12-05-2025
Will the EU ban phones at school?
EU ministers gathered on Monday to discuss how to better protect young people online – from misinformation and addiction to digital harassment. While not all proposals are likely to make it into law, the message was clear: the EU wants to get tougher on tech when it comes to kids.
One of the suggestions was a full ban on mobile phones in schools. Several EU countries have already gone down that path: France, the Netherlands, Italy, some Spanish regions, and more recently, Luxembourg, have introduced school-wide bans on phones during the day.
Speaking to Euronews in December, Ben Carter, professor of medical statistics at King's College London, said: 'Nobody has the answer to whether banning them in schools is a good thing or a bad thing.'
Some governments want to go further. France has proposed a Europe-wide ban on social media for under-15s. 'In the absence of a European agreement, France will have to take action,' said Clara Chappaz, France's minister for artificial intelligence. She added that she would try to 'rally a coalition, with Spain, Greece, and now Ireland, to convince the European Commission.'
French President Emmanuel Macron has also backed tighter rules, calling last year for a ban on smartphones for children under the age of 11 and tougher age verification on social media platforms.
Spain's Secretary of State for Youth and Children, Rubén Pérez Correa, stressed the need for more robust online age checks. He highlighted a new child protection law under discussion in the Spanish parliament, which would expand the use of the Cartera Digital – a national ID wallet app to access adult sites – to verify that users are over 18 before watching YouTube videos or creating an account on social media.
Spain is also calling for stronger parental control systems to be built into platforms by default.
But so far, there's no reliable and privacy-friendly system in place to verify users' ages online. Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – says responsibility should vest with app stores, calling for checks to be done at that level instead.
Several EU laws already require platforms to check the age of their users. The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) include provisions to shield children from harmful content, while the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) covers data privacy for minors. The proposed Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) regulation, still under negotiation in the Council of the EU, would also require effective age identification to shield children against predators.
'For some movement to be done, we need the European Commission and cooperation. Single countries will not be able to put effective age limitation [in place], whereas together it can be done,' Poland's Education Minister Barbara Nowacka told Euronews. 'It is possible, but it is of course a long-term project.'
Youth organisations invited at the Council's table urged the EU to better enforce existing laws – such as the DSA, AVMSD and the 'Better Internet for Kids' strategy – which already contain tools to protect younger users but are often under-implemented.
European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, Glenn Micallef, told Euronews that several new initiatives are in the pipeline, including EU-wide guidelines on child protection, an action plan against cyberbullying, and a new study into the mental health impact of social media – due to be published before the end of 2025.
Syria has agreed to take back any of its citizens who are intercepted trying to reach Cyprus by boat, the Mediterranean island country's deputy minister for migration has said.
Nicholas Ioannides confirmed that two inflatable boats each carrying 30 Syrians were turned back in recent days in line with a bilateral agreement agreed by Nicosia and Damascus.
Cypriot navy and police patrol boats intercepted the two craft after they put out a call for help. The boats were subsequently escorted back to Syria.
Ioannides told private TV station Antenna that there's been an uptick of migrant vessels trying to reach Cyprus from Syria, unlike in recent years when boats would primarily depart from Lebanon.
Cyprus and Lebanon have a long-standing agreement to send back migrants.
Cyprus' deputy migration minister said his government and their Syrian counterparts are trying to fight back against people traffickers who are supplying an underground market for labourers.
According to Ioannides, human traffickers are cutting deals with local employers to bring in Syrians. This is despite laws that prevent asylum-seekers from working prior to the completion of a nine-month residency period.
"The message we're sending is that the Cyprus Republic won't tolerate the abuse of the asylum system from people who aren't eligible for either asylum or international protection and just come here only to work," Ioannides said.
The Cypriot government decided last week not to automatically grant asylum to Syrian migrants, but to examine their applications individually on merit and according to international and European laws. This came six months after the ousting of dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
From a total of 19,000 pending asylum applications, 13,000 have been filed by Syrian nationals, according to Ioannides.
After al-Assad was toppled in December last year and a new transitional government took power, some 2,300 Syrians have either dropped their asylum claims or rescinded their international protection status, while 2,100 have already left Cyprus for Syria.
Both the UN refugee agency and Europe's top human rights body have urged the Cypriot government to stop pushing back migrants trying to reach the island by boat. Cyprus denies doing anything wrong.
Meanwhile, four people, including two small children, have died during an attempt to cross from Africa to Europe, a German charity has said.
The nonprofit group RESQSHIP said that dozens of migrants had departed western Libya on a flimsy rubber boat with a failing engine.
On Saturday afternoon, the group's civilian vessel NADIR found 62 of them in international waters where Malta is responsible for search and rescue.
By the time the group reached them, two children aged three and four were dead and a third person was found unconscious and died later, it said.
Frontex, the European border and coastguard agency, and the Maltese Armed Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Mediterranean Sea is the world's deadliest migration route, with nearly 32,000 recorded fatalities since 2014, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
