Chinese technology giant Huawei is participating in 16 projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program despite being dubbed a high-risk supplier. The Commission restricted Huawei from accessing Horizon projects in 2023 after saying that it (and another Chinese telecom supplier, ZTE) posed “materially higher risks than other 5G suppliers” in relation to cybersecurity and foreign influence. However, public data reviewed by POLITICO’s EU Influence newsletter shows that Huawei still takes part in several projects, many of which are in sensitive fields like cloud computing, 5G and 6G telecom technology and data centers. These projects mean Huawei has been working alongside universities and tech companies in Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Finland and Italy. It also has access to the intellectual property generated by the projects, as the contracts require the sharing of information as well as joint ownership of the results between partners. A Commission spokesperson confirmed that of the 16 projects, 15 were signed before the restrictions took place. The remaining project “was signed in 2025 and was assessed as falling outside the scope of the existing restrictions.” Many of the projects started in January 2023, with the contracts running out at the end of this year, while others will last until 2027, 2028 and 2030. “Huawei participates in and implements projects funded under Horizon Europe in a lawful and compliant manner,” a company spokesperson said. One of the projects is to develop data privacy and protection tools in the fields of AI and big data, along with Italy’s National Research Council, the University of Malaga, the University of Toulouse, the University of Calabria, and a Bavarian high-tech research institute for software-intensive systems. Huawei received €207,000 to lead the work on “design, implementation, and evaluation of use cases,” according to the contract for that project, seen by POLITICO. COMMISSION CRACKDOWN Last month the Commission proposed a new Cybersecurity Act that would restrict Huawei from critical telecoms networks under EU law, after years of asking national capitals to do so voluntarily. “I’m not satisfied [with] how the member states … have been implementing our 5G Toolbox,” the Commission’s executive VP for tech and security policy, Henna Virkkunen, told POLITICO at the time, referring to EU guidelines to deal with high-risk vendors. “We know that we still have high-risk vendors in our 5G networks, in the critical parts … so now we will have stricter rules on this.” The Commission is also working on measures to cut Chinese companies out of lucrative public contracts. Bart Groothuis, a liberal MEP working on the Cybersecurity Act, told POLITICO that the Commission should “honor the promises and commitments” it made “and push them out.” “They should be barred from participating. Period.” Huawei was also involved in an influence scandal last year, with Belgian authorities investigating whether the tech giant exerted undue influence over EU lawmakers. The scandal led to Huawei’s being banned from lobbying on the premises of the European Commission and the European Parliament.

MUNICH, Germany — U.S. officials have countered Europe’s push for technology sovereignty from America with a clear message: It’s China you should worry about, not us. The European Union is rolling out a strategy to reduce its reliance on foreign technology suppliers. Donald Trump’s return to office has put the focus on American cloud giants, companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink and X and others — with European officials increasingly concerned that Washington has too much control over Europe’s digital infrastructure. As political leaders and security and intelligence officials met in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Washington sought to calm nerves. The idea that Trump can pull the plug on the internet is not “a credible argument,” the United States’ National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross told an audience Thursday. Europe and the U.S. “face the same sort of threat and the same threat actors,” said Cairncross, who advises Trump on cybersecurity policy. Rather than weaning off America, wean off China, he said: “There is a clean tech stack. It is primarily American. And then there is a Chinese tech stack.” Claiming that U.S. tech is as risky as Chinese tech is “a giant false equivalency,” according to Cairncross. “Personal data doesn’t get piped to the state in the United States,” he said, referencing concerns that the Beijing government has laws requiring firms to hand over data for Chinese surveillance and espionage purposes. The attempt to quell concerns is notable even if it may not change the direction of travel in Europe. The European Commission wants to boost homegrown technology with a “tech sovereignty” package this spring. It presented a cybersecurity proposal in January that, if approved, could be used to root out suppliers that pose security risks — including from America. “We want to ensure that we don’t have risky dependencies when it comes to critical sectors,” the Commission’s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO in an interview in Munich on Friday. “We see this in AI, quantum technologies and semiconductors — we must have a certain level of capacity ourselves.” Europe’s attempt to pivot away from U.S. dependencies, while not new, has gained support in past months as the transatlantic alliance creaked. The POLITICO Poll conducted in February