What Ska spoke about.

Madam President, plastic particles have been found in the Antarctic. They have been found in the deep sea. They are harming flora and fauna, they are harming humans. And those particles, they come from tyres, from panes, from landscape fabric, from textiles, etc. from many other things. And they come from plastic pellets, flakes and powders that are supposed to be the base material for all things

Mr President, dear colleagues, our oceans and seas are central for human survival. They provide us with the air that we breathe. They function as a massive carbon sink, and many people and communities depend on them for food and for income. They are a treasure that we need to guard closely. But while they seem vast, they’re not indestructible. They, and all the benefits that we get from them, are

Mr President, dear colleagues, unfortunately, the catastrophe that we see happening in Galicia is just the tip of an enormous iceberg. The pollution of our sea with over a billion plastic pellets is a huge disaster for the environment, for marine animals and for local communities, but this disaster is not even 1% of the plastic pallets lost every single year. We need to stop this ongoing catastrop

Mr President, dear colleagues, the oceans are important for their biodiversity, for providing the oxygen that we breathe, for the food that we eat, for their role as a carbon sink – on which we depend – and for the mysteries that the deep sea still holds for us. That’s more than enough reason to protect them, because without healthy oceans, we humans cannot exist, and I’m afraid we very often forg

Mr President, dear colleagues, every year, thousands of tonnes of fin sharks are being exported from or through the EU because, yes, the sharks are being caught as a whole, they are being landed and then their fins are being cut off. The rest of the shark body is being sold off for stuff that not necessarily everyone wants to eat. And the fins are the stuff that makes the profit from being exporte

Madam President, the deep sea is still a mystery to us. We know more about the surface of the moon than about the bottom of the ocean. Yet we are already wrecking this unknown and delicate place with waste and with fishing gear. Bottom trawling destroys everything on the sea floor, no matter whether it will be used later or not. And this has to stop. Already in 2016, we adopted the Deep-Sea Regula

Madam President, things are difficult, but what we need now is the message of ‘Yes, we see all the difficulties that everyone is facing. Yes, we are doing whatever we can to make things better. Yes, we will get through this very difficult time together – there is light at the end of the tunnel. And yes, Europe is a vital part of the solution’. And for that, we need action now from the Commission,

Madam President, dear Commission President and dear Ms Zelenska, it is a big honour to have you here with us today and your presence reminds us that while we talk a lot about the problems that we’re facing in the EU, the real consequences of this war of aggression of Putin are carried by the people in Ukraine. A brutal invasion led against the peaceful people of Ukraine simply because they chose t

Mr President, I’m happy that the Commission has taken the historical decision to propose the status of an accession candidate for Ukraine and Moldova, as called for by this House, and I hope that the Council will also decide accordingly. The war Russia is raging against Ukraine, is also one against European values and is also one against European integration. And as a European family, we need to s

Madam President, we are all shocked by the atrocities that Russia is committing in Ukraine. The images, the testimonies of the survivors, they are unbearable. But we must not remain paralysed. There can be no questions. These more crimes cannot remain without reaction. We must take action and respond with further sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s criminal regime. Europe’s answer must be decisive

Madam President, Putin has brought back the horrors of war to Europe, and a cruel reminder of those horrors of the past and present is the violent death of World War Two Nazi concentration camp survivor, Boris Romanchenko, who was killed last week in the shelling of his apartment in Kharkiv. Our condolences go out to his family and friends, and to all Ukrainians who have lost loved ones in this se

Madam President, the war Putin is waging is targeted against Ukraine, shelling civilian areas and attacking refugees, but his war is also meant against Europe as a whole. Putin intends to destroy the post—Cold War European security architecture. Putin is waging a war against democracy, rule of law and freedoms, which are universal values. As the European Union, as the Union built for peace, we mus

Madam President, we have made advances for gender equality, but the pure fact that I stand here today, as a female politician and the President of my Group, and the fact that we have a female President of the Parliament, is unfortunately nothing to be taken for granted. It is the result of the incredible work of the many women before us who fought for equal rights and for gender equality. With tha

Madam President, Ukraine is under threat. A country that just as any other country wants to decide on its own future but is bullied by its big neighbour. But this is not just a threat to Ukraine. It’s also an attack on the basic idea of how states relate to each other. It’s a threat to international rules and to European security. And it saddens me profoundly that we have to debate this dangerous

Madam President, dear colleagues, dear family of David, last week, we not only lost a political leader but also a member of our European family. And as it always is with family members, they leave a painful void – a void that will be felt in this Parliament for a very long time. President Sassoli was a committed, heartfelt pro-European. He carried a deep conviction that Europe’s future could only

Mr President, yet again, the COVID cases are spiralling up in some European regions more than ever before during the pandemic. Europe is even becoming a hotspot in the global statistics. And yes, there are differences between Member States. But we should never stop to look for European solutions, to learn from one another, and we should make sure that the virus that has caused so much damage never

Madam President, before looking ahead to the Council meeting, I need to look back and refer Minister Logar to some remarks that his Prime Minister, Prime Minister Janša, has made lately via Twitter. He has degraded MEPs. He has promoted ridiculous conspiracy theories and he has used anti-Semitic stereotypes. I’m not willing to get used to this kind of political rhetoric. It undermines our democrac

Mr President, I was really wondering what the Prime Minister was trying to achieve today in this plenary because he hasn’t really presented himself as a prime minister of one of the most important Member States of the European Union. Prime Minister, you’ve been coming here more like a leader of a small party in a heated election campaign and I’m not sure that’s the image you want to give here. Whe

Dear Prime Minister, I welcome the opportunity to speak to you directly even though, unfortunately, I might have missed that hopeful part that you had promised to us. Maybe we should give him the extra time for that, President. I believe, Prime Minister, though, that you are leading your country on a dangerous path, a path which calls into question the country’s well-deserved place at the heart of

Mr President, this summer the UN Panel on Climate Change gave us a dramatic reminder of what’s at stake. They tell us the global surface temperature is increasing faster than ever in the past 2 000 years. They tell us that if we don’t drastically limit our emissions, every single region on our planet will suffer the immediate consequences of climate change. They tell us we only have until 2030 max

Mr President, an ever—accelerating climate crisis, the deterioration of the rule of law in Europe, a new turn in the pandemic with a very transmissible variant spreading: these are just some of the issues a new Presidency will have to face, and it will be more than enough for any. But we are concerned about how willing the Slovenian Presidency is to take on those challenges. While we see unprecede