What Brando spoke about.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, while Parliament is preparing to examine the proposal for a regulation on artificial intelligence, with this report we are giving a clear message and already making an important point: In our view, there is no place in Europe for mass biometric surveillance and security and the fight against crime cannot be at the expense of citizens' fundamental rights. Indeed, identification by means of biometric data in publicly accessible places risks leading to serious abuses of the right to privacy and other underlying principles of our democratic systems. The European Data Protection Supervisor said: these systems would have a direct negative impact on the exercise of freedom of expression, assembly, association and even freedom of movement. Let us then think about what could happen in places that are not so attentive to the separation of powers or fundamental freedoms, be they states or cities. The risk of abuse is too high. That is why we believe that the exceptions to Article 5 on prohibited practices in the proposal for a regulation should be removed. Similarly, predictive techniques for law enforcement bring with them a very serious risk of discrimination, in addition to the lack of evidence on their accuracy, undermining one of the fundamental foundations of our democratic systems, namely the presumption of innocence. No human oversight or error-free datasets will be sufficient to ensure that such decisions by AI systems are made respecting constitutional guarantees and fundamental rights of the Union, even where these decision-making processes are reversible. A fortiori, these systems cannot undergo a mere conformity self-assessment before being placed on the market, as proposed by the Regulation in its first draft before us. A self-assessment exposes people to unacceptable risks of errors and violations, which would only be discovered later by the supervisory authorities if they had the means to do so, and this would result in damage that has now occurred, even irreparable, to people's lives. We already have the world's most advanced data protection laws in the EU today. For us it is a model, a model that we want to bring to the rest of the world, and we cannot afford to retreat even a millimeter from this setting when we find ourselves regulating artificial intelligence. In this area too, we must fully protect the rights of citizens. I think this is how we can act for a Europe that has its own model centered on the human rights of artificial intelligence.

Madam President, Madam President von der Leyen, ladies and gentlemen, what would Altiero Spinelli and the founding fathers and mothers of European integration say about the last twenty years, which began with the explosion of globalisation and the attack on the Twin Towers and Afghanistan? They'd tell us: How much time did you lose while the world was running? But they would also tell us that today we are finally on the right track. The dramas we have experienced have led to a reaction, today we are working on debt and common taxation, to reform the fiscal rules. We have a massive vaccination campaign that must continue, as well as the construction of social Europe, technological sovereignty, environmental transition, common defence, humanitarian corridors, the protection of LGBT and women's rights. On all these issues you, Mr President, have used courageous words, but we want to see them put into practice. If he does, he will have Parliament on his side. A federal, supportive and democratic Europe may seem impossible but it is not so, as we have heard from our Bebe Vio, then it can be done, indeed it must be done.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, after years of stalemate, we conclude the revision of the Blue Card Directive, a necessary tool to make the European Union attractive to talent and highly skilled workers. I am pleased to have contributed to this file as rapporteur for the S&D Group in the EMPL Committee. Since the last legislature, this instrument has been important to us as a proposal for highly qualified workers, for universities and companies that needed it. We have combated the risks of social and wage dumping, we have broadened the scope of the directive to include seasonal workers and those enjoying international protection. The outcome of the negotiations, however, is partially satisfactory, because we needed to be more ambitious by creating a single European instrument, replacing national ones – I am addressing governments – but we have achieved a lot, thanks to the work of our rapporteur Javier Moreno, whom I want to thank, a useful instrument that we will relaunch in order to build a more united and more open Europe in the world.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we must say clearly that the European Union cannot go back to the austerity policies of the past. The pandemic has shown the need and usefulness of investment and social policy choices that many of us were proposing well before this last year and a half. We are now moving forward with the reform of the Stability Pact, which takes into account a new golden rule for social and environmental investment and for inclusive digitalisation, so that it becomes a sustainability pact. So we can support European growth with more work, with the necessary reforms, with less inequality for all Europeans, starting with the youngest. A new season is possible. We learn from the mistakes of the past and don't go back.