showed far more people described the U.S. as an unreliable ally than a reliable one across four countries, including half the adults polled in Germany and 57 percent in Canada. “The leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference Friday. REBALANCING ACT Europe is still working out what a forceful attempt to build technology sovereignty would look like, as it reforms everything from industrial policy programs to procurement rules and data and cybersecurity requirements on companies and governments. Top European cyber officials in Munich told POLITICO that technological sovereignty does not mean cutting ties with trusted partners. Vincent Strubel, director of France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI, said sovereignty means avoiding being bound by rules set elsewhere. “It’s about identifying what leverage non-European countries may have based on the technology they provide,” Strubel said in an interview. “It’s not about being friendly or unfriendly with any country — it’s about recognizing that we [currently] have no say in how that leverage might be used.” Claudia Plattner, head of Germany’s cybersecurity agency BSI, said, “We need to become more independent. We need to strengthen our local and European industries … We need to become digitally successful — that is essential to economic strength and to security.” The BSI plans to test sovereign cloud offerings from several large tech companies, including AWS and Google. The testing will examine whether European services can operate independently from parent systems and will help inform Germany’s national cloud strategy. Critics of Europe’s efforts to turn away from the U.S. say it is bound to lead to worse security. Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO of threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, said he understood that things like military command and control must remain national, “but if you start choosing sub-par cyber products just to achieve sovereignty, you’re going to be target No. 1 because threat actors will discover the vulnerabilities.” COMMON GROUND ON CHINA While tensions persist over the U.S.’s dominant position, Washington and European capitals have common ground when it comes to caution over Chinese tech. The EU is drafting legal requirements to cut out Chinese tech from critical supply chains including telecom networks, energy grids, security systems and railways. That move drew the ire of the Chinese government, which called it “blatant protectionism.” Many of the measures mirror what U.S. authorities have done in the past decade. “The U.S. understands what national security is. They don’t want to hear: ‘The U.S. is a threat.’ But they understand resilience,” said Sébastien Garnault, a prominent French cyber policy consultant. Trump “is putting America first, and the same goes in cyberspace,” Cairncross said. But, he added, “we don’t want it to be America alone. We want that partnership.” Laurens Cerulus contributed reporting.

China’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said a new European Commission proposal to restrict high-risk tech vendors from critical supply chains amounted to “blatant protectionism,” warning European officials that Beijing will take “necessary measures” to protect Chinese firms. Beijing has “serious concerns” over the bill, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters, according to state news agencies’ reports. “Using non-technical standards to forcibly restrict or even prohibit companies from participating in the market, without any factual evidence, seriously violates market principles and fair competition rules,” Guo said. The European Commission on Tuesday unveiled its proposal to revamp the bloc’s Cybersecurity Act. The bill seeks to crack down on risky technology vendors in critical supply chains ranging across energy, transport, health care and other sectors. Though the legislation itself does not name any specific countries or companies, it is widely seen as being targeted at China. 5G suppliers Huawei and ZTE are in the EU’s immediate crosshairs, while other Chinese vendors are expected to be hit at a later stage. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier responded to the Chinese foreign ministry, saying Europe has allowed high-risk vendors from outside the EU in strategic sectors for “far too long.” “We are indeed radically changing this. Because we cannot be naive anymore,” Regnier said in a statement. The exclusion of high-risk suppliers will always be based on “strong risk assessments” and in coordination with EU member countries, he said. China “urges the EU to avoid going further down the wrong path of protectionism,” the Chinese foreign ministry’s Guo told reporters. He added the EU bill would “not only fail to achieve so-called security but will also incur huge costs,” saying some restrictions on using Huawei had already “caused enormous economic losses” in Europe in past years. European telecom operators warned Tuesday that the law would impose multi-billion euro costs on the industry if restrictions on using Huawei and ZTE were to become mandatory across Europe. A Huawei spokesperson said in a statement that laws to block suppliers based on their country of origin violate the EU’s “basic legal principles of fairness, non-discrimination, and proportionality,” as well as its World Trade Organization obligations. The company “reserve[s] all rights to safeguard our legitimate interests,” the spokesperson said. ZTE did not respond to requests for comment on the EU’s plans.

