Speeches

Gender—based violence is an epidemic that has been ignored for too long. One in three women in the EU have experienced physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15. If a similarly serious problem affected one third of all men, I am sure it would have already have been appropriately addressed. That said, I am glad to see the report on gender—based violence come to a vote, and I want to thank the rapporteurs and shadows for their work. Specifically, I would like to commend the holistic approach taken, with the recognition of online and offline gender—based violence from an intersectional perspective. President von der Leyen announced, in her State of the Union address, that a legislative proposal would be brought forward to tackle violence against women by the end of the year. I hope this proposal will take inspiration from this report and put forward concrete steps to prevent gender—based violence, adequately support victims and bring perpetrators to justice.

Madam President, in Europe there are people trafficked for forced marriages, for illegal adoption, for prostitution, for criminal activities, to be forced to work – even today, here, we have just discussed forced labour – and even to be surrogates. There are more than 7 000 victims of trafficking in the European Union every year, most of them women and children, regrettably. It is to end this marketing of people that we have fought hard to make a difference with the revision of the Anti-Trafficking Directive. Thank you very much to Malin and María Eugenia and all the others involved in this work. We did not get the final agreement as ambitious as the socialists would like, but we still printed new European rules, not only to prevent, investigate and combat trafficking more effectively, but also to offer better protection to the victims and survivors of this heinous crime. The results of its implementation by Member State authorities will show whether it was worth it. I want to believe so.

Madam President, I want to thank very much all colleagues for their intervention. The fight against forced labour must unite all of us in this Parliament. The European Union will finally have an instrument to address this practice, an instrument that is good for the victims, but also for the responsible European companies that protect their workers and suffer from unfair competition and dumping. However, our work does not end here. For this regulation to be effective, it must be properly implemented. We must ensure that competent authorities, including the European Commission, have sufficient resources to carry out their new tasks, including inspection in third countries. I hope the Commission feels proud of this new competence. Cooperation with our international partners, particularly the US and Canada, will also be essential to prevent companies blocked by one country from selling their forced labour products elsewhere. To finish, I want to dictate all my work in this file to the 28 million victims of this form of modern slavery. I am proud of the work of this Parliament.

Madam President, today, around the world, 28 million people are trapped in the hands of human traffickers or sometimes states that force them to work for little or no pay. 12% of them are children. This business of human misery is thriving, despite international efforts to end it. Almost 100 years after the adoption of the landmark Forced Labour Convention of 1930, the International Labour Organisation estimates that forced labour generates €217 billion a year of illegal profits, a dramatic increase of 37% since 2014. It is comparable to an economy like Portugal's. It is very likely that a t-shirt What we are wearing today is made of cotton contaminated by human rights violations, without our knowing it. If not harvested in Turkmenistan, it may have been in China's Xinjiang region, where more than 2 million people, mostly Uyghurs, are estimated to be at risk of forced labour. They are forced to work in labour-intensive sectors, where they harvest cotton or tomatoes, assemble toys, furniture and electronics, sew clothes or process polysilicon. We now have a historic opportunity to combat this form of modern slavery, both in the European Union and in the rest of the world. After years of civic mobilisation and political battles, after months of very difficult negotiations – thank you, Samira, for your cooperation – the European Union has passed the first European law banning the sale of products made with forced labour on its market. The United States and Canada already have their equivalent legal instruments. For us socialists, this is certainly a source of pride. We had asked for this law as a political group and then worked hard on it in the European Parliament. We have reached a very broad agreement, as is appropriate, when we know that this is only the first step on a long and difficult road to eliminating forced labour. The final text we are going to vote on tomorrow is not as ambitious as we would like, but it can make a difference for victims around the world. At our request, the Commission will create a database with a list of specific economic sectors and geographical areas where state-imposed forced labour occurs, which will be used to assess the need to open an investigation. The European Commission will be responsible for investigating suspected cases of forced labour outside the Union, while the competent national authorities of the 27 Member States will deal with cases within the Union. At the end of the investigation, if forced labour in the production chain is proven, the final product will have to be withdrawn from the internal market and can be recycled or donated. Europe cannot export values and import products made with forced labour. The fact that the European Union finally has a law to ban these products on the internal market is one of the greatest achievements of this mandate and a victory for all those who defend human rights. Thank you very much to everyone who helped me and Samira, as well as to our teams in this negotiation.

