well. Funding cuts, legal restrictions, administrative burdens and smear campaigns are taking their toll.
I see organisations drastically downsizing or closing altogether and staff burning out. If we are to reverse our fortunes, the traditionally legally-focused movement needs to rebalance its skill-set to include more communicators and organisers.
Traditionally, human rights NGOs have been staffed mainly by lawyers. This is understandable. Human rights are legal standards contained in national, European and international law. If your main tools for getting human rights implemented are advocacy and litigation, then you need legal experts. But advocacy is becoming less effective because decision makers increasingly see supporting human rights as politically risky.
And litigation as a tool is partly limited by increasing political interference with the courts in some countries, or because – again – politicians see potential political brownie points in not complying with (or see potential political costs in complying with) judgments that enforce human rights standards.
It’s not just that NGOs’ traditional tools are losing their power. It’s that legal training does not equip us with the tools do we need to reverse our fortunes.
Our main lever for restoring human rights and the organisations that promote them is public opinion. For as long as we live continue to live in democracies, pressure from voters can have an impact on decision makers. Which means we need communicators who can help the public realise how important human rights are to them.
David Attenborough pointed out a few years ago that “saving our planet is now a communications challenge. We know what to do, we just need the will”.
The same goes for human rights.
But legal training does not make you good at communicating with folks outside your bubble.
‘Legal-ese’ is not the right lingo
I know from personal experience. I trod a path to human rights through a law degree, masters, doctorate and then academia. Human rights folks talk about them in a way that conveys a fraction of their value and power. If you’d asked me 15 years ago why human rights are important, I’d have said things like this: ‘they protect us from abuse by the government’, or ‘they’re minimum standards of protection the state can’t breach’, or ‘they exist to protect the vulnerable’.
These things are true. They’re also not very persuasive to people outside our base of support. Because the kinds of human rights breaches the movement foregrounds tend to affect ‘other people’. And lawyers are used to thinking about rights in the context of legal disputes.
So human rights get reduced to a shield that protects groups or institutions that most people don’t care about, don’t understand, or who live in other countries.
Human rights are not just a passive defence. They are transformational. Human rights are tools. Tools we use to demand that our leaders use the powers and resources with which we’ve entrusted them to do what’s best for all of us. Tools that we use to create the lives we want to live and the communities we want to live in. This is how we need to talk about them, especially when it comes to civil and political rights.
People outside our base cannot be made to care about media freedom, the right to protest or democracy itself just on principle or because they’re enshrined in legal standards. To care about human rights, most people need to know what these things deliver.
Folks will see that protest is important when we explain how it allows people like them to come together and make their leaders listen to their concerns, whether it’s about climate change or better pay for teachers. I’ve seen it first-hand when testing messages in focus groups.
Empathy, not stereotypes
The same goes for stimulating support for the rights of people from marginalised groups. Right now, most people have trouble caring because they been fed negative stereotypes that cause them to regard some people as ‘others’ and ‘outgroups’, meaning that they will tolerate lower standards of treatment for them.
Using legal arguments and evidencing rights violations by focusing on the harm being suffered doesn’t work because it does nothing to address the reason people don’t care. For that, we need to stimulate empathy and dissolve negative stereotypes through techniques like storytelling. Once people empathise and recognise our common humanity, they’re much more likely to support equal treatment.
When we communicate in a way that allows our audience to see how human rights deliver things they find important to them, they don’t just start to support human rights as standards. They also start to support the organisations that promote them. That means they’re more likely to listen to them, stand up for them, get involved in their work and even donate.
It’s not just about communicating better. We also need organisers who can help people come together to carry effective messages and make the strength of public support felt by our leaders.
Folks with legal training are still essential.
If you’re going to make phones, you need engineers. But we don’t see the engineers being given the job of persuading folks to buy the phones, do we?
Unless they’ve had proper communications training. The human rights movement’s legalistic centre of gravity needs to shift to make room for knowledge and skills that can meet the moment.
In the short-term we could achieve this by retraining staff and joining forces with other progressive movements that know how to organise and mobilise, like environmental NGOs.
We could also tackle the issue upstream by working with universities that produce human rights graduates to develop more holistic curricula that cover communications and organising and not only law.
EUobserver is proud to have an editorial partnership with Europod to co-publish the podcast series “Briefed” hosted by Léa Marchal. The podcast is available on all major platforms.