Heidi Kingstone is a journalist and author covering human rights issues, conflict and politics. Her most recent book is “Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions.” Slavery is alive and thriving, and it’s wrapped inside shiny chocolate bars that promise to be “fair trade,” “child-labor free” and “sustainable.” In West Africa, which produces more than 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, over 1.5 million children still work under hazardous conditions. Kids, some as young as five, use machetes to crack pods open in their hands, carry loads that weigh more than they do and spray toxic pesticides without protection. Meanwhile, of the roughly 2 million metric tons of cocoa the Ivory Coast produces each year, between 20 percent and 30 percent is grown illegally in protected forests. And satellite data from Global Forest Watch shows an increase in deforestation across key cocoa-growing regions as farmers, desperate for income, push deeper into forest reserves. The bitter truth is that despite decades of pledges, certification schemes and packaging glowing with virtue — of forests saved, farmers empowered and consciences soothed — most chocolate companies have failed to eradicate exploitation from their supply chains. Today, many cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast and Ghana still earn less than a dollar a day, well below the poverty line. According to a 2024 report by the International Cocoa Initiative, the average farmer earns only 40 percent of a living wage. Put starkly, as the global chocolate market swells close to a $150 billion a year in 2025, the average farmer now receives less than 6 percent of the value of a single chocolate bar, whereas in the 1970s they received more than 50 percent. Then there’s the use of child labor, which is essentially woven into the fabric of this economy, where we have been sold the illusion of progress. From the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol — a voluntary agreement to end child labor by the world’s chocolate giants — to today’s glossy environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports, every initiative has promised progress and delivered delay. In 2007, the industry quietly redefined “public certification,” shifting it from a commitment to consumer labeling to a vague pledge to compile statistics on labor conditions. It missed the original 2010 deadline to eliminate child labor, as well as a new target to reduce it by 70 percent by 2020. And that year, a study by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that hazardous child labor in cocoa production increased from 2008 to 2019. “We covered a story about a ship carrying trafficked children,” recalled journalist Humphrey Hawksley, who first exposed the issue in the BBC documentary called Slavery: A Global Investigation. “The chocolate companies refused to comment and spoke as one industry. That was their rule. Even now, none of them is slave-free,” he added. As it stands, many of the more than 1.5 million West African children working in cocoa production are trafficked from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali. Traffickers lure them with false promises or outright abduction, offering children as young as 10 either bicycles or small sums to travel to the Ivory Coast. There, they are sold to farmers for as little as $34 each. And once on these farms, they are trapped. They work up to 14 hours a day, sleep in windowless sheds with no clean water or toilets, and most never see the inside of a classroom. Last but not least, we come to deforestation: Since its independence, more than 90 percent of the Ivory Coast’s forests have disappeared due to cocoa farming. In 2024, deforestation accelerated despite corporate commitments to halt it by 2025, as declining soil fertility and stagnant prices pushed farmers farther into the forest to plant new cocoa trees. But as Reuters Correspondent for West and Central Africa Ange Aboa described them, such labels are “the biggest scam of the century!” | Lena Klimkeit/Picture Alliance via Getty Images Certification labels like “Rainforest Alliance” and “Fairtrade” are supposed to prevent this. But as Reuters Correspondent for West and Central Africa Ange Aboa described them, such labels are “the biggest scam of the century!” Complicit in all of this are the financiers and investors who profit. For example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest investor, and Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) is a shareholder in 9,000 corporations, including Nestlé, Mondelez, Hershey, Barry Callebaut and Lindt — all part of the direct chocolate cluster. NBIM also has shares in McDonald’s, Starbucks, Unilever, the Dunkin’ parent company and Tim Hortons — the indirect high-volume buyer cluster. “The richest families in cocoa — the Marses, the Ferreros, the Cargills, the Jacobs — are billionaires thanks to the exploitation of the poorest children on earth,” said journalist and human rights campaigner Fernando Morales-de la Cruz, the founder of Cacao for Change. “And countries like Norway, which claim to be ethical, profit from slavery and child labor.” The problem is, few are asking who picks the cocoa. And though the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which was adopted last year, requires large companies to address human rights and environmental abuses in their supply chains, critics say the directive’s weaknesses, loopholes, and delayed enforcement will blunt its impact. However, all of this could still be fixed. Currently, a metric ton of cocoa sells for about $5,000 on world markets, but Morales-de la Cruz estimates that a fair farm-gate price would be around $7,500 per metric ton. To that end, he advocates for binding international trade standards that enforce living incomes and transparent pricing, modeled on the World Trade Organization’s compliance mechanisms. “Human rights should be as binding in trade as tariffs,” he insisted. The solution isn’t to buy more “ethical” bars but to demand accountability and support legislation that makes exploitation unprofitable. “We can’t shop our way to justice,” he said. So, as the trees in the Ivory Coast’s forests fall, the profits in Europe and North America continue to soar. And two decades after the industry vowed to end child labor, the cocoa supply chain remains one of the world’s most exploitative and least accountable. Moreover, the European Parliament’s vote on the Omnibus simplification package last month laid bare the corporate control and moral blindness still present in EU policymaking, all behind talk of “cutting red tape.” “Yet Europe’s media and EU-funded NGOs stay silent, talking of competitiveness and green transitions, while ignoring the children who harvest its cocoa, coffee and cotton,” said Morales-de la Cruz. “Europe cannot claim to defend human rights while profiting from exploitation.” However, until the industry pays a fair price and governments enforce real accountability, every bar of chocolate remains an unpaid moral debt.