Madam President, we have all been through the hassle of having a home appliance that stops working, a broken mobile phone, a radio that stops tuning. What do we do then? Shall we throw it away? We want a quick and efficient solution to restore the functioning of our equipment, avoiding waste and the additional costs of its replacement. Avoiding answering the question, we throw away, buy a new one. We now have a new toolbox aimed at making repair possible, but which is also attractive to consumers. For example, the possibility for consumers to require manufacturers to repair products when this is technically possible, even outside the warranty, or a European online platform dedicated to repair, with a view to facilitating contacts between consumers and repairers to know where to repair. By choosing repair over replacement, we are not only giving new life to our products, but also creating jobs, reducing waste, limiting our dependence on imported raw materials, boosting the circular economy and, most importantly, protecting the environment. Thank you to the rapporteur, Mr Repasi, and to all the colleagues involved and their teams for the excellent work they have done.

Mr President, I never thought I would have to come back to this issue since, in 2007, I contributed to the victory of yes in the referendum on the decriminalisation of abortion in Portugal. I repeat: Abortion is no longer a crime, it's what we voted on. The rest is individual freedom. No woman is obliged to have an abortion, but if she so decides, for reasons that are her own, she must be able to do so in safe conditions and be assisted by competent professionals, and not in a stairwell, hidden like a criminal. You see, there the poorest hide, because the others always have access to clinics or even to travel abroad. This is what we're discussing here. This is what we want to guarantee for all women by enshrining this right in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Madam President, Commissioner, I would like to begin by making it clear that the refusal of entry of a delegation from the European Parliament by the Cuban authorities is reprehensible and that it is unacceptable for any country, whether Cuba or any other country, as has already happened, to dictate the composition of our delegations. While this incident is worrying, turning it into a diplomatic crisis is not prudent. Without dialogue, we have lost the means to pressure the Cuban authorities to prioritise respect for fundamental human rights and release political prisoners. Despite what many will say here and write in the resolution, we need to maintain a balanced approach and not compromise our relationship in order to be able to respond to the concerns of many Cubans, as the Commissioner pointed out. Our involvement must therefore remain constructive, as has happened in our relationship with other countries in the world where similar problems occur.

Mr President, Commissioner, intangible assets such as trademarks, designs, models, patents and data are increasingly important in today's knowledge economy. IP-intensive industries account for almost half of total GDP and more than 90% of all EU exports. One of the most important types of patents are so-called essential patents, i.e. patents protecting technologies that have been declared essential for the application of a technical standard, e.g. standards supporting technologies such as 5G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, the current market for these patents is characterised by a lack of predictability and long disputes and litigations, which makes it difficult to develop new innovative products based on this type of patents. Unfortunately, self-regulation has not been enough to tackle and eliminate these problems. For that very reason, the Parliament argues, in that regulation, that the European Union Intellectual Property Office must establish a register of holders of essential patents, verify which patents are actually essential for a given standard, what fair payment is made for the use of that patent and provide assistance in negotiations between undertakings. We aim to ensure that end-users, including small and medium-sized enterprises and consumers, benefit from products based on the latest standardised technologies at fair and reasonable prices. We therefore hope, and we are sure, that the Commission will also speed up innovation and not stop it, ensuring that both owners and users of essential patents are more competitive on world markets.

Mr President, Commissioner, it is now possible, through the use of artificial intelligence, to create fake propaganda videos that are almost indistinguishable from real videos, the so-called . It is also possible to use personal data to adjust lies and fake news to those who will hear and read them. Under this regulation, the use of personal data for the purposes of political advertising will only be allowed if the data subject has given his or her consent. We will also avoid foreign interference and create a European register of political advertising. Confidence in elections and political processes is one of the essential pillars of a democratic regime. With this regulation, we are taking an important step to protect it. I hope and hope, Commissioner, that it will be sufficient and that we will not have to revisit it soon.

Madam President, in her State of the Union speech in 2020, the President of the European Commission announced a proposal to ensure that a child never loses his or her parents legally when moving from one Member State to another. This is currently the case because the parenthood of a child from rainbow families is not recognised in all Member States. In December last year, Parliament adopted its position on the Commission proposal, for which I was rapporteur, upholding the basic principle that underpins it: the family of a child may not vary within the Union. Today, we call on the Council to be sensitive to this convergence of positions between the Commission and Parliament. No child can be discriminated against by the type of family he or she is part of or by the way he or she was born.

