Debate contributions by Leoluca ORLANDO

How can I disagree with what you have denounced? What we denounce in Europe we denounce also with reference to a country like the United States of America, with the difference that the United States of America, unfortunately or fortunately, are not subject to the possible intervention of the European Commission and, therefore, we ask that the European Commission intervene in the meantime with reference to the Member States and Italy, hoping that in the meantime we can recover that principle of interdependence that entrusts the affirmation of international legality to international courts. But as we know Trump, like his comrade Putin, does not like interdependence, neither the United Nations, nor international courts.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, maximum solidarity with the RAI journalist, Sigfrido Ranucci, and his family, who are today the target of a serious attack. With him we express solidarity to all journalists in Italy who suffer violence and intimidation for the sole fact of freely informing. The history of our country is marked by too many victims of this marginalization. In the 2025 Rule of Law Report, it is precisely the European Commission that denounces the vulnerability of RAI and the political interference that, among the consequences, has also led to the failure to elect the President of RAI for over a year. I report numerous cases of threats and defamation: 87 attacks in 2024 and, according to the Journalists’ Union Observatory, there are even more than 500 and more than 7000 since 2006. More importantly, the Paragon case: espionage with the use of spyware against journalists, with clear responsibility of the Italian government. Enough, I say again, to the lawsuits of politicians with an evident intimidating taste. I would also like to ask: But what awaits the Commission to launch investigation, clarification and infringement procedures against Italy, which is violating press freedom and the principles of the rule of law? If not now, Commissioner, when?

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in the square in Valletta and today in this House, memory is due for the killing of the courageous journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and we are with family members and many Maltese citizens here to demand strong truth and justice. The suspect, arrested in 2019, was released on bail at the beginning of 2025 and, as of today, the date of the trial is not yet set, eight years after that terrible crime. It risks prevailing a disarming climate of resignation to lawlessness, corruption, violence and impunity. It should be borne in mind that legislative measures and policy choices are only partly necessary to date. The European Commission’s 2025 Rule of Law Report in Malta summarises gaps and the need for reforms. The 2025 report states that it is necessary to ensure the safety, independence and freedom of journalists and media reform. Furthermore, the 2025 report recalls that for the full implementation of the anti-corruption recommendations, key actions remain to be taken with regard to transparency, anti-corruption and anti-corruption activities. lobbying, a code of conduct – and I add with conviction – also for controlling the movement and origin of assets. If not now, Commissioner, when?

Mr President, Madam High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, in Colombia the peace process agreement launched in 2016 is in serious crisis due to the violent actions of armed groups that disagree with the peace process and that have produced a continuous armed confrontation for the control of the territories of the entire Colombia, with the involvement of drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, such as the different Italian mafias Cosa Nostra, 'Ndrangheta, Camorra, and criminal groups in countries bordering Venezuela. In this scenario there was the attack on Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, opposition candidate in the next presidential election, and his death after two months of agony. And there are still escapes from the territories of thousands and thousands of frightened citizens and attacks and acts of violence against representatives of civil society and institutional politicians, such as the mayor of Medellín, Federico Andrés Gutiérrez Zuluaga, who - I still remember being present at that time - in 2019 had significantly detonated and destroyed the city. Monaco, symbol of the criminal arrogance of Pablo Escobar. The upcoming electoral deadlines, Madam High Representative, the parliamentary ones in March 2026 and the presidential ones in June 2026, constitute a moment of great importance for democratic integrity and legality in Colombia. I wrote my letter to Commission President von der Leyen and I wrote my letter to Parliament's President Roberta Metsola, whom I thank for her attention, asking for the utmost attention of the European institutions to respect democratic values and legality in such an important country in Latin America, linked by numerous agreements with the European Union, and to counter an explosive mixture that, unfortunately, risks finding space also in this Chamber between political struggle and organised crime, which risks threatening and prejudicing the upcoming electoral deadlines.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, on 23 June the European Council of Foreign Affairs will finally have to sanction the now indisputable violation of Article 2 of the Association Agreement with Israel, which is responsible for genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian territories, with 55 104 killed, including 16 854 children, 127 394 injured and maimed, and also thousands of anonymous Palestinians who die from famine and lack of care for the criminal blockade of humanitarian aid. Ms Kallas, how many more crimes, how many more Palestinians killed and maimed and left to die will you want the European Union to be held accountable by history and international justice before applying Article 2, before terminating the association agreement with Israel, before applying sanctions and suspending arms and resources? Finally, an appeal to the Jewish people, who have suffered the terrible tragedy of the Shoah caused by Nazi-fascism. The Germans were asked to distance themselves and oppose Adolf Hitler, the Italians Benito Mussolini, the Muslims Osama Bin Laden. We call on Jews around the world to distance themselves from the Netanyahu government.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, thank you for admitting that the Commission has done nothing after requests and complaints about the Pegasus case. Thank you for admitting that there is also nothing the Commission has done about obstacles and constraints on the part of the Italian government against the freedom of journalists, certified in the Brunner 2024 report on Rule of Law. Read the 2024 report, Commissioner. Nothing the Commission continues to do about the established responsibilities of the Italian government, which essentially authorized the spying by the Israeli company Paragon of social workers, responsible only for saving lives in the Mediterranean and would have had the interceptions of Libyan criminals financed by the Italian government and led by the torturer Almasri, exposing those social workers to reprisals of all kinds. The Italian Government still appears to have prevented Paragon, which formally denounced this, from identifying the spyware mercenaries who spied on Italian journalists. No complaints, no infringement proceedings by the Commission, even after so many complaints and claims. Madam Commissioner, the so-called Copasir report, try to read it and you will see, from this report, the embarrassing contradiction of having to admit what I have just finished saying.

