Las week at the ‘Versailles informal Summit’, EU leaders agreed to “bolstering [their] defence capabilities” by “increasing substantially defence expenditures” and focusing on investment and collaborative development of capabilities. In other words, more money should be poured to the arms industry for developing weaponry.
ENAAT and TNI are publishing on Thursday 17 March a very timely report about how such type of funding has been spent at EU level: it reveals the dark side of the €600 million in military research that the EU has undertaken since 2017, and shows a very worrying perspective for the €8billion of the European Defence Fund in 2021-2027.
The report connects the dots on major issues like conflicts of interests, corruption cases, regulatory and transparency issues involving large arms dealers like Leonardo, Indra, Safran, Thales, Airbus and Saab, and alerts on how the EDF paves the way to dangerous scenarios of future wars. Indeed the development of cutting-edge technologies, ‘smart’ weapons and other disruptive technologies, which would drastically change the way to conduct war and may render the laws of war obsolete, are largely unregulated and unaudited by the EU
To know more, register to our launch event here
