Speeches

Mr President, this report takes time to condemn Hamas and Russia, but not a bad word about Israel. In fact, it says we should continue to build peace and stability in the region. What peace and stability? We can’t even call for an unconditional ceasefire while EU Member States funnel endless weapons and financial aid to a regime openly perpetrating a genocide. During Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the European Investment Bank has signed off on 650 million in loans for Israeli infrastructure projects, with over 12 000 children killed, we now have children starving to death in Gaza as Israel imposes famine conditions on 2.3 million Palestinians, and still the right wing have the inhumanity to table an amendment calling for the suspension of funding to UNRWA. The EPP have tabled an amendment to make all EU funds to the Middle East and North Africa conditional on a declaration of a recognition of Israel, while brazenly conflating opposition to the genocidal, settler-colonial, Zionist State of Israel with anti-Semitism. EU racism knows no bounds.

Madam President, we have a regulation to extend the trade liberalisation measures for Ukraine’s agricultural products in the same session as we have a call to impose sanctions on Russian and Belarusian food and agri-products to the EU. The EU’s grain prices have been primarily depressed by the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain. The EU wants to support Ukraine during the war effort, but the reality is Ukraine’s agri—exporters are offshoring billions of the profits from sales in the EU, while EU farmers see their costs rise due to the war and the self-defeating sanctions, and their income threatened by cheap imports. Grain growers in Ireland are seeing their livelihoods eroded by cheap Ukrainian imports. Why put grain growers in Ireland out of business just to enrich big agri in Ukraine? The EU should stop supporting trade deals that benefit speculators and put an end to profiteering by hedge funds. More sanctions on Russia and Belarus will not solve the problem of our farmers. If it might try and stop the war, it might help.

Madam President, we already have a corporate sustainability reporting directive that creates a legal obligation for corporations and big business to report on how their activities impact the environment and human rights. The idea that we wouldn’t actually match that directive with a corporate sustainability due diligence directive – which would actually require these businesses and corporations to take action to prevent and stop human rights and environmental violations – is farcical. Is it any wonder farmers and workers across Europe are angry? What does this say about EU democracy and the EU’s priorities? We already had an agreement on the text of the regulation between Parliament and the Council, and now certain Member States – led by Germany – are reneging on the deal. Yet Germany is determined to go ahead with Mercosur, a deal that will create even more unfair competition for farmers and producers in the EU. It does look like big business interests are winning again.

Mr President, the Commissioner would be very disappointed if I didn’t get to talk. The final draft of the European Media Freedom Act is disappointing, but no surprise given how the EU is hell bent on promoting the defence industry at every opportunity. This legislation could have made a strong statement: that the use of spyware by Member States against journalists would be illegal. Instead, it fudged the issue, and the legislation now refers to the fact that the European Union confirms to respect Member States’ responsibilities with regard to national security. The consequence of this is that the Council’s retention of the national security exemption enables EU governments to continue to deploy spyware against journalists under the guise of national security, outside the protective framework of EU law. This is a backward step at a time when we know that spyware programmes, such as Pegasus and Predator, have been employed by EU governments. Neither should we forget that many of these Israeli companies who make a lot of this stuff test their products on Palestinians under illegal occupation. And I wonder: this European Media Freedom Act, will it do anything for the freedom of journalist Julian Assange?

Madam President, Ursula von der Leyen says she is planning on a commissioner for defence if she is in power next term. A commissioner for defence means a commissioner for war. Why don’t we have a commissioner for peace? What started as an economic union is fast developing into a military union. Great news for the elites that profit from war, but not good news for the citizens of Europe who see more and more of their money going to the military industrial complex. Why in two years did we never work for peace in Ukraine? Why did Commissioner von der Leyen go to Tel Aviv to greenlight an Israeli genocide? Now the EU is supporting a genocide, we are still supporting the Zionist settler colonial project. The EU response to Israel’s act of genocide in Gaza exposes all the talk about human rights, international law and it all sounding meaningless. Each day there’s a new atrocity, continued bombing and ethnic cleansing, the blocking of aid and now starvation has been used as a weapon of war. The EU has been exposed.