BRUSSELS — First it was telecom snooping. Now Europe is growing worried that Huawei could turn the lights off. The Chinese tech giant is at the heart of a brewing storm over the security of Europe’s energy grids. Lawmakers are writing to the European Commission to urge it to “restrict high-risk vendors” from solar energy systems, in a letter seen by POLITICO. Such restrictions would target Huawei first and foremost, as the dominant Chinese supplier of critical parts of these systems. The fears center around solar panel inverters, a piece of technology that turns solar panels’ electricity into current that flows into the grid. China is a dominant supplier of these inverters, and Huawei is its biggest player. Because the inverters are hooked up to the internet, security experts warn the inverters could be tampered with or shut down through remote access, potentially causing dangerous surges or drops in electricity in Europe’s networks. The warnings come as European governments have woken up to the risks of being reliant on other regions for critical services — from Russian gas to Chinese critical raw materials and American digital services. The bloc is in a stand-off with Beijing over trade in raw materials, and has faced months of pressure from Washington on how Brussels regulates U.S. tech giants. Cybersecurity authorities are close to finalizing work on a new “toolbox” to de-risk tech supply chains, with solar panels among its key target sectors, alongside connected cars and smart cameras. Two members of the European Parliament, Dutch liberal Bart Groothuis and Slovak center-right lawmaker Miriam Lexmann, drafted a letter warning the European Commission of the risks. “We urge you to propose immediate and binding measures to restrict high-risk vendors from our critical infrastructure,” the two wrote. The members had gathered the support of a dozen colleagues by Wednesday and are canvassing for more to join the initiative before sending the letter mid next week.   According to research by trade body SolarPower Europe, Chinese firms control approximately 65 percent of the total installed power in the solar sector. The largest company in the European market is Huawei, a tech giant that is considered a high-risk vendor of telecom equipment. The second-largest firm is Sungrow, which is also Chinese, and controls about half the amount of solar power as Huawei. Huawei’s market power recently allowed it to make its way back into SolarPower Europe, the solar sector’s most prominent lobby association in Brussels, despite an ongoing Belgian bribery investigation focused on the firm’s lobbying activities in Brussels that saw it banned from meeting with European Commission and Parliament officials. Security hawks are now upping the ante. Cybersecurity experts and European manufacturers say the Chinese conglomerate and its peers could hack into Europe’s power grid.  “They can disable safety parameters. They can set it on fire,” Erika Langerová, a cybersecurity researcher at the Czech Technical University in Prague, said in a media briefing hosted by the U.S. Mission to the EU in September.  Even switching solar installation off and on again could disrupt energy supply, Langerová said. “When you do it on one installation, it’s not a problem, but then you do it on thousands of installations it becomes a problem because the … compound effect of these sudden changes in the operation of the device can destabilize the power grid.”  Surges in electricity supply can trigger wider blackouts, as seen in Spain and Portugal in April. | Matias Chiofalo/Europa Press via Getty Images Surges in electricity supply can trigger wider blackouts, as seen in Spain and Portugal in April. Some governments have already taken further measures. Last November, Lithuania imposed a ban on remote access by Chinese firms to renewable energy installations above 100 kilowatts, effectively stopping the use of Chinese inverters. In September, the Czech Republic issued a warning on the threat posed by Chinese remote access via components including solar inverters. And in Germany, security officials already in 2023 told lawmakers that an “energy management component” from Huawei had them on alert, leading to a government probe of the firm’s equipment. CHINESE CONTROL, EU RESPONSE  The arguments leveled against Chinese manufacturers of solar inverters echo those heard from security experts in previous years, in debates on whether or not to block companies like video-sharing app TikTok, airport scanner maker Nuctech and — yes — Huawei’s 5G network equipment. Distrust of Chinese technology has skyrocketed. Under President Xi Jinping, the Beijing government has rolled out regulations forcing Chinese companies to cooperate with security services’ requests to share data and flag vulnerabilities in their software. It has led to Western concerns that it opens the door to surveillance and snooping. One of the most direct threats involves remote management from China of products embedded in European critical infrastructure. Manufacturers have remote access to install updates and maintenance. Europe has also grown heavily reliant on Chinese tech suppliers, particularly when it comes to renewable energy, which is powering an increasing proportion of European energy. Domestic manufacturers of solar panels have enough supply to fill the gap that any EU action to restrict Chinese inverters would create, Langerová said. But Europe does not yet have enough battery or wind manufacturers — two clean energy sector China also dominates. China’s dominance also undercuts Europe’s own tech sector and comes with risks of economic coercion. Until only a few years ago, European firms were competitive, before being undercut by heavily subsidized Chinese products, said Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. China on the other hand does not allow foreign firms in its market because of cybersecurity concerns, he said. The European Union previously developed a 5G security toolbox to reduce its dependence on Huawei over these fears. It is also working on a similar initiative, known as the ICT supply chain toolbox, to help national governments scan their wider digital infrastructure for weak points, with a view to blocking or reduce the use of “high-risk suppliers.” According to Groothuis and Lexmann, “binding legislation to restrict risky vendors in our critical infrastructure is urgently required” across the European Union. Until legislation is passed, the EU should put temporary measures in place, they said in their letter.  Huawei did not respond to requests for comment before publication. This article has been updated.

