What Raphaël spoke about.

14

Dec

2022

FR Speech

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Defending democracy from foreign interference (debate)

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, will we be able to preserve the jewels we have inherited? Will we be able to draw from ourselves the strength to defend democracy and European integration? Or are we going to let corruption and indolence lead our cities to ruin? Corruption is not just suitcases of banknotes. It is more broadly the erasure of the general interest before particular i…

13

Dec

2022

FR Speech

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Suspicions of corruption from Qatar and the broader need for transparency and accountability in the European institutions (debate) (debate)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, hugged by shame, filled with anger, aware that citizens demand that we be firm and intransigent, we must act quickly. "Today is the time to get rid of old burdens that have become cumbersome": These words of Altiero Spinelli should serve as a compass. The old burdens of carelessness, indolence, the culture of impunity and the ethos of compromise must now be remo…

19

Oct

2022

FR Speech

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Preparation of the European Council meeting of 20-21 October 2022 (debate)

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, one leader is fighting for diamonds, the other is fighting for luxury, the third is fighting for uranium. There are enough of these negotiations of carpet dealers, of heads of government who act in VRP of private sectors. It weakens our democracies, it weakens our sanctions. When war rages, it is vital for the city that the public interest again takes precede…

18

Oct

2022

EN Speech

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Question Time (Commission) - Protecting critical infrastructure in the EU against attacks and countering hybrid attacks

Mr President, very good question. Thank you for your response. I like it very much. It has been fun, by the way. My second question is: of course the era of naivety is over, but how do you react when you learn that the German head of cybersecurity is actually working with Russian interests? When will we have a total clean—up of our institutions that are supposed to protect and guarantee our securi…

18

Oct

2022

EN Speech

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Question Time (Commission) - Protecting critical infrastructure in the EU against attacks and countering hybrid attacks

Thank you. And hello, Vice-President. I have a question on the attacks, but you already responded. My question will be, therefore, on money. I mean, how can you tell us that what happened with Germany and the strategic gas storage owned by Gazprom cannot happen anymore? And what do we do about Huawei investments, for instance, in critical infrastructure? Is there any plan to actually address the f…

5

Oct

2022

FR Speech

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Outcome of the Commission’s review of the 15-point action plan on trade and sustainable development (debate)

Mr President, Mr Vice-President, finally, finally, we are starting to put things right and stop confusing the end with the means. Because yes, trade is a means and not an end. It must serve a greater purpose than it, starting with sustainable development. The Commission seems to have partially heard the message we are trying to convey and we will therefore be able to sanction tomorrow the violatio…

5

Oct

2022

FR Speech

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Countering the anti-European and anti-Ukrainian propaganda of Putin’s European cronies (topical debate)

Mr President, Mr Vice-President, Mr Minister, ladies and gentlemen, they call themselves patriots and serve a foreign tyrant. They call themselves truth seekers and relay the crudest fake news. They claim Orwell and empty the words of their substance, abolish the principle of non-contradiction. They are Putin's digital, political, and media proxies. They're not in Kherson or Donetsk. No, they're i…

15

Sep

2022

FR Speech

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Statute and funding of European political parties and European political foundations (debate)

Madam President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced yesterday here a great pact for the defence of democracy. This is what we have been calling for in the Special Committee on Foreign Interference for a long time now. It is urgent to take the measure of peril and strengthen our democracies. This text participates in…

14

Sep

2022

FR Speech

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Human rights violations in the context of forced deportation of Ukrainian civilians to and forced adoption of Ukrainian children in Russia

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, remember the Mariupol theatre in front of which the locals had written the word ‘’ (‘Children’), hoping for a hint of humanity on the part of their tormentors. Remember that the Russian army bombed anyway. Keep in mind that Ukrainian children are therefore targets of the Russian war, as were Syrian children yesterday and Chechen children the day…

6

Jul

2022

FR Speech

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The arrest of Cardinal Zen and the trustees of the 612 relief fund in Hong Kong

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, dare to keep your head up when everything pushes you to bow your back: that is courage. Cardinal Zen, 90, is now the face and name of human dignity, and with him Jimmy Lai, Joshua Wong and hundreds more. In Hong Kong, the list of political prisoners is growing every day, cells are full and puppet trials follow one another. Collusion with a foreign power, inci…

6

Jul

2022

FR Speech

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The relations of the Russian government and diplomatic network with parties of extremist, populist, anti-European and certain other European political parties in the context of the war (debate)

Madam President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, in the Special Committee on Interference, which I have the honour to chair, we have been working for two years on the ‘how’. Now is the time to ask the question of ‘why’. Why is Vladimir Putin sponsoring far-right movements across Europe? Why do its networks support both anti-Western pan-Africanists and Western white supremacists, the mo…

9

Jun

2022

FR Speech

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A new trade instrument to ban products made by forced labour (debate)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, a crime against humanity has haunted our cabinets and our shops for too many years. The deportation and enslavement of the Uyghur people. When you buy a Zara shirt or a pair of Nikes, you may find yourself unknowingly, unwittingly, bound to the Chinese concentration system. Why? Because there is no law in Europe, no instrument to prevent the import of the produc…

8

Jun

2022

FR Speech

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The human rights situation in Xinjiang, including the Xinjiang police files

