A new law aimed at protecting children could kill off old video games and threaten small developers, industry trade groups have warned.
The EU Kids Act was unveiled by commission president Ursula von der Leyen last month as a chance to “give childhood back to our children” and put parents “in the driving seat”.
It would require videogames to be catered to children by default with stringent requirements including an eight-hour nighttime lock-out, a ban on screenshots, and guardian supervision.
Gamers wanting to play the full version of games would have to pass age verification checks to access features, like multi-player tournaments or mystery boxes.
The European Commission is gathering feedback on the act with respondents quick to criticise the threat posed to videogame makers.
Stop Killing Games, a campaign to protect videogames, has opposed the act.
“This could turn the EU into a pariah state for videogames,” said Ross Scott, the consumer group’s founder. He reckons the regulation could spark a race to update games or deactivate them.
MEPs have also joined in sounding the alarm bell.
Proposed law could kill games
If the law passed, developers would need to make a child mode version of games and gate the full games behind a verification step.
“This is going to bury developers with compliance steps, and a whole lot of cost,” said Scott.
Age verification with zero-knowledge proof (meaning developers cannot collect data) will likely be required. “In practice, providers would likely need to engage a third-party age assurance provider,” also said Lauro Fava, partner at law firm Pinsent Masons.
The Commission’s impact assessment claims that third-party age verification apps would reduce costs, but failed to provide estimates.
Fava called it “strange” that these were missing, and thinks the commission “arguably downplayed” the cost of compliance.
Gamer’s Voice, an advocacy group, asserted that small games would struggle to pay for age-verification and other compliance measures, likely to inlclude game redesigns.
The Kids Act would outlaw features ‘increasing social comparison’ for minors, meaning functions like leaderboards and kill counts could be restricted.
And while the cost to developers is not known, it is feared prices could increase for players.
The wide scope of the draft law means community servers and hobbyist-developed games could be subjected to the new rules. Any game, new or old, would have to follow measures unless strictly offline in a physical format or built only for educational purposes.
And since the rules would apply to games made or consumed in the EU, it is feared game makers could block access to their games on the bloc.
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Environmental NGOs have threatened to sue the owner of Tefal, a leading French kitchenware company, over failing to phase out forever chemicals from their products, at a high price for consumer health.
The organisations allege that Groupe SEB, the parent company of known brands, such as Tefal cookware, Calor irons, and Moulinex kitchen appliances, fails to curtail harmful chemicals in its products.
And the environmentalist groups have threatened to file a lawsuit if the firm fails to makes a change to its policy within three months.
Companies have a duty to identify and address the impact of their work and products under the French law, for instance the pollution they cause or human rights they might violate.
Environmental NGOs ClientEarth, Générations Futures and Notre Affaire à Tous say Groupe SEB should swap harmful chemicals in its products to existing alternatives, such as ceramic coating or cast iron, to limit harm to human health and the environment.
The company uses teflon for non-stick, high-temperature suited coatings of their products.
The substance is one of the ‘PFAS’ polymers, often dubbed forever chemicals, because they break down very slowly, remaining in the environment and human body for a long time.
PFAS are widely used for food pots, clothes, packaging, and waterproof products.
But since they take so long to decompose, they are often found in soil and groundwater. Many of the substances cause cancer, others are harmful to babies in the womb.
Teflon is allegedly “not absorbed by the human body” and is approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for contact with food, the company’s website says.
However, a recent risk assessment by the EU’s Chemical Agency’s (ECHA), quoted by the NGOs, points out that when overheated or scratched, teflon releases PFAS particles.
It also releases substances harmful to the environment during the manufacturing process, ECHA’s research found in March.
And a new European law on the issue will provide a “more consistent basis for corporate due diligence litigation,” Hélène Duguy, ClientEarth’s lawyer in the case, told EUobserver.
An EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence directive, inspired by French legislation, will oblige all companies based in the EU to address the impact of their operations on the environment and human rights.
Member states must implement national laws fulfilling the obligation by summer 2028.
SEB can show stopping PFAS use is “necessary and feasible,” setting a precedent for others, Duguy said.
Twelve years ago, EU summit leaders announced they had a strategy to tackle unprecedented migrant arrivals.
Next week, they will meet again in Brussels and to tell us something similar.
We journalists will report on the latest twists and turns, hoping to get some sort of angle that hasn’t been covered. But the reality is that our leaders have broadly failed.
Dozens of EU summit conclusions have been published since 2015, when one around million Syrians arrived in Europe to seek protection.