Madam President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, the genocide of Israel against the Palestinians has now become the heaviest example of a violation of international law in the world by a state with a government that has not been condemned by the European Union, and is improperly considered a privileged and democratic partner. Apartheid and genocide, Madam Vice-President, are incompatible with democracy. Appeals to Israel for a ceasefire fall on deaf ears and the immediate release of all hostages is blocked after the massacre of October 7, now arbitrarily and deliberately denying the Israeli government humanitarian aid, including from UN agencies. In doing so, war crimes are committed, which have been established by the International Criminal Court, and which seem to have been ignored by European leaders. The drama of Palestine weighs like a boulder on the credibility of the European Union: The Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union should be suspended immediately, Madam Vice-President, and trade with products from the illegally occupied territories should be banned.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the proposed text does not pay sufficient and necessary attention to respect for the human rights of migrants, nor does it pay attention to the facts of reality. After the failed agreement between the United Kingdom and Rwanda, expulsion from Member States to third countries with which agreements are concluded that do not contain guarantees of human rights and that do not take into account the migrant's links with the contracting third country is assumed. At the end of the day, there will be no return to the country of origin: It seems to evoke yet another failed example after the England-Rwanda one. In fact, we end up giving legitimacy to the recent protocol between Italy and Albania, which has become a monument of inefficiency and waste of resources, denounced by public opinion: It is a monument to the violation of human rights, condemned by the Italian courts. This attitude to Pontius Pilate does not seem to me worthy of the European Union in which we believe. I hope that the European Union will ultimately contribute to respect for all human beings, because migrants, Commissioner, are also human beings.