Mr President, Commissioner, poverty is not gender-neutral. Some 383 million women live on less than $2 a day. It is estimated that the next generation of women, the next, will still spend an average of 2.3 hours more per day on unpaid care work than men. Without forgetting the economic dependence resulting from the lack of access to education, privilege still denied to women in some parts of the world; poverty linked to widowhood as a result of deprivation of the right to inherit; or the cases, so frequent in Africa, of women who are left alone, with the task of caring for many children, because their companions sought a better life elsewhere or simply abandoned them. To face this reality, it is imperative to tackle with more courage and ambition the fundamental causes of women's over-poverty around the world. I hope that the next United Nations Assembly will make an important contribution to this.

Madam President, Commissioner, we talk a lot about platforms and those that promote hate speech and disinformation online, but we must not forget that these phenomena do not affect everyone equally. As in the world offline, victims are usually the most vulnerable and those who cannot defend themselves. That's why we have numbers like this: one in ten women in the European Union has already been the victim of cyberviolence, a situation favoured by the anonymity that protects detractors. Right, this type of content guarantees many views and interactions to platforms and is therefore one of its most profitable elements. But we cannot allow hate to become a business model. We need to remain united in the European Union, in ensuring a secure, more transparent digital space that protects fundamental rights and contributes to democracy, rather than to its destruction. Preventing these attacks instead of remedying what often no longer has medicine is really what has to happen.

Mr President, Commissioner, there is no doubt that Global Gateway has been instrumental in the development of infrastructure in various parts of the world. Let me pay special attention to Latin America, where we have more than 130 investment projects focused mainly on digital infrastructure development and sustainability. As I have heard from the other side, it is, however, important to simplify and facilitate these processes so that this initiative becomes easier to understand and be used by our partners. We must also make sure that these partnerships help us navigate the difficult paths of the two transitions, climate and digital, not only with convergent regulation, for example on artificial intelligence or forest protection, but also with the same basic conditions on both sides, for example on connectivity, so that digital technologies do not deepen inequalities, but rather diminish them.

Mr President, Commissioner, when I was in Venezuela at the European Union Election Mission in 2021, what I heard most from civil society was a huge desire to participate in elections, not to boycott them, and to express their protest through them. To respond to this legitimate and democratic aspiration, elections must be free and there will only be free elections in Venezuela when the disqualification of potential candidates who oppose the regime, such as Corina Machado, Henrique Capriles and so many others, ceases to be an instrument to prevent electoral competition. It would be desirable for the Barbados Agreement, but also the recommendations of the 2021 Electoral Mission, to be followed, in particular the abolition of the administrative prerogative of the Comptroller General to deprive citizens of the right to stand in elections. We will continue to press for this, putting an end to the protracted political and social crisis that we have also seen the Venezuelan people suffer for too long.

Mr President, Commissioner, I have heard in this Parliament two positions that seem equally questionable to me. One holds that all regulation is a burden on businesses. The other considers that data should be protected at any cost and never shared for any purpose. The proposal we are debating shows that both positions are incorrect. The use of interoperability makes it possible to share data securely between different public and even private institutions and thus reduce the administrative burden in fulfilling various obligations that companies have towards their administrations. It also simplifies and designs user-centred public services, reducing reporting obligations at national and European level. Commissioner, the more interoperable our public administrations are, the more integrated the internal market will be and the more effective its freedoms will be. To some extent, interoperability is thus a technology that can help to build a true European citizenship.

Madam President, Commissioner, unfair competition has many causes and always harms our businesses, especially the smallest ones. But I want to focus today on just one: forced labour. We know that the major competitor of the European solar industry is China and we also know, thanks to reports such as those from the University of Sheffield Hallam, that the Chinese solar industry uses forced labour on a large scale, especially state-imposed forced labour. I am the rapporteur for the proposal for a regulation to ban the existence of products made with forced labour in the internal market. In Parliament's position, we have included a mechanism to deal specifically with this type of state-imposed forced labour. I now hope that the Council and the Commission will be able, in the course of the negotiations, to follow us in this ambition and that we will be able, together, to approve the reversal of the burden of proof for this type of situation. Without a dedicated tool to deal with state-imposed forced labour, we will continue to see our companies and industry on solar panels and in other areas fall victim to the worst unfair competition, which is based on the violation of human rights.