We need stronger external borders to preserve the Schengen passport-free zone, they said. We need partnerships with foreign states to save lives. We need to step up deportations. We need a European solution.
All of these ideas and strategies have found a home in council conclusions, in various iterations, since 2015. All of them.
Some have actually panned out, including an EU migrant swap deal with Turkey and other deals with autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Others like internal reforms on asylum have also been delivered.
Yet the sense of urgency to tackle these issues continues because there is an obvious disconnect between what has been delivered, the promises made and the lived experience on the ground.
People still come. Some 80,000 arrived in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta end of July alone.
Many are still fleeing violence, war and economic hardships. Others are lured by the promise of labour in Europe by Europeans willing to exploit them.
I remember meeting a group of boys from Bangladesh on the Ocean Viking, freshly rescued in the middle of the night, asking when they would be able to start working in Italy.
One of them was still shaking with fear and sobbing, following a near death experience.
The European Commission is now claiming that the drop of irregular arrivals is due to their migration policy reforms, as if the fall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria had no discernible impact.
Perhaps some of that is true. But there is no disputing that Syrians accounted for over 100,000 irregular crossings in 2023, a year before Assad fell. It then dropped to around 6,000. Today, it is around 1,000, according to Frontex.
At some point, one has to wonder if these conclusions, repeated ad nauseam, is nothing but political theatre by a leadership that has run out of ideas.
EU leaders meeting next week in Brussels for the usual post-summer European Council are rehashing conclusions on migration, echoing almost word-for-word statements since at least 2015.
“The European Council has developed a strategy aimed at stemming the unprecedented migratory flows Europe is facing,” they announced in December 2015, following a summit.
“It is indispensable to regain control over the external borders,” they also said, noting the perceived threat to the EU’s internal border-free Schengen zone.
And they voiced fear over the low number of deportations, insisting on “concrete measures to ensure the actual return and readmission of people not authorised to stay.”
Eeleven years later and the 15 October summit in Brussels next week is now asking almost the same thing, including to what extent previous conclusions on migration have been implemented.
Although draft conclusions can change, and likely will, the current wording essentially repeats the same demands spanning over 50 EU summits since at least 2015, when over a million Syrians entered Europe to seek protection.
Out of the 52 published conclusions since 2015, over half dealt with migration in some shape or form. The latest draft dated 5 October and seen by EUobserver is among those.
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The European Commission has proposed up to 15 years of post-accession safeguards to punish new member states in case of bad behaviour, in a long-delayed pre-enlargement policy review out on Tuesday (6 October).
The reforms were initially requested by the European Council in June 2024 to be ready by spring 2025, but were delayed several times due to political sensitivities in EU capitals.
They are aimed at frontrunners for future EU membership – Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine – each of whom will get an accession roadmap this month.
EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has deemed union enlargement a “geopolitical imperative” amid the war in Ukraine and shift towards a new global order.
By expanding, the EU hopes to promote democracy and strengthen the single market.
But this also comes with fears that countries could misbehave after getting in, prompting the commission’s proposed new guardrails.
The commission suggests that new member states promise “not to oppose EU decisions on future enlargements” due “to bilateral disputes” for an unspecified time.
But Marta Kos, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, said this commitment would be voluntary.
Commissioner dismisses ‘two-tier’ concerns
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The Commission is “going a bit too fast” in unlocking €4.2bn and restarting the Erasmus+ student exchange programme in Hungary, according to budget committee MEPs.
The EU froze its financial assistance to Hungary in 2022 due to concerns about rule of law breaches and misappropriation of funds by Viktor Orbán’s government.
Green MEP from Germany, Daniel Freund, told EUobserver he “would have taken a more staged approach to not release everything in one go,” admitting that the reform agenda of Péter Magyar’s new government still has some way to go.
The commission’s proposal to unlock part of the €16.4bn in funds available to Hungary requires the green-light from the EU council, representing member states, one month after its announcement on 23 September.
Freund said that he was “happy about the changes we have seen” following his visit to Hungary on 1 October.
“Hungary needs this money, I also want Hungarians to have this money, since for years it was just going to Orbán and his cronies,” he said on Tuesday (6 October).
However, Freund and other MEPs on the fact-finding mission found that “the same risks of corruption exist,” and “there are new laws that are still fragile in their implementation,” French socialist and democrat Jean-Marc Germain told reporters in Strasbourg on Monday.