Mr President, Madam High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, the sudden and peaceful collapse of a decades-long dictatorial regime in Syria is once again the result of the intervention of foreign powers. The European Union must finally pay attention to civil society in Syria and to civil society in the diaspora to urge Ahmad al-Sharaa towards a democratic transition, guaranteeing the rights of women and minorities, calling in particular on Turkey, which has taken on an important role at this stage, to stop attacks on the Kurdish community on Syrian soil. At this point, there is an urgent need for joint action by the Commission and the European Parliament, listening and being present on the ground, to secure and involve civil society as the only guarantee of a democratic path. Maximum attention is also needed for the rights of Syrian refugees in Europe, avoiding a suspension of the guarantee. Implement the roadmap set out in UN Resolution 2254 so that, finally, the Syrian people can be called upon to decide their own destiny. Syria ceases to be a space of contrasts and muscular tests that have nothing to do with the rights of the Syrian people.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, on 19 July you received a large majority with the extreme right voting against. Now an incomprehensible turn in coalition with the extreme right, with sovereignist groups, with liberticide and anti-peace processes, rights, environmental and social justice, in open contrast with the founding reasons of a democratic, anti-fascist and inclusive Europe. I will vote 'no', like so many others, to avoid legitimising an extreme right that is unacceptable and dangerous for the Union and for individual Member States.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, since 2004, under the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia has asked to be part of the European Union as a free, democratic Member State, certainly not as a colony of the European Union. This position has increased pressure to block democratic progress, freedom of the press and gender, reforms, including with the Russian military invasion of August 2008 and the consequent conditioning of Georgian domestic politics. Today Saakashvili was stripped of his Georgian citizenship. He is being held in a harsh prison despite his serious health condition. Successive governments have also questioned and thwarted innovative reforms and anti-corruption actions in recent years. Georgia is now more distant than twenty years ago from Europe and is exposed to the influence of Russia pressing on the Caucasian border with its army and controlling regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, only nominally belonging to the Georgian Republic. The attention of the European Parliament, as the resolution rightly points out, must be very strong after the elections of 26 October, which we hope will take place regularly, and must talk not only with the government but also with Georgian civil society, free to express consent to the European Union, but which is unfortunately conditioned by an apparatus of pro-Russian financial and political interests. Georgia must be supported in a path of autonomy and independence, which in the past had to suffer the empire of the tsars and the Soviet Union and which today suffers the imperialist aims of the current Russian government.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Mr High Representative, solidarity with the victims and condemnation of the massacre of 7 October require us to denounce the systematic violation by the Government of Israel of international law. Since 1967, the government of Israel has disregarded the rulings of the international community and the United Nations and in the past year has violated the sovereignty of states, such as Syria and today Lebanon, and practiced apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. Today Lebanese civilians are victims of the violation of Lebanon's sovereignty, which is now a new Gaza, Mr. High Representative, and hostage to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The European Union must immediately recognize the State of Palestine and support and strengthen the role of the United Nations and its Secretary-General, irresponsibly considered unwelcome by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is undermining Israel's international credibility, provoking a wave of reaction and hatred towards the Jewish people, to whom all our solidarity goes for the intolerable Nazi-Fascist Shoah of the past and for the current growing episodes of anti-Semitism. The European Union must make its voice heard and strongly call for a ceasefire by all, the release of the hostages, considering the suspension of military support to Israel and the initiation of any sanctions and embargo procedures, as practiced in any other case of violation of international law.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, beyond words and exploitation, we have been witnessing a humanitarian tragedy in Gaza and the West Bank for almost a year. The terrorist action of Hamas on 7 October, which we strongly condemn, however, forces us to recall decades of indifference and mortification for the rights of the Palestinian people – indifference and mortification that have certainly created a climate favourable to the affirmation of Hamas. Today, the conscience and responsibility of the European Union is weighed down like a boulder by the recent decision of the International Court of Justice, which clearly defined and condemned the illegal occupation and violence of the State of Israel against the Palestinians. Dozens of MEPs today denounced war crimes committed by two Israeli government ministers at the top of the Commission. Preliminary to any path of peace is the recognition of the State of Palestine, as reaffirmed by the United Nations for decades, as provided for since the Oslo Accords. Only this recognition makes it possible to invite all Arab countries to recognize the State of Israel and its indisputable existence. However, I cannot recognize as democratic the Netanyahu government, which practices illegal occupation and violent apartheid. Europe today seems plagiarized, not only in the Middle East, by a senseless arms race and the use of war as a pretext for the export of democratic values. More than 40 000 Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank require the European Union to take a position consistent with the founding reasons for its birth, beyond the borders of hatred and war. Enough polemics on the use of the word "genocide", which many of us continue and will continue to use to describe a condition of mortification of rights and extermination of thousands of human beings, for which some have already been recognized as legally responsible and all the others certainly responsible before history.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to underline the sensitivity you have confirmed, Madam President, and the words you have spoken on the occasion of this 32nd anniversary of the Via D'Amelio massacre. We remember Paolo Borsellino, Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina, killed by a terrible explosion of a car bomb on a very hot Sunday in July in Palermo. Thirty-two years have passed, but in the aftermath of that terrible explosion there was a real civil revolution: women took to the streets, marches and human chains were formed to say enough to a reality in which the mafia had the face of institutions, had the face of those same men who were supposed to fight it. And there arose, strong, not only the need for justice but also the need for truth, the right to truth: This is exactly what I want to remember right now, after four trials that are the biggest judicial misdirection in Italian history. Four processes in which the misdirections of men of the institutions, accomplices of the mafia, have also invented false repentants to prevent the institutional level of complicity of that terrible massacre from being reached. Today we owe it to family members, we owe it to the ‘Paolo e Rita Borsellino’ Study Centre, we owe it to the Red Agendas Movement – we must give a word of encouragement so that the truth can finally be reached, in a condition in which, unfortunately, justice, that of the State, is struggling to arrive.