Mr President, when it was founded in 2002, the European Maritime Safety Agency had a narrow focus on the monitoring of ship movements, but its role has expanded into areas such as coastguard operations and the surveillance of migration flows. The agency is increasingly complicit in the militarisation and externalisation of the EU’s border policies. From 2018 to 2020, the Maritime Agency leased drones to a Portuguese company that were manufactured by Israel’s largest military company, Elbit Systems. That contract was worth EUR 59 million. Israel developed and battle-tested these drones in Gaza in its brutal and inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Border security is a central part of the European security research programme, and the Commission has used this programme consistently in order to support the development of a competitive European security industry. This has allowed military technology to be systematically transferred to border management. The defence industry is making a fortune while we allow migrants to drown at sea.

Mr President, this revision of the 40-year-old Product Liability Directive means consumers should be better protected and should find it easier to claim compensation for damages caused by a faulty product. But it is not enough simply to have legislation in place; it must be enforced. In Ireland, the defective block scandal has devastated families in Limerick, Clare, Donegal and Mayo. At the heart of this scandal are repeated breaches of EU legislation. It is clear that the blocks did not meet the standards of the Construction Product Directive. It is also clear that the market surveillance regulations were breached. Ireland did not grant any entity market surveillance power for construction products, and it did not report any market surveillance activities to the Commission between January 2010 and July 2013. After July 2013, surveillance was reactive only, not proactive. To add insult to injury, the redress scheme is not fit for purpose and is inflicting more pain on the victims.

Mr President, the text of the Green Claims Directive builds on the empowering consumers for the Green Transition Directive, which essentially bans climate neutrality claims for products based on offsets. The Green Claims Directive text we passed at ENVI adds a significant restriction on claims based on offsetting at the level of a trader, not just at the product level. The text now states traders would only be able to use offsets on residual emissions, in line with the Environmental Sustainability Reporting Standards. Both the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive and the Green Claims Directive show that there is an appetite in the Parliament to tackle offsetting. The next logical step would be to contest climate neutrality as a concept and as the basis for EU climate action, and to work to establish a separate EU carbon removal target.

Mr President, I voted against this. I think it’s madness! We are in a rush towards enlargement. We are prepared to overlook rule of law. We are prepared to overlook corruption, as we’ve seen with Ukraine’s bid to get into the EU. We’re looking to fast-track things. We’re pressuring countries to behave in a certain manner so that they will get into the European Union quickly: countries like Georgia and Macedonia. We’re badgering them; we’re telling them how they should vote so that they can qualify for EU entry. And as for the introduction of qualified majority voting in the Council for decisions relating to the protection of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, this is absolute nonsense! If we’re interested in democracy, we wouldn’t dream of bringing in qualified majority voting. This is 100% anti-democratic. It’s not the EU that we signed up to.

Mr President, I voted against this. What does unwavering EU support for Ukraine really mean? If we were really prepared to support Ukraine, we would help to end the war. We have done nothing to bring about peace. We have opposed dialogue and diplomacy. We have supported the US-NATO proxy war from the start. We have wasted billions of EU taxpayers’ money on this stupid war. And where’s it going? It isn’t going in Ukraine’s direction. Hundreds of thousands of working-class Ukrainian kids are dead – for no good reason! Ukraine has been destroyed. Western corporations from the US and Europe are buying up the land on the western side of Ukraine for peanuts. This is madness! Pumping more money into Ukraine now has become a money laundering exercise at this stage – to feed the military industrial complex and just to please the US at a great expense to every citizen in Europe. This place is losing it!