Find the full transcript below:
Do you remember the Yellow Vests movement that shook France 2018? On TikTok, a young user has called for a national mobilisation on the seventeenth of October against the cost of living, and the video quickly went viral. So could the Yellow Vests make their big return?
“Please, give us a date, we’re ready to protest! We young people are struggling. We just can’t make a living anymore,” that’s what Justine, a TikToker from Normandy in France has posted a few weeks ago, while wearing a fluorescent yellow vest.
The reference to the 2018 Yellow Vests is unmistakable. The French movement, which began in protest at rising fuel prices, has been widely revived on social media in recent weeks, especially by younger users.
Our colleague Romane Lizée from StreetPress, a fellow member of the Sphera Network alongside Europod, spoke to some of them: young people reviving a protest movement they only knew from a distance.
Yves, a 24-year-old TikToker with over 80,000 followers, made a video called “Survival Guide for the Yellow Vests 2026”. He gives would-be protesters practical advice, such as bringing thick ski goggles or writing a lawyer’s phone number on a piece of paper.
So why is the movement resurfacing now? For many, the movement has come to stand for a general sense of being fed up, something they still feel today.
“Eight years ago, France put on the yellow vest because petrol hit 1.50 euros a litre, and now we’re almost at three euros and nothing is happening!” That’s how Saïd, a 23-year-old delivery driver, sees it.
The economic context is indeed worse than it was eight years ago. The price of fuel is now almost 2.40 euros a litre.
Throughout September, a series of protests followed one another, called by different professions and for different reasons: climate action, firefighters, a public-sector strike, the law on sexual violence, and finally the student blockades.
High school students have been protesting for a few weeks now, blockading their schools to demand better conditions. We talked about this in a previous Briefed episode. You can find the link in the description.
Now, will the protest be as big and long-lasting as the one in 2018?
Online, a petition launched by the website 17octobregiletjaune, which calls for the protest, has gathered more than 21,000 signatures. Over a thousand actions across the country have been identified on a map by the same website: mostly protests in several cities, but also actions on roundabouts and at petrol stations.
Youth organisations, students’ unions and education staff have already answered the call. More importantly, the CGT, one of France’s main labour unions, has backed it, as have some political figures, like Marine Tondelier, the Green candidate for the presidential election. Still, the true extent of the movement is difficult to predict.
In other European countries, protests are also multiplying, especially among young people. In Spain, huge demonstrations for the right to housing have been taking place in several cities since mid-September. They went quite far: they pushed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call snap elections.
In Brussels, on October 9th, thousands of protesters, including rail workers, teachers, and university and secondary school students, marched against the federal government’s policies, in particular its socio-economic measures. Here again, precarity is a central grievance.
In Italy, on October 8th, students called for mobilisation, notably by camping in front of universities across the country to protest against the sharp rise in tuition fees and student rents.
The triggers behind these protests are not all the same, and the mobilisations take different forms from country to country. But the goal is broadly the same: to call for better living conditions and to defend basic social rights. And young people are particularly mobilised.
EU leaders met Thursday (15 October) for their first face-to-face talks on the 2028–2034 budget, killing the latest negotiation proposal put forward by Ireland.
Dublin, which holds the symbolic EU Council presidency, proposed cuts of up to €141bn from the long-term budget, about eight percent less than the commission proposal. But it failed to make anybody happy, for different reasons.
And now, EU Council president António Costa has been tasked to deliver a new compromise before EU leaders meet again on 26 November in Brussels, with the goal of striking a deal during the summit in December.
An EU official said Costa deemed the deal in December as “essential,” urging EU capitals “to assume their responsibility”.
For Denmark, for example, it is important to have more funds for defence, borders, illegal migration, and competitiveness. “It will probably be as difficult as it was last time or even more difficult,” said Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen ahead of the meeting.
“We need unanimity in the Council. We are far from that unanimity,” also said German chancellor Friedrich Merz before meeting counterparts.
The EU is divided into two camps. The so-called Frugals (Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden) want “several hundred billion” more to be cut, mostly from agriculture and cohesion funds, while 17 EU member states (self-named as Friends of Cohesion) criticise the savings.
But time is of the essence to reach a deal this year, especially for French president Emmanuel Macron. France will hold presidential elections in the spring, and if Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, wins, reaching an EU deal would become far more difficult.
Le Pen has pledged that, if she comes to power, she will halve France’s contribution to the EU budget.
And Macron reportedly said in the room with EU leaders that from January onwards, there will be no political room for reaching an agreement.
‘Easier to give up what you don’t yet have’
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