Speeches

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, over the past year, Netanyahu's government has committed war crimes on a large scale, effectively causing a humanitarian catastrophe. To all my colleagues who say, 'Oh, but Hamas started,' I would like to say that it is not appropriate to talk so much about who started because there were 75 years of occupation before October 7. Then we are faced with a humanitarian catastrophe before which I would like to remind you that Europe has an instrument to protect the civilian population, which is Directive 55 of 2001 on the temporary protection of populations fleeing war. It was first applied in 2022 to protect the Ukrainian population fleeing wars. I believe that this Parliament should ask the Commission and the Council to apply it to all the people who are trying to escape, to the few who manage to escape from the Middle East as a result of this humanitarian disaster over the last year.

(IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, dear Commissioner, the reintroduction of controls at the Union's internal borders regularly returns to public debate, used and flaunted by the government in office to give the impression of having everything under control or to pretend that citizens can be protected simply by closing borders. It should be a temporary and exceptional measure. However, in the last ten years it has become a practice that undermines trust and cooperation between Member States - and the Court of Justice has also ruled it illegal on a number of occasions - and obviously reduces the fundamental freedom of citizens to move within the Union. But has this practice yielded results? Do Europeans feel or are they more secure? I do not believe, because security is not only public order, it is the security of rights. Have a decent job, home, pensions, medical care when you're sick. This is the security and protection that we must give to the citizens of Europe. And it is certainly not achieved with more border controls, but with social justice policies. It is certainly not achieved by dividing Europe and the Member States, but only by uniting them even more under the banner of rights and solidarity.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, last June a 31-year-old farm worker died in an accident at work while working in the countryside of the Agro Pontino. An agricultural machine ripped off his arm and broke his legs. What did your employer do? He didn't call for help, he didn't take him to the hospital. He loaded it into a van, abandoned it in front of his house, with his severed arm in a vegetable basket. The farm which did all this had, I am sorry to say, received funds from the common agricultural policy. Was it a horrible crime? Yes, it is. Was it an isolated incident? No, it's a system. It is a production system, that of the agri-food chain, which is based on the exploitation of workers. It is a system that puts profit ahead of human rights – or in place of human rights. It is a system that is infiltrated at every level by organized crime, from production in the fields to transportation and marketing. Of course, organised crime is trying to get its hands on the funds of the common agricultural policy. Do we have laws to counter this? Yes, but in Italy we also have a law – the Bossi-Fini law – which in fact keeps hundreds of thousands of people, workers of foreign origin, in an irregular situation. It is a huge pool of labour available to organised crime and exploiters. Sometimes there has also been a suspicion that governments have not done enough to regularize people precisely to be able to use this huge mass of workers to exploit. What can we do from a European perspective? We must, I believe, be vigilant about the rules of the market and minimum wages, because it is not possible for profit to always be in front of rights. We must certainly be vigilant about the beneficiaries of the common agricultural policy, because every time someone gets their hands on these funds they are harming producers who do things right, as well as consumers, as well as killing workers. More generally, since we all recognize that crime knows no borders, I believe that the time has come, also taking up the requests of various Italian anti-mafia associations, for this institution to equip itself with a permanent anti-mafia commission, because only by working together, in a structured way, we can think of fighting organized crime in Europe.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I want to protect the Israeli population, like everyone else, I think, here and, in order to protect the Israeli population, we must stop Netanyahu's government. Because Netanyahu's government is not just slaughtering the Palestinian population: He is massacring his country's democracy and putting his country out of the democratic civil forum, out of the way that we, democratic states, want to be together. It's a priority. The Netanyahu government cannot be expected to continue to commit war crimes and go unpunished. It is truly exposing its population to decades of future hatred, other attacks, an escalation. Truly, not only for the Palestinian population, but also to protect the Israeli population: If we all care about Israel's life and democracy, we must stop the Netanyahu government.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, my first speech in plenary is on a subject that I care a lot about, because all my life I have been a humanitarian worker, working also in war zones and in areas affected by terrorism. For the last few years I have been working in rescue at sea. I find it frankly unacceptable that we continue to associate the entire population of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers so lightly with the issue of terrorism, because we know that this is not the case and it is a lack of respect even towards the victims of these atrocious attacks, I believe. It is also a hoax towards our constituents and for this reason I do not want to go into the merits of the migration phenomenon, but rather to think about the concrete tools to counter terrorism. Let us remove the exploitations from the table and instead look at the work of Europol, which shows us the path we must continue to follow: control over financial flows, anti-money laundering, ‘follow the money’, programmes to counter radicalisation, a special eye on prisons and stringent controls on online propaganda – propaganda that, let us remember, also feeds on our hate speech and racism, which are used by Islamist fundamentalism for recruitment. Terrorism is not defeated by raising walls, discrimination and racism, but it is defeated with the instruments of law, with more integration, more rights and more democracy.