Mr President, Navalny should not have been in prison. The only people that should be in prison are those who are a danger to society when they’re free. His death in prison was a tragedy. He was brave and committed, but committed too many of the things that we wouldn’t agree with. He was very much at odds with purported EU values. He was a right-wing nationalist, much like Putin. He was Islamophobic and compared Muslims to cockroaches. He championed gun legislation and he urged Russians that they needed guns to exterminate Muslims. At the same time as we are eulogising Navalny, Julian Assange has been persecuted now for 13 years. We met his father, John Shipton, this morning and it was absolutely emotional just to listen to him. And he told us that, in 2011, 13 years ago, the CIA set out to destroy Julian, destroy his family, bankrupt his family, destroy WikiLeaks. That’s 13 years ago! They have been fighting that since and the EU has nothing to say about Julian Assange.

Mr President, one of the root causes of migration is the trading of arms and their subsequent use in conflict. European arms exports have been directly linked to the forced displacement of millions. The arms trade is a lucrative industry that profits both from conflict and from militarising the migration routes it helps to create. And the EU is helping the business boom. The Commission has given away billions in taxpayers’ money to border control companies that torture and kill people seeking safety, either through direct contracts or through dodgy deals with third countries. These are crimes committed with our resources, in our names. The EU has chosen to turn human misery into a business opportunity rather than evaluate the underlying causes of displacement. We should focus our energies on ensuring all have a chance of a safe life and a safe planet, and stop using migration to distract from our domestic failures.

Mr President, there’s been much talk about the threat to undersea cables in the Red Sea, but Ansar Allah have made it clear that they have no intention of targeting internet cables destined for regional countries. They are solely targeting ships that are facilitating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Now, how are we supposed to take the Commission’s concern for undersea cables seriously when the Nord Stream investigations are going cold? This was a terrorist attack on critical EU infrastructure that has affected the lives of every person in the EU. Along with the brain-dead sanctions against Russia, this act of sabotage compounded rising energy costs, a cost of living crisis and an EU-wide economic downturn. Sweden and Denmark have abandoned their investigations into the destruction of Nord Stream. How bad that the EU countries don’t even want to know the truth about what really happened? See no evil, speak no evil. Accountability is less important than maintaining propaganda narratives. Smear the enemy and bury the evidence. It’s a shocking indictment on the EU that they don’t want to know the truth about Nord Stream.

Mr President, it’s often forgotten that the European Union was founded primarily as a means to prevent future wars. The European Investment Bank was established in the 1958 Treaty of Rome with a mission to facilitate equitable development in the EU through lending to regions that are less developed and to support the EU’s internal market. The EIB’s current mission statement is to boost Europe’s potential in terms of jobs and growth, support action to mitigate climate change and promote EU policies outside the EU. Yesterday, however, the EIB president said the bank was ready to do more and better to contribute to projects which boost the European defence industry. Can anyone tell me how a bank with a mission statement to facilitate equitable development throughout EU Member States can justify committing funding to defence industry to the tune of EUR 8 billion? It’s worrying to hear that the EIB president says that supporting the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine is a priority now. This is turning into a money laundering exercise for the military industrial complex. The architects of the Treaty of Rome would be turning their graves if they knew that the European Investment Bank had turned into a de facto money lender to the EU arms industry.

Madam President, there are 18 condemnations in the common security and defence policy annual report. Not one of them is directed at Israel. Yet, unlike Israel, none of the 11 countries condemned are carrying out a genocide right now. The report emphasises full support for Israel and for Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law. I would like the rapporteur of the report to please point out what system of law he is appealing to, because nowhere in international law does it allow for a state to claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation. Israel is a foreign nation illegally occupying Palestine. The Palestinians are the ones with the right to self-defence, not the Israelis. This part of it makes a mockery of the notion of international law of human rights. You are twisting international law to justify a genocide and then accuse everyone else of human rights abuses. This place is losing the plot.

