Blog – Page 5 – MyCitizenship.EU

How the EU helps young people…

This film is one of the winners of the EUandME Young Filmmakers Competition. Alex will do anything he can to keep dancing. Finding himself trapped in a restrictive job, he’s suddenly hit by a spark of inspiration.

Director: Yorgos Zois
Find out what the EU contributes to your life by visiting https://europa.eu/euandme
Watch other short films in the #EUandME series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/EU_Commission #EUandME

‘The Loner’ a short film from Poland

This film is one of the winners of the EUandME Young Filmmakers Competition. ‘The Loner’ won a Silver Dolphin at the Cannes Corporate Media and TV Awards in the category for best non-profit corporate videos this week!

Do you have an idea for a short film about how the EU improves our lives?

The EU is offering young filmmakers the chance to make their very own #EUandME short film. Five winners will each receive a grant of €7,500, as well as mentoring from a top European director, to help them to bring their idea to life.

The jury, composed of five European film directors, will review the entries and choose 10 nominees, two for each of the five categories:

Mobility
Sustainability
Skills & business
Digital
Rights

More information from the Europa site: https://europa.eu/euandme/en/yfc/

shall we be EUROPEAN?

Celebrating language diversity

I feel tempted. Mă simt ispitit. De ce? Why? or even ‘Miks?’ (Estonian). Well, my wife and I have just returned from a holiday in Romania and since my brain is buzzing in Romanian I almost started to continue writing this post in Romanian. I happen to love Romania. We went there for the first time in October 1990 and in the years since I have worked many times there, but this was the first time I had been to Romania for purely recreational purposes. So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been using the Romanian language again for the first time since I left Moldova in 2013. I am reminded what a rich language it is. Perhaps the most surprising thing – for my wife, anyway – was the number of people who got into conversation with me on the presumption that I might be Romanian, only to express absolute surprise when I told them that I am in fact a native Brit. It’s comforting to know that I can still make myself sound like a native Romanian with a few days of becoming reacquainted with the language. The experience got me thinking about language, the part that it plays in bringing people together and hence in promoting the concept of EU citizenship.

We all think in our mother tongue. It’s only when you get to a certain stage of fluency in another language that you find yourself subconsciously thinking or even dreaming in it, as I do in Romanian from time to time. The melody of a language, its nuances, its rhythms and word stresses influence music that uses the language. That’s one of the reasons why songs and poetry are often difficult to translate without losing some of the beauty of the original.

Emoţie de toamnă

A venit toamna, acopera-mi inima cu ceva,
cu umbra unui copac sau mai bine cu umbra ta.

Mă tem că n-am să te mai văd, uneori,
că or să-mi crească aripi ascuţite până la nori,
că ai să te ascunzi într-un ochi străin,
şi el o să se-nchidă cu o frunză de pelin.

Şi-atunci mă apropii de pietre şi tac,
iau cuvintele şi le-nec în mare.
Şuier luna şi o răsar şi o prefac
într-o dragoste mare.

I once tried to translate my own song ‘Beautiful Lord’ into Romanian, with the title ‘Domn Minunat’. It wasn’t easy but the result works up to a point. Some things, however, are simply untranslatable. I remember that for my 45th birthday in September 2000 my deputy project manager and assistant conspired to buy for me the book ‘Îngerul cu o carte în mână’ by the Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu. I enjoy very much Stănescu’s poetry because the imagery in it is fantastic – in the original language. His poem ‘Emoţie de toamnă’ doesn’t work in English. Sure, one can translate the words, but in doing so one destroys the spirit of the poem.

So the different languages of the European Union are not merely alternative ways of saying the same thing. Each has its particular ways of forming and using words, which colours the way its speakers perceive what happens in the world. “I gave the book to Nicoleta” somehow doesn’t feel as specifically precise as the Romanian “i-am dat cartea Nicoletei”, but maybe that’s just my imagination.

Those of us who work frequently with EU policy and legislation may perhaps see the various languages through the monochromatic filter of vocabulary and sentence structures that are by necessity aligned as far as possible in meaning and interpretation. If it were to end there, Europe would be a poorer place; but if we regard each of the EU’s languages as a treasure trove of new thoughts, ideas and ways of describing the world around us, then think of how much richer we become! One of my favourite operas is ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ (A kékszakállú herceg vára) by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. I have in my music collection four recordings of it: two in English and two in Hungarian. If I’m listening to it with friends, I use one of the English versions but when I’m listening to it alone I always listen to the Hungarian. When Bluebeard (Kékszakállú) sings of his third wife in the final scene there is depth of poignancy in the Hungarian words that Judit sobs in reply that almost makes it unnecessary to understand exactly what they mean. Put simply, English cannot do justice to the intensity of the Hungarian.

BLUEBEARD
The third I found at evening.
Quiet, languid, sombre twilight.
Hers is each returning sunset.
Hers that grave and umber mantle.
Hers is every solemn sunset.