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, one day we all wondered what we would have done in the Europe of camps in 1942 or in the USSR of the gulag in 1947. These questions, bequeathed by history, cannot be answered. But there are other questions that we can and must answer. What are we doing today in the face of the camps of our time? What are we doing in the face of the deportation of the Uyghur p…

19

May

2022

FR Speech

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The fight against impunity for war crimes in Ukraine (debate)

Mr President, Commissioner. Systematic rapes, civilians tied up and shot dead in the street, torture, hospitals and schools razed... The strategy of terror of Russian soldiers in Ukraine is limitless. Why would he get in the way? Impunity has existed for 20 years: impunity for crimes committed in Chechnya, impunity for crimes committed in Syria, impunity for crimes committed in Russia itself, impu…

5

May

2022

FR Speech

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The impact of the war against Ukraine on women (debate)

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, you are too ugly. We'll let you live so you can tell everyone. That's what Putin's welders told a 17-year-old girl, after raping her mother and 15-year-old sister in front of her for days and nights and beating them to death. Why did her tormentors let her live to speak? Because systematic rape of Ukrainian women is not just barbaric, it is a strategy of terr…

4

May

2022

FR Speech

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Reports of continued organ harvesting in China

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Halal bodies. The first time I heard this expression in the mouth of a Uighur doctor forced to participate in forced organ harvesting from shotguns, I did not understand. He told me: Wealthy clients in the Gulf are asking for halal organs. They are then taken from Muslim deportees. This is the law of supply and demand”. That was in 2020. I asked him to repeat…

6

Apr

2022

FR Speech

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Cooperation and similarities between the Putin regime and extreme right and separatist movements in Europe (topical debate)

Madam President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, Bucha's lying bodies, Mariupol's martyrdom, women raped, children tortured, civilians executed: This is the true face of Putinism. The face of an evil that, for 20 years, our leaders have not wanted to see, name and fight at our borders and at the very heart of our cities. Today, the war in Ukraine forces us to open our eyes. The moment …

5

Apr

2022

FR Speech

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Outcome of the EU-China Summit (1 April 2022) (debate)

Mr President, Mr High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, we have not received the slightest support from Beijing against the invasion of Ukraine. But how could it have been otherwise? Why, then, would a regime that parches Uyghurs in camps, intends to vassalize its neighbors and sees us as strategic adversaries help us stop a regime that massacres Ukrainians, intends to vassalize its neighbors …

9

Mar

2022

FR Speech

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Debate with the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas - The EU's role in a changing world and the security situation of Europe following the Russian aggression and invasion of Ukraine (continuation of debate)

Madam President, Mr High Representative, the future of Europe is decided in the ruins of Mariupol and Kharkiv, in the streets of Kiev and Odessa. If we do not arrest Putin in Ukraine, we will no longer have peace on our continent. Then we will not intervene militarily, but we can do much more than we do today. Every day, we fund the war machine razing towns and villages with more than €600 million…

8

Mar

2022

FR Speech

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Foreign interference in all democratic processes in the EU (debate)

Madam Vice-President, Madam Minister, Mr High Representative, allow me first of all to welcome and thank the work of the rapporteur Kalniete and all the members of the committee whom I have had the honour of chairing for 18 months. We have shown that the defence of democracy is not left-wing or right-wing and transcends all political divides. Colleagues, for 20 years, bottled up in the myth of the…

16

Feb

2022

FR Speech

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EU-Russia relations, European security and Russia’s military threat against Ukraine (debate)

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Elina was 20 at the end of 2013. A philosophy student, she was one of the first to take to the streets, with a European flag in her hands, to launch the revolution. Andrei was 25, and he was a DJ. I saw him, at the beginning of 2014, with an iron shield attached to his arm, facing the bullets of the snipers. Want to be free, aspire to join the family of Europ…

15

Feb

2022

FR Speech

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Corruption and human rights (continuation of debate)

Mr President, Mr Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, how long are we going to tolerate tyrants spending on us the money they steal from their people? How long are we going to let the brigands of Vladimir Putin enjoy their villas on our coasts, their chalets in our mountains, their yachts in our ports? Alexander Babakov, Vice-President of the Duma, is one of the poorest members of the Russian Par…

15

Feb

2022

FR Speech

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Human rights and democracy in the world – annual report 2021 (continuation of debate)

Mr President, Mr High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, 'Words, words, words...', Hamlet repeated. "Words, words, words..." We talk a lot about human rights, but the question before us is simple: What powerful interests are we willing to offend to give our words the weight they lack? We condemn forced labour, but our multinationals have their products manufactured by Chinese suppliers who expl…

19

Jan

2022

FR Speech

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Presentation of the programme of activities of the French Presidency (continuation of debate)

Madam President, Mr President, there are apparently crimes too great and criminals too powerful to find any place in your long speeches. You have sung about human rights in general, but you have again ignored the worst crime against humanity of our time: deportation and eradication of the Uyghur people. But what are human rights worth without the courage to defend them? Courage is not to be silent…

16

Dec

2021

FR Speech

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Continuous crackdown on civil society and human rights defenders in Russia: the case of human rights organisation Memorial

– Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Vladimir Putin is afraid. Admittedly, its power is not immediately threatened. Admittedly, it controls weapons, money, the media, civil servants. But he will be afraid as long as there are free consciences in Russia. And there he is afraid of Memorial, afraid of law and truth, afraid of every light that illuminates the dirty night of thieves a…