The Parliament can serve as a pressure point, although the decision on funds is largely in the hands of the commission and the council.
“There is no real political pluralism in Hungary, which may in the long run be a reason for worrying,” he said, adding that most companies are still owned by the same few people as during Orbán’s rule.
The tone is different on the other side of the political spectrum.
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European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has joined MEPs in urging the bloc’s governments not to gut the EU’s next seven-year budget, as talks on spending reach a critical phase.
The commission has proposed a budget worth just under €2 trillion, equivalent to 1.26 percent of the EU’s gross national income, a small increase on the previous seven year spending plan. But the so-called ‘frugal’ group of countries, led by Germany, have demanded hefty cuts, complaining that they are contributing too much.
“Having no new financial framework is by far the most financially advantageous solution for Germany,” chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday.
But 17 EU countries from Southern and Eastern Europe signed a joint letter last week, demanding that farmers’ subsidies via the Common Agricultural Policy are maintained, as well as spending across the EU’s poorest regions, known as cohesion policy
During a press conference on Tuesday, Siegfried Muresan, the Romanian centre-right MEP who is co-leading parliament’s negotiating team on the seven-year budget with Portuguese socialist and democrat Claudia Tavares, said that there was “still time” for the Irish presidency to avoid proposing “unjustified cuts” that “would make Europe weaker and severely undermine the institutional cooperation between parliament and council.”
Though Muresan conceded that governments did not want to increase their national contributions, “there is a way out”, he said.
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Politicians need to solve the affordability crisis to stop the far-right, social democratic Portuguese prime minister Luís Montenegro told MEPs on Tuesday (6 October).
Opening a debate in Strasbourg, Montenegro called for more lax regulation as a way to address the housing crisis, defended strict migration policies, and expressed support for funding poorer regions in the next EU budget.
He also stressed the importance of lowering fuel prices and prioritising the energy transition to “solve the real problems that people wrestle with,” adding that “our response … has to be felt in the lives of Europeans” to avoid disappointed voters turning to populism and extremism.
Back at home, Montenegro has the far-right Chega (Enough) party on his tail: in the 2025 parliamentary elections, they won 23 percent of the ballots against the Montenegro alliance’s 33 percent.
Now, polls give Chega 27 percent of declared votes for the next parliament, slightly less than the Socialist Party (28 percent) and ahead of the current government coalition (24 percent).
For his part, a Chega MEP (Patriots for Europe), António Tânger Corrêa, challenged Montenegro on Tuesday for relying on wind and solar energy without enough storage in case of blackouts and shutting down coal power plants.
He also warned Montenegro against agreeing to limit unanimous votes in the European Council in future, as representing a blow to Portugal’s sovereign powers.
From his left-wing opponents, Portuguese MEP Catarina Martins pointed out the high rent costs in the country and criticised the government for failing to support low-earning tenants.
Montenegro said his government simplified the law around housing construction – much in line with the EU’s focus on deregulation – and proposed tax breaks to encourage investors to build more.
An EU-level policy complementing it “would be very useful,” he said, as long as it simplified existing regulations.
The Affordable Housing Act presented by the EU Commission in early September aims to improve the market for tenants by restricting short-term rentals.
Every day, children are killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Where are the outraged headlines?
The number of children killed in Gaza since Israel started its onslaught, following the Hamas attack on 7 October, 2023, is estimated at more than 21,600.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that since the so-called Israel-Hamas ceasefire, an average of “at least” one child a day – 300 children over 300 days – has been killed in the enclave.
Children, toddlers, and babies are being killed in their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, and on roads marked by displacement. They are also dying because the basic structures that should protect them – family, healthcare, education, food, water, and refuge – have been systematically destroyed.
Where are the urgent statements from EU and world leaders?
EU governments continue to authorise arms transfers to Israel despite rules which require governments to deny licences where there is a risk that military equipment will be used for serious violations of international humanitarian law.
Every EU member state is also bound by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the EU’s own treaty, which requires the union to promote children’s rights.
Why are these international rules and domestic commitments not being applied to the children of Gaza?
Mourners light candles during a mass funeral and vigil for 105 Palestinians near the rubble of the Al Tajj building in Gaza City on 30 September 2026 (Source: EPA/MOHAMMED SABER)
Children rights beyond Ukraine
The EU does care for children. In Ukraine, the EU treats children as individuals rather than statistics: it convenes coalitions, compiles names, traces families, imposes sanctions, creates mechanisms for return and makes the fate of children a central diplomatic demand.