Andrew Bailey is governor of the Bank of England and chair of the Financial Stability Board. As the G20 finance track meets in Washington amid a challenging global environment, it’s important to remember that multilateral institutions play a vital role in helping navigate troubled waters. But these institutions must be agile enough to refresh their approach to respond to the changing environment. Geopolitical tensions add to financial market vulnerabilities. Incomplete and inconsistent implementation of critical reforms across jurisdictions further exacerbates these vulnerabilities, and affects the financial system’s ability to withstand future shocks. Against this backdrop, multilateral institutions help foster the cooperation and coordination needed to find a way through these challenges and ensure global financial stability. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), which I chair, is one such example. Created by the G20 in response to the global financial crisis, the FSB advances global cooperation on financial regulation to improve the global financial system’s resilience and create the conditions necessary for sustainable economic growth. That objective matters for everyone — from Milan to Mumbai, Sapporo to Salvador. The reforms put in place by the FSB and other standard-setting bodies since 2009 have helped contain the fallout from more recent crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the swift resolution of the 2023 banking turmoil. The need for such global standards and cooperation is as clear today as it was 15 years ago — not just to prevent crises but because, ultimately, a resilient system allows for the efficient allocation of capital and supports G20 member economies in boosting growth. To maintain financial stability, however, policy development alone is not enough. We need the timely and consistent implementation of agreed reforms across jurisdictions. At the request of the G20 South African presidency, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve and former FSB Chair Randal Quarles has been asked to lead a review of reform implementations since the board’s creation, and his interim report will be submitted to the G20 next week. It shows that while we have seen intensified cooperation since the global financial crisis and made significant progress in areas like over-the-counter derivatives, full, timely and consistent implementation across the broad range of reforms hasn’t been achieved yet. But why does this matter? The FSB works hard to achieve consensus, and recommendations are adopted only when there is broad agreement among its members. Similarly, when the G20 endorses these recommendations, it reflects their collective perspective. Choosing not to implement weakens this consensus-building that is valuable for the global financial system. It also contributes to fragmentation, which weakens the resilience of markets by reducing their size and stability. This, in turn, increases the costs of cross-border activity, creates an uneven playing field and limits opportunities for risk management and diversification. This is true across the FSB’s work — from enhancing cross-border payments to managing cyber risk and establishing effective resolution regimes. Put another way, consistent implementation is the foundation of cross-border banking and capital markets, which can deliver better services to businesses and households. But in addition to implementation, we also need enhanced cooperation. As the financial system evolves, so too must our ambition for monitoring and responding to risks. Understanding risks and threats to the financial system is at the heart of the FSB’s mission, enabling us to identify vulnerabilities and respond with targeted evidence-based action. Whether it is the rise of private finance, the implications of geopolitical tensions, the impact of climate-related events or the increasing role of stablecoins, our ability to detect and address emerging threats is crucial. To this end, the FSB is committed to enhancing its surveillance capabilities too. Robust tools and data are essential for understanding vulnerabilities across the financial system, and for ensuring potential problems are addressed before they materialize. Jurisdictions can’t achieve financial stability alone. An interconnected system requires both global cooperation and engagement, as well as steadfast follow-through on agreed reforms. The FSB works in support of that fact, strengthening the financial system to create the conditions for sustained growth. In a world where global cooperation can feel increasingly under threat, the reality is we need more multilateralism — not less.