Mr President, we are living in a world of rampant inequality between North and South, between rich and poor, between the classes that labour and those that profit. This inequality is produced by various forces of global capitalism that divide, exclude and polarise the world. The emergence of neoliberalism has certainly exasperated the problem. Neoliberalism is a project of the ruling class to increase its power and profits on a global scale. Too often, the better off blame the poor for being poor, but the truth lies elsewhere. The developed North imposes conditions of exclusion on the Global South. We are rich because they are poor; 4.6 billion people in the world today are living on less than USD 5 a day. If they were better off, we wouldn’t have quite as much wealth. We are still robbing the Global South blind. Colonialism hasn’t stopped. Today it’s called financial imperialism and the developed North is playing a huge role in continuing the poverty of the Global South.

Mr President, resources are a source of wealth and trouble. Amnesty International has published a damning report denouncing shocking human rights abuses in Congo arising from the industrial mining of cobalt and copper for rechargeable batteries. These include the forced eviction of entire communities, as well as sexual assault, arson and beatings. Decarbonising the global economy should not come at the expense of the Global South. The transition towards renewable energy cannot be based on the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail. In Western Sahara, Morocco’s renewable energy projects are also used to greenwash human rights abuses. This infrastructure serves to further entrench Morocco in occupation with the obvious complication of foreign capital, complicity of foreign capital and the shameful approval of the EU. The EU allocates millions of euros in subsidies and aid to Morocco and to a multitude of European companies that invest in Western Sahara. This makes the EU a financier and accomplice to an illegal occupation. The EU is blatantly ignoring international law in Western Sahara.

Madam President, the US and their allies imposed unilateral sanctions to punish the people for supporting their government, to strangle the country until the people see no other option but to abandon their belief that independence is possible, so that they come to the realisation that, in a world dominated by financial capital, democracy means one thing: the exposure of your country, its people and its resources to the exploitation of the predatory global capitalist regime. These totalitarian coercive measures decimate development and undermine the basic human rights of entire populations. The right-wing forces besieging the country then blame the results on the government under attack. For 62 years, this has been the formula for Cuba. US sanctions amount to crimes against humanity: whether it’s genocide in Gaza , killing hundreds of thousands of the weakest in societies through regime change or sanctions in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Yemen or Cuba, the totalitarian US regime and their puppets spread terror and call it democracy promotion.

Madam President, Syria has been strangled by Western unilateral sanctions. Malnutrition is at critical levels. Electricity, water, irrigation and sanitation infrastructure is crippled. Hyperinflation is rampant. The US occupation steals oil, burns wheat crops, and, along with the Israelis, continuously bombs Syria. Syria doesn’t bomb Israel. Turkey occupies the northwest and Israel illegally occupies and plunders the Golan Heights. But still, the report lays all responsibility at the feet of the Syrian Government. No mention of the brutal proxy war bankrolled by the US, EU, Turkey and the Gulf States, far right extremist forces armed and trained by the US and Turkey and Jordan. As Jake Sullivan said back in 2012, al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria. No mention of French industrial giant Lafarge, convicted for providing material aid to ISIS and its complicity in crimes against humanity. If we want to normalise relations with Syria, as this report claims to, we must own up to our destruction and strangulation of Syria today. And it should be noted that the author of this report was in the French cabinet that decided to illegally bomb Syria in 2018 – it was a war crime.

Mr President, are we really going to pretend that the EU is concerned about human rights after four months of complicity with the murderous Israeli regime? Citizens across Europe are sick and tired of the empty words and the expressions of concern for the terrible things happening in Gaza. We say the EU must uphold international human rights and humanitarian law. We say that we’re concerned about sexual violence, gender-based violence and the torture and killing of civilians and prisoners of war. But this only applies to countries that we amount to our geopolitical opponents. When the crimes are committed by our likeminded partners, like Israel or the US, we fall silent. We say it’s ‘complicated’, granting the likes of Israel impunity. Even with the weight of 30 000 dead Palestinians on our conscience, we still haven’t found it in ourselves to call for a ceasefire and an end to the European military support for Israel. So much for European values.