In her State of the Union address last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – a proud mother and grandmother – introduced and praised the courage of Sasha, a six-year-old Ukrainian girl who lost a leg in a Russian missile strike in Ukraine but has now returned to her beloved gymnastics.
Von der Leyen quite rightly made the suffering of Ukrainian children intimate and personal. It is more than time she did the same for Palestinian children.
But let’s not only blame political leaders for their indifference, their lack of historical knowledge of Palestine’s occupation and their limited understanding of Palestinian calls for justice.
Parts of the legacy media must also own up to their responsibility in normalising the abhorrent.
Powerful mainstream media have preferred to “repeat Israeli propaganda and sometimes simply cut and paste IDF press releases” rather than accept the analysis of Palestinian journalists, writers and scholars, writes Bhakti Shringarpure.
Her criticism reflects a wider ongoing discussion on the sourcing and framing of Gaza coverage, with studies spotlighting how Western media has described Israeli suffering by using emotive language around 11 times more often than Palestinian suffering. References to Israel’s “right to defend itself” appear roughly five times as frequently as references to Palestinian rights.
Also, as the immediate shock of the bombardment recedes – but the killing continues – Gaza has dropped down the news cycle.
Assal Rad, author of “Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide”, describes the logic: “The façade of a ceasefire has created the space to cover it less. In reality, the conditions on the ground for Palestinians in Gaza have not changed.”
It is also less politically costly for leaders and media to focus on settler violence and settlement in the occupied West Bank, since it can be described as the work of “extremists” rather than of the Israeli government.
EU silence
Our lack of a strong reaction to what is happening is Gaza is also the story of how bystander societies can watch, absorb, and rationalise horrors – and move on.
Additionally, the killing of Palestinian children is preceded by their political “unchilding”, a process which Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian says begins before the missile falls, when Palestinian children are imagined not as children with futures but as demographic threats, future militants, or extensions of an armed group.
Their age, instead of guaranteeing greater protection, becomes entangled with suspicion.
Even amid such savage violence, some people are not giving up.
Their bosses may still look the other way, but EU Staff for Peace, which holds vigils in front of the European Commission and the EU Council every Thursday, has held gatherings to read out the names of children killed in Gaza, thereby according individuality to children whom the political and media systems have reduced to numbers.
As one EU staffer told me: “We only have a time slot of three hours and the last time we only managed to read out the names of children up to three years old. It took us one hour to read out the names of Palestinian babies under one-year old.”
Hind Rajab, who was five, was killed on 29 January 2024 by Israeli fire on the car in which she was trapped. Her body was found 12 days later alongside the bodies of members of her family and two paramedics who had gone to rescue her.
Israel has acknowledged firing on the car but has not admitted that her killing was unlawful, citing an ongoing investigation. In other words, there has been no accountability.
The obscenity is not only that Hind was killed, but that by now the killing of children in Gaza has become a familiar event.
The shame is that so many of us have constructed a hierarchy in which some children summon the world’s full moral and political force, while others are ignored.
Omar El Akkad, in his seminal book says that “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” Given the cowardice on display over the last three years, I sometimes wonder if there will ever really be a true global moral reckoning.
Almost 150 European politicians have become targets of AI-generated deepfake pornography, 50 of whom are MEPs. The EU’s Green party has now taken the fight to the upper echelons of EU authority to push a ban on ‘nudifying’ apps.
Research by the think tank Agora Digital Transformation (ADT), published on Monday (5 October), found that 50 MEPs have been targeted by digital platforms able to digitally strip anyone whose picture is uploaded to it. Of these, 46 are women.
Another ADT study published in September found that the chances of becoming a victim of false sexualised portrayals are one in 14 for women, against one in 500 for male politicians.
Most worryingly, a woman has no way of knowing she’s been targeted because “the harm is often unseen until it has spread,” Monday’s study read.
MEPs have rallied behind the Green party in demanding EU leaders take concrete steps to limit the influence of such software, while requiring member states to set up national authorities to roll out an effective ban on ‘nudifier’ apps from 2 December 2026.
The Green party initiated an open letter, which was endorsed by 119 MEPs from the Socialists and Democrats, liberal Renew Europe and the Left, calling on the European Commission and member states to take decisive action against AI deepfakes of women politicians.
The appeal asks to strengthen EU resolutions on AI and digital protection by requesting that the commission guide national authorities on enforcing the ban, and that there be a designated and properly resourced body in every member state ready to implement the ban from December.
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