JUDIT
Fairer, richer far than I am!

KÉKSZAKÁLLÚ
Harmadikat este leltem,
békés bágyadt barna este.
Övé most már minden este,
övé barna búpalástja,
övé most már minden este.

JUDIT
Jaj, szebb nálam, dúsabb nálam.

The languages of the European Union add to each other by expanding immeasurably the scope for creating thinking and describing the world around us. As fellow citizens of the EU let us celebrate this diversity rather than feeling threatened by it.

GDPR

We think in principle that GDPR is a very good idea. However, we ourselves are discovering that it is not as easy to implement in certain respects as one might assume! If you or your company is having issues with implementing GDPR, we’d be happy to hear from you and perhaps share our experiences so that together we can make GDPR the effective tool for data protection that it is intended to be.

GDPR Portal

Not an offical EU Commission or Government resource. This is a education portal and the information contained within this portal does in no way constitute legal advice.

https://www.eugdpr.org/

GDPR Full Text

Here you can find the official PDF of the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) as a neatly arranged website.

https://gdpr-info.eu/

Let us know your thoughts and experiences on GDPR

(Filling in the form below comes as a private email to the administrators of the site. If you want to post a public comment, scroll down further to the Leave a reply section)

When Things Go Wrong: Your Right to Consular Assistance

On 1 May 2018 EU consular assistance was fully implemented worldwide. Why might that be important?

Those of us who travel a lot in our work expect things to go wrong from time to time. In most cases it’s something practical, such as traffic hold-ups on the way to the airport, a delayed or cancelled flight, mix-ups with hotel bookings, credit card issues and so on. It might be something medical. I’ve had a number of scares of a medical nature over the years.

There’s another group of things that could go wrong, though, for which you’d need the help of your country’s Embassy in the country you’re visiting. I’ve been travelling on business since 1988 – and I’ve worked in quite a few countries that the average tourist tends not to visit. Places like Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Chile, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan… and several others. So I’d like to share with you some of the more amusing (and in some cases alarming) things that have happened to me over the years, for which consular assistance was definitely needed!

A Case of Cleanliness

I took the bundle of clothes out of the washing machine. As I separated them, one of the shirts felt a bit strange. There was something in the breast pocket. My passport. ‘Great’, I thought, ‘here I am in Chişinău’ (Moldova) ‘and I’ve just washed my passport.’ To be fair, my passport would have made a good prop in an advertisement for a particular brand of washing powder. All the entry / exit stamps had been washed away completely, proof – if ever such were needed – that this brand did indeed wash whiter. The British Embassy issued me with a letter explaining what had happened and on the day of my departure I turned up at the airport. I presented the lady on the passport control desk with my very clean passport and my diplomatic accreditation card. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘I washed it’ I replied, adding ‘not intentionally’ in case she concluded that I might be an idiot. She suggested that it might be a good idea to get a new passport before returning to Moldova and wished me a good journey. I love Moldova.

Fortunately on that occasion one of my own country’s Embassies had been able to help. Yet one of the lovely things about being an EU citizen is that even if my own country had not had an Embassy there, I could have gone to any other EU Embassy and received the same level of assistance. Don’t you just love being European?

Cruising through life

In early 1999 I was sitting in an Irish bar in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Earlier that day events in Kosovo had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Didn’t you see the cruise missiles flying overhead?’ somebody asked me. (He might have been joking, of course; we were in an Irish pub after all.) Well I hadn’t seen them because I hadn’t been looking. Anyway, the news of greatest relevance to me was that Sarajevo Airport was closed. A US B52 bomber was occupying the main runway, as a consequence of which commercial flights could not operate for the time being. Zagreb and Ljubljana Airports were also closed. (I managed to return to Prague, where I was living at the time, by driving up the Adriatic coast of Croatia and meeting a colleague in Rijeka.) I was working with a French lawyer, so when we needed some consular advice, we both went to the French Embassy. Thanks to being an EU citizen, I was welcomed as if I were a Frenchman born and bred. EU citizenship is a wonderful thing.

Shadow of the past

Trust me when I say that you really do not want to hear words like that. I know, because that is the literal translation of what was said to me in Romanian at around 2:00am in the morning of 1st September 2002, in Chişinău, Moldova. I ask for your understanding when I say that while I am prepared to reveal further details in private, I will not do so here. However, the salient point is this: at the time my own country did not have an Embassy in Chişinău. The nearest one was in Bucharest. France, however, did have an Embassy in Chişinău and as an EU citizen I had the right to ask for consular assistance from that Embassy.

Conclusion

My colleagues and I have travelled extensively. I know that in many respects we are an atypical group of people, so what matters to us may be less relevant for you. Nevertheless, speaking for myself personally, I can say without hesitation that when things go wrong and your back is against the wall, the right to consular assistance from any EU Embassy is something upon which you cannot put a value.

It is priceless.