– Madam President, over 12 000 Gazan children murdered in a few months. UNICEF warns that the Gaza Strip is about to see an explosion in preventable child deaths that will compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza. We have been warning for weeks that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a nutrition crisis. Food deliveries are drastically inadequate. UN experts said last week that Palestinian women and girls continue to be raped, tortured and executed by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Women and children are being arbitrarily executed by the IDF. The Israelis are brazenly ignoring the binding ICJ court orders to halt the threat of genocide against the people of Gaza. Israel is failing to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and yesterday the EPP won a vote to take the reference to the ICJ ruling off the agenda. The European Parliament is engaging in genocidal denial. We are watching the total destruction of place, designed to obliterate past, present and future for Palestinians. This is pure evil and a genocide.

Mr President, in October, I said the 50 million Ukraine Facility is a rushed, inadequate mechanism tailor-made for corruption and embezzlement of EU funds on a massive scale. This is still the case. Many findings and recommendations put forward in the June 2023 European Court of Auditors opinion have been ignored. They found that persistent grand corruption and state capture posed a systemic risk for the Ukraine Facility, so they called on the Commission to develop a strategic document on how to prevent and combat grand corruption and state capture. Where is it? We are taking billions from other parts of the EU budget, and there are no provisions to ensure that the funds don’t end up with companies owned by the likes of Zelenskyy and the oligarchs close to him. The dogs in the street know that Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on earth, so why are basic anti-corruption standards being waived in the case of Ukraine? Wouldn’t it make an awful lot more sense if we work for peace before we start pouring billions more into Ukraine? You’re burning EU citizens’ money. Youse are being irresponsible.

Mr President, international law is in trouble these days. The US and its allies, they seldom actually talk about the UN Charter anymore. They prefer to refer to the international rules-based order, which they make up as they go along, which makes it easier for them to actually facilitate the genocide that is taken place in Gaza. Likewise, if we look at organisations like the ICC, we had a woman from Ghana, Fatou Bensouda, and she had the audacity to threaten to investigate the US for war crimes in Afghanistan and also to investigate the possibility of Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories. So that didn’t go down very well and the US threatened her. She soon lost her job and she was replaced by Karim Khan, who is very amenable to the US interest. He recently went to Israel and he met the victims of the Hamas attack, but refused to meet the Palestinian victims. This man cannot possibly be trusted to implement justice at the ICC. It’s an absolute joke that he still has the job and he should be removed if he’s of any interest in the future of the ICC.

Mr President, it’s welcome that the revision of the directive will now include a provision to directly address specific, severe cases of ecosystem destruction, including habitat destruction and illegal logging. I would hope that it will make the worst polluters sit up and pay attention that they might actually be held to account for the destruction of the environment. Now, the text doesn’t actually say ‘ecocide’. Any such inclusion of this word in the operative part of the directive was blocked by the EPP, but the recitals make it clear that the intention of the directive is to criminalise cases comparable to ecocide. The next step for the EU now should be to push for the amendment of the Rome Statute of the International Court to add ecocide, as a fifth crime, to the Rome Statute.

Mr President, PRIMA’s goals to develop knowledge and common innovative solutions for sustainable agri-food systems and integrated water provisions in the Mediterranean area are admirable and, in the light of our current climate crisis, required now more than ever. However, the initial phase of PRIMA, started in 2017, has not been without its deficiencies. There has been a particular delay in releasing funds to applicants. In Italy, for example, who supply almost a third of the applicants to PRIMA, there have been substantial payment delays, mainly due to bureaucracy and red tape emanating from the EU side of the project. If the goal of PRIMA is to develop solutions for sustainable agri-food systems, the Commission must ensure that the red tape and bureaucracy that slows down so many initiatives in this place is removed as soon as possible.