What Malte spoke about.

Mr President, dear Commissioner, you said it at the beginning: the five richest men, they doubled their wealth in the last years and the 5 billion people got poorer. I think we really fail to deliver on the human rights core values that we pretend to defend. I always think that we in the European Union, we have to defend a cosmopolitan understanding of justice, which means that each and every indi

Madam President, it is quite exactly ten years ago that I was travelling through Tanzania, through Uganda and through Rwanda and I really wanted to go and see eastern Congo because I was always so interested – where are all our resources coming from that we are using on a daily basis in all our technical devices? But I was unable to cross the border to eastern Congo because the M23 just emerged. A

Mr President! I want to talk to farmers today. I think it's a really good time for you to think about who your allies are here and who is actually just instrumentalizing you. Let me tell you one thing: If your colleagues - or those who pretend to be - break through police barricades or prevent my friends from holding their gathering in Hirschaid, then a limit has been crossed. One thing is very cl

Mr President, dear Commissioner, I guess we can all agree that the tobacco industry, they are the bad guys. And I guess we can see it also if we look at the trade of tobacco and the illegal trade of tobacco within the EU. I think we lose EUR 20 billion of tax revenue per year just because of the illegal inside EU trade. And this is something that we have to face with the traceability. But what I t

Mr President! Lately, I have sometimes wondered what we really need this European Parliament for. Can you answer me? I would say that the very first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that we know that together we can just make better decisions, that together we can just give more people what they need, and that together we can just create much more of these wonderful rights, as the EU does.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to tell you a story about the farmer Helmut, the rider Laura and her horse Whirlwind. Laura was an avid rider. Their horse whirlwind and they were really the best friends for years. They took part in competitions all over the country, were on the road and could not separate from each other. But one night, Laura heard a strange noise

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen. If 26 tons of plastic pellets fall into the sea, it's tragic, it's an accident. But above all, it is irresponsible of the companies that are responsible for this, of the shipping companies, of the companies that load these pellets in exactly the same way that there is a possibility that they will fall into the sea. And that's exactly the huge problem that pollut

Mr President, Commissioner! If you look at the list of countries that support deep-sea mining, you come across China, Russia, India and Norway. I would say that Norway is in a somewhat critical society, and in general the issue of deep-sea mining should be removed from our agenda very, very, very quickly. We are not even able to establish consistently high environmental standards on land. How does

Mr President! On 25 November, right-wing neo-Nazis and people’s ideas gathered in a hotel in Potsdam and made plans to expel millions of people from Germany. And it is precisely this idea that has structure all over Europe. It is the simple, the too short answers that lead to exactly such inhuman ideas gaining a foothold again. We don't just notice it with us. We notice it everywhere on the planet

Madam President, dear Mr Commissioner, dear colleagues, and also dear Tanzanian Government, I appreciate your will to protect the nature in your country. I lived in Dar es Salaam for one year. I know the beauty of the nature and I met amazing people over there. So yes, the nature is wonderful, but also the culture is wonderful. Also the people are wonderful. And with your plans to evict the Maasai

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! We are launching the Critical Raw Materials Regulation. I would have been a big fan of it if we had called it some kind of heavy metal law or something like that, that it's just more catchy for the citizens of Europe. But did we rock it all? Not so sure. Yes, of course it's somehow better than before. Of course, we put rules on the way. But when I

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! At the moment, I sometimes really feel that we as politicians are failing globally with our goals. 700 million people in the world still live in poverty. 735 million people are starving on this planet. 26 percent of people do not have access to clean drinking water and 40 percent do not even have access to decent sanitation facilities. In my opinio

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. The next time you walk over the bridge to Parliament and happen to meet a blue whale there, I'm asking you to throw it into the river. It's better than that. But I also ask you to make a video of it yourself and record it, because it is guaranteed to be a viral hit on TikTok. But when we come to the next Strasbourg part-session, it can very well

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen. The fish is male, but if we look at the European waters, then we have to assume, maybe soon we have to talk about it being the fish, because the stocks are feminizing. This is mainly due to the fact that incredible amounts of micropollutants are imported into the waters. The hormonal burden on the stocks is immense, and that is why it is so insanely important th

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! We in the European Parliament have the enormous honour of defending the interests of European citizens, and I am sure that if we asked them, the vast majority would say that they have absolutely no interest in Europe's greatest world heritage losing its protection status. But that's exactly what's ahead of us. A few days ago, the UNESCO committe

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! In the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo, right at the beginning of the so-called copper belt, there is the city of Kolwezi. It is the capital of mining. And in this town of Kolwezi, there's an aid organization, a small one, and it takes care of getting children out of illegal mines, giving them access to education, giving them enough food

Mr President! If you are a man currently wearing lipstick or women's dresses in Iraq, you can be imprisoned for up to three years. If you apply for homosexuality, you can be imprisoned for seven years. And if you have sex with another man more than three times, you can get the death penalty for it. At least when the law proposed there comes into force. This is not only the case in Iraq. There are

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen. I looked up earlier, there are exactly 38 weeks and six days until the next European elections. And we will all be back on the streets in the weeks before. We will promote what the EU does for its citizens. You will ask us: What's she doing? And with this Consumer Credit Directive, we can say: We protect the poorest people on this continent. Because the poorest

Mr President, dear Marc, dear Commissioner, dear colleagues! In less than a year there will be European elections again, and we will all be standing in the streets all the weeks before, talking to people, and again and again the question will come up: What is the EU actually doing? I will sit down relaxed and ask: Are you planning to buy something in the next few years? I suppose the answer will b

Thank you very much. Let me just quickly get back to the question of the waste, since, I mean it’s nice that we have some projects and it’s working well at some points, but how can we make sure that if European companies ship to African countries that what they ship there does not become waste? How can we, like basically, apply the same rules as we do with the waste shipment regulation for product

Madam Commissioner, I have quite some questions, but let me see how many I will manage to ask. First of all, I stumbled over a problem I have no solution to, and it is about waste and the products that we ship to Africa. I was wondering whether you might find a solution to this. If we ship products to African countries, often there are no extended producer responsibility organisations. So all the

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! Six years, six months, two weeks and four days – this is precisely the time we have given ourselves to ultimately create a just world – because nothing less are the sustainable development goals. This is our roadmap, which we have agreed globally to make sure to fight poverty, to fight hunger, to create clean drinking water for all and to create

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen! I'm just so free: I believe that if we pass this regulation on batteries and waste batteries, it is really historic. Think about it: How many devices do you have where you can change the batteries yourself? I think it's very manageable. And that's exactly what we're putting a stop to here. This is a huge success for European consumer protection.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. Insanely often I hear again and again on the streets, in the squares: What do we have to do with the collapse of a house in Bangladesh? Or: What do we have to do with a dam breaking in Brazil? Or: What do we have to do with expropriating people in Uganda? Let the countries take care of it themselves. And it is precisely to these people that we must

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, The Willow project must be stopped. Not only because it will have catastrophic consequences for the local environment, for animals, for nature. Not just because it's an absolute climate bomb, which affects all of us around the world. Not only because it is to a large extent against the will of the indigenous local populations who want to continu