Mr President, Commissioner, in 2019, Ecuador was one of the safest and most peaceful countries in Latin America, with a murder rate of six deaths per 100 000 inhabitants. Unfortunately, the Ecuador we are talking about today is the most violent country in the region, with a rate six times higher than four years ago and plunged into a wave of violence, due to drug trafficking, which culminated in the events in Guaiaquil and the decision to decree the state of armed conflict, to combat 22 groups of drug traffickers who launch terror in the country. The situation is so serious, and rightly so, that the government and the opposition have come together to find a solution. But internal union is not enough. An effective response requires coordination between the various countries in the region. It is therefore very important that we follow and support the ministerial meeting of the Andean Community, convened as a matter of urgency to examine the impact on neighbouring countries. Cooperation is the key that will make a difference in the fight against transnational organised crime and the fight against drug trafficking, which is the main source of funding for this whole problem. Allow me, however, to leave a final warning here. The security response that may be needed in this crisis must not result, in the next phase of the hangover, in any abuse of the security forces that indiscriminately undermines human rights and the pillars of the rule of law.

Mr President, Commissioner, if we all choose the most environmentally friendly product, if we decide to repair it when it is damaged, instead of replacing it, we will contribute to a sustainable environment and influence the market to change with us. But we can only do this if the information available about the product is reliable, without trying to go green which is not. And we will only be able to repair the products if there is where to do it and the parts are available. The rules we are going to adopt at European level serve precisely that, to ensure that we can rely on green labels and to let us know how easy it is to repair a product and whether there are parts available. What's more, with these rules, families' budgets will benefit. Dear fellow European citizens, managing the climate transition is not only a burden for governments and the European Union, it is also an obligation for businesses and for all of us, for our consumer choices. Thank you very much to the Commission for the proposal and to the rapporteur for her work.

Mr President, Commissioner, I would like to thank you for your speeches and also my colleagues from the various political groups who have spoken here today in support of this report. We are not talking about surrogacy business, and anyone who tries to divert the debate is because they did not have the courage to say here that they do not care about these children and even less about their families. We are talking about children who were born, born here next to us – they are not even children born in third countries – and who live within the European Union. It is not acceptable that they have access to fewer rights because of the way they were born or the family they are part of. How can we justify that a parent cannot visit a child in the hospital because they are not recognized as such? Nor are we changing the family law of the Member States. They will only have to recognise, as the Commissioner said, that a child maintains the same family that has already been recognised in another Member State. And there can be no exceptions here, Colleagues. There are no acceptable interruptions when we think of the love and affection to which children are entitled within the family in which they grow up, whatever it may be. In the name of all these children and in the name of their families, what can I hope for? That the Council is as sensitive to children's rights as Parliament was in this report.

...the kind of family you're part of or the way you were born. However, today in the European Union, a child can lose his or her parents – legally, of course – when moving from one country to another. This is because the law applied to recognise parenthood is not the same and because some Member States still do not recognise certain families, such as those composed of same-sex couples. In practice, this means that a child may be deprived of many essential rights that affect his or her daily life and future life – something as simple and as serious as not having anyone who approves a study visit at school, who enrols him or her in an extracurricular activity, who makes medical decisions for him or her, if necessary – or even be deprived of his or her inheritance rights vis-à-vis those who are his or her parents. I became aware of an extreme case of a family of a same-sex couple who had moved from a Member State after the birth of their baby. The mother, who has a biological connection with the child, was terminally ill. However, the Member State in which she was present did not recognise the parenthood of the other mother. Therefore, there was a risk that the custody of the child would be given to other relatives, with whom she had no close connection. Unfortunately, the cruel suggestion given to the biological mother was to go and die in another Member State that recognised the parenthood of both mothers. Such situations, Commissioner, are unacceptable in the European Union of the 21st century, which is so proud of respect for human rights in its diversity. In order to ensure children's rights, it is therefore essential that we provide clarity and legal certainty to all types of families that move, reside, exist in the countries of the Union. It should be recalled that, independently of this proposal, the Court’s interpretation of EU law already provides that parenthood established in one Member State is to be recognised in all other Member States, but only for the purposes of applying EU law, such as access to the territory, the right of residence and non-discrimination against nationals. What this proposal brings again are two fundamental things. First, it allows children, in cross-border situations, also not to lose their rights under national law in matters such as succession, maintenance, custody, or the right of fathers or mothers to act as legal representatives of the child, for example for school or health purposes. Secondly, it creates a European Certificate of Parenthood which guarantees access to all these rights and which will have to be accepted by all Member States. As rapporteur, I hope that access to such a certificate will be simple, without unnecessary bureaucracy, not repeatedly asking for the same information and taking advantage of digital communication. In essence, I would finally like to state my support for this proposal and for the basic principle on which it is based: the family of a child may vary within the Union. All children have the right not to lose the protection of those they regard as their fathers or mothers. Their love has no boundaries and the law must not impose them.

