Eufactcheck, an initiative of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) fights misinformation about European policies and topics. Journalism students from all over Europe factcheck claims made by politicians and others and rate them. Our focus is not to debunk fake news or disinformation but to give correct information to the reader.
Member of the European Parliament Petri Sarvamaa claimed that small and medium-sized enterprises employ 90 percent of the workforce in the EU area. This false claim was made on 12th April 2019 in a press meeting at the Finnish bureau of the European Parliament in Helsinki. Sarvamaa made the claim when asked what differences parties…
During a public hearing of a committee of the German parliament, Marc Bernhard of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) criticized the German strategy for climate protection. To his mind, reducing national CO2 emissions is not effective. In this fact check we show that Bernhard uses correct numbers but interprets them in a misleading…
In an interview in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen (paywall) on the 7th of May, Belgian liberal politician Vincent Stuer says that Europe is not able to deal with the way Spain treats the Catalonian separatists. According to him the European Union has no hard power to sanction Spain. We rate this claim as false.…
In March 2019, the German Teachers‘ Association approved of the decision of the EU Parliament to abolish the time change. However, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of the association, thinks there is a health risk for students if a country switches to summer time permanently: The probability of sleeping and learning problems, depression and diabetes has…
As part of his pre-election campaign, a Croatian candidate in European elections Mr Karlo Ressler of the currently ruling party Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), claimed that the youth unemployment halved since the EU accession [since HDZ is in power] and optimistically stated that since then 96,000 new jobs have opened. Both statements are true, however,…
One of the big question in the European Parliament Elections 2019 is sustainable energy. The liberal-conservative political party Moderaterna in Sweden has stated during their EU-election campaign that “Nuclear power is climate smart”. This is not totally true. Moderaterna stated this slogan in different social media as Twitter and Instagram. The slogan is also reported…
Article 13 of the new European copyright law anticipates a lot of resistance. The law wants to ensure that content creators are better protected. On March 26, a Flemish member of the European Parliament Anneleen Van Bossuyt (N-VA) voted against the European reformation of copyright law. In an article that appeared on the website of…
On March 23rd, 2019 Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s vice-chancellor and party head of the right wing party FPÖ, stated that “Turkey continues to receive European tax money” and demanded on his Facebook page that EU payments towards Turkey had to stop. But is it true that the EU is still paying money to Turkey as a…
On May 4th, Nicola Zingaretti – newly elected secretary of the Italian Democratic Party – firmly stated that, “under the current Lega – Movimento 5 stelle government, the unemployment rate is consistently growing”. This claim has turned out to be false.
In mid-June 2018, US president Donald Trump tweeted that the crime rate in Germany rose by more than ten percent because of the immigrants who were allowed into the country in recent years. Is this just another speculative Trump-Tweet or a disconcerting development? Since the beginning of 2017, the Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees…
