Speeches

Mr President, Commissioner Reynders, it took exactly three months and 15 days for the European Union to launch the European COVID-19 certificate and for us to regain our freedom of movement between Member States. Only three and a half months for our European health pass to come into effect. Three and a half months during which Parliament and the Member States worked together to find an agreement on how to implement this certificate. Three and a half months have allowed the European Union to develop a digital portal interconnected with national systems, through which each Member State can verify the authenticity of a vaccination certificate, a negative PCR test or a certificate of recovery issued by any other European country. I would particularly like to congratulate our rapporteur, Jeroen Lenaers, on his exemplary work. Since its entry into force on 1 July, 250 million citizens have already downloaded the certificate, i.e. more than one in two European citizens. Here, the European Union has been extremely effective in enabling each of us to travel this summer and thus relaunch the tourism sector – 50% of world tourism, it should be recalled, taking place in European countries. So yes, this European health pass is a real success. It is now the responsibility of each Member State to adapt its vaccination strategy to further vaccinate and to ensure that the resumption of contamination, which is still relatively localised and due to the emergence of new variants, does not become widespread.

Madam President, Commissioner, I will speak for a minute, and during that minute, almost 30 complaints will be lodged in the European Union to report child sexual abuse content online. This is 17 times higher than in 2010, and online violence increased by 57% between 2019 and 2020. Europe has become the global epicenter of websites hosting images of child sexual abuse, with almost 90% of this content on European websites. In December 2020, the European Electronic Communications Code entered into force. For privacy reasons, it did not allow online messaging services, such as Messenger or WhatsApp, to detect, remove or report child sexual abuse content exchanged on their applications. Tomorrow, we will finally vote on a three-year temporary derogation that will once again allow online messaging services to combat child sexual abuse, pending the Commission’s legislative proposal in the second half of 2021. This proposal must be ambitious, sustainable and much more burdensome for courier services, in order to effectively protect our children.