Mr President, Mr High Representative, the attempt by the Guatemalan Public Prosecutor's Office to annul the results of the presidential elections is unacceptable, as are the accusations against the President-elect and the Supreme Electoral Court. Faced with this sad third-category novel, orchestrated by a group of prosecutors on the basis of ridiculous arguments, the intention of a coup d’état seems to us to be real and very worrying. The European Union must therefore support democratic forces and adopt sanctions, if necessary, against this attack on democracy and the rule of law, so that Bernardo Arévalo takes office as President on 14 January and a peaceful and law-abiding transfer of power takes place. I have observed these elections and I have heard the wish of many Guatemalans to see their vote respected, even if, surdly, they confessed to fearing otherwise, that they would not let their President take office. In the name of all of them, we will do everything we can here to ensure that the will of the people that was freely expressed in the last elections prevails in Guatemala.

Mr President, if I have a problem in a Portuguese court, for example a family matter or even a criminal matter, which requires a witness who resides in France, Germany, Sweden or another Member State, I run the risk of seeing the case be delayed long before she is heard. It turns out that if justice isn't swift, it often won't be justice. With this regulation we will facilitate the use of videoconferencing in oral hearings and allow all parties to communicate with the competent authorities electronically in the course of judicial proceedings. They themselves are obliged to communicate with each other by this means. In this way we will avoid unnecessary travel, speed up processes and save around EUR 25 million per year in postal and paper costs. This is an important step towards the digitalisation of judicial cooperation. However, we could have gone further. For example, by obliging companies to also report by electronic means in legal disputes involving more than one Member State. Madam Vice-President, in the 21st century. XXI no company, whatever its size, can afford not to use digital means, and I believe that the pandemic has clearly shown this to those who had not yet realized it. I therefore hope that in future initiatives of this kind the Commission, and also this Parliament, will be somewhat more ambitious.

Mr President, the growing importance of digital in our lives, cyber violence, creates another serious problem for women. One in ten, often young people, have experienced harassment or virtual harassment, or blackmail practices known as ‘revenge porn’, where explicit sexual images or videos are shared without their consent. We therefore need a greater effort at European Union level to ensure that the digital space is a safe place for women and girls. Preventing, instead of remedying what often no longer has medicine, is really what has to happen. Cyberviolence against women and girls is a plague in digital form that deserves a ceaseless fight from all of us.

Mr President, it is very important that the United States and the European Union work together to promote their economic resilience and security. So we have to align our approaches on very concrete issues. We need, for example, to combat practices that distort competition, such as the circulation of products made with forced labour. The United States already has very ambitious legislation in place. It will be good if the European Union also approves its own before the end of this mandate. We also need to work together to tackle the misuse of artificial intelligence and disinformation techniques. The European Union is in the process of having a regulation with these objectives. It would be good if the United States went in the same direction. These are problems without borders that, together, we can solve better.

Commissioner, X is, in mathematics, the letter that best symbolises the unknown. It is therefore a very suitable new name for the platform we previously called Twitter. It is unknown because we are less and less aware of the direction of the platform. What kind of content is being promoted? What kind of moderation is being done? The unknown can be resolved, in particular, with the use of two tools of the Digital Services Act: the transparency database on content moderation decisions to learn more about the actions or inactions of platforms in the face of disinformation, and access to data for researchers to understand where it comes from and how disinformation is promoted. To fight disinformation, we need to make sure that all platforms, X and others comply with the rules we have adopted here. If X is unknown, the Digital Services Act is the right tool to find out the end result.