kfajdsl/voxpopuli huggingface dataset:
one of the big considerations and it has been raised here already is that in anything we do we have to answer the question do we think this will prevent deaths or do we think that this is actually going to make things more difficult?
we try to always work on our relationships and when i meet with the russian foreign minister syria is always on the agenda;
the first thing to say is that when we were discussing russia which is getting ready for the european council discussion on russia we talked about a whole range of different ways in which we engage with russia.
this is a conversation a discussion a debate that goes on in every single foreign affairs council and many conversations in between.
i have made clear that in those debates no member state suggested that we should lift the arms embargo and provide weapons.
regarding the issues of non lethal aid and technical assistance this is partly a clarification of what exactly we are trying to do to support the people and ensuring within the legal frameworks we operate in that we are clear about what we are doing and what we are not doing.
nonetheless we will continue to come back to those discussions because it is important to keep that debate going.
always i talk about looking at all options; because it is very important that we have those debates in the detail that really will make our deliberations move us forward.
and indeed in the summits with president putin so to the same.
we would like to see.
and i have heard a number of personal stories including the personal stories of palestinians fleeing syria then being put in one of the camps in lebanon and after being confronted with the conditions there fleeing back to syria being
we are trying to map out the needs and the possibilities on the ground.
the next point is about getting the assistance first of all to those in syria. let me make it clear that we are trying to be innovative here.
and support and here the european union is not one of the biggest it is the biggest contributor to humanitarian aid. however we are not only financing the needs of the refugees.
only last week i visited lebanon but i will come back to that.
with our role with our assistance with us being credible because whatever we pledged we deliver on it because of us this crisis is manageable.
we are now working more closely with the syrian coalition with the syrian liberation army with the local authorities.
i want to be clear too that on the occasions this year when i have put the arms embargo on the agenda of the foreign affairs council with all options to be discussed no member state has proposed that it be lifted to arm the opposition.
this situation reflects in part the inability of the international community to find a coherent united way to respond to the horror that is being perpetrated and to act collectively to protect the people.
he was killed during a rocket attack on the damascus suburb of deraa where he lived. ahmad died while providing humanitarian help to the community.
happening. what is most important is to keep the momentum of al khatib's initiative by creating space for dialogue to work closely with russia with arab partners with our contacts in turkey qatar and saudi arabia in short to explore all options of engagement that can lead to some form of political dialogue further down
we are looking into the best way of channelling our assistance across the lines of fire and taking measures on the ground to reach those who need support although we must also make sure our support reaches the right people and does not fall into the hands of extremists.
be needed. that assistance provides shelter support emergency health care water and sanitation implemented by the red cross by un organisations and by the high commissioner for refugees as well
workers. we have to find all the possible channels for delivering this assistance.
million. eur four hundred and thirty six million is already committed eur two hundred million from the eu budget the rest from member
not everyone involved in the fighting shares our values or our vision for the future of syria. as lakhdar brahimi said when he came at my invitation to the foreign affairs council this week there is no easy solution;
jordan. it is
drag on. we have to be prepared for a direct impact on the european
in need. together with our partners we try to deliver assistance to all areas of syria including those that are fiercely
supplied. success of course depends on the willingness of all members of the international community to rally behind a political
is over. both inside syria and in neighbouring countries we are the biggest donor in this
survive. however we have to be more effective and innovative and we have expanded our help to the syrian opposition coalition and its assistance coordination unit as well as the free syrian
ground. every single financial instrument available to the eu and its member states has been engaged in our joint efforts to assist syrians inside and outside the country to provide assistance to refugees and their host countries to support human rights activists in raising their cases to support students to continue their studies and to help people simply to
army. syrians wherever they are must not feel abandoned by the international community.
states. i want to thank this house for helping in mobilising the funds from the emergence aid
so we work in the situation we find ourselves in with all its constraints. this is a messy and complicated situation on the ground.
as ngos. we are also mobilising in kind assistance from eu member states for refugees using the eu civil protection mechanism in april of this year for turkey and in september for
not easy. we want to reach more people
reserve. the last tranche became available in december but i have to tell honourable members that we know that more is going to
and we should continue to talk with russia and china especially but also with all the members of the security council as well as others across the region and indeed the world in order to try to find a way through.
disputed. yet access is challenging often impossible and far too many innocent civilians are beyond the reach of our humanitarian agencies and
solution. we have to keep up the momentum we have to avoid initiatives starting to disappear and we have to support efforts to explore willingness on both sides to engage in the first steps of any
can. we are also leading the international donor coordination efforts and are preparing the ground for joint assessment activities for the important work to come once this conflict
we know too that the constant stream of refugees puts an unsustainable burden on the socio economic and in some cases political stability of the neighbours
necessary. in this spirit we will continue to act with the clear intention of showing assad that the eu is mobilising all efforts to oppose what is
can i begin by saying i learned with great sadness of the tragic death yesterday of ahmad shihadeh a policy officer of the eu delegation in syria.
without a security council mandate or a clear situation on the ground military action by the international community is not under consideration.
mr president each time we debate syria the situation appears more desperate.
the lebanese government in particular has taken a laissez faire attitude which has exposed traumatised refugees to even more suffering. as with so many crises of this kind women and children have suffered the most.
assad in particular has reached the stage where he is prepared to reduce his once great country to a wasteland of rubble and blood all for the purposes of retaining power and escaping justice a megalomaniac's pyrrhic victory.
indeed one crucially under reported feature of this war is the prevalence of rape as a weapon of terror.
it is all too easy to become desensitised but we must continue to reinforce the scale of this barbarity a staggering seventy zero civilians killed and a million or more displaced people causing a full blown refugee crisis which has the potential to destabilise the region in particular jordan lebanon and iraq.
it is hard to know how much worse the situation could become before moscow feels compelled to do something to help or the free syrian army can become armed and prevent arms going to the salafists from the west but in the meantime we must deploy every resource at our disposal to galvanise the international community and end this disaster.
the answer is very little just typical eu lip service or you are an expensive lipstick mrs ashton.
what does that make you?
your authority is highly questionable. you represent twenty seven nations who have different outlooks.
mr president in a dispute where up to seventy zero people have been killed and a million refugees have fled the country since the crisis began two years ago the question must be posed what good is baroness ashton? what is her highly expensive and ineffective eeas achieving to alleviate the situation?
sadly the days when the deaths of individuals in syria make european news are rare.
even as people are murdered by tens of thousands we are still searching for solutions.
commissioner georgieva wrote today that we need a political solution yet many including european citizens are taking up arms and joining extremist networks that take the space that is left by the international community.
the people in syria are increasingly crushed between the murderous regime and violent extremists.
we as the european union must get aid to the people and take the initiative for a un mandate enabling direct cross border operations from turkey jordan and lebanon.
let us get more deeply involved in what happens in the refugee camps so women do not continue to be abused and extremists cannot infiltrate.
we need a strategy for the day after assad in a country full of weapons with deep wounds where there is such a desire for revenge in an ethnically mixed society.
on the one hand we say to the people stand up for your rights and fight for your freedom.
on the other hand we are leaving them to the mercy of this dictator. these are not my views these are views that are expressed to me by ordinary people throughout the region.
this is the message that they are beginning to receive.
on top of that what is their experience now in places like jordan?
like lebanon?
whilst on the one hand we are seeking to get countries like the uea like kuwait like saudi arabia to come on board and work with us in a coordinated fashion even that is not going to be enough.
my very final point is this the eu embargo.
it is due for renewal soon and it will not be our finest hour if any of our member states have to go it alone but that will happen if leadership is not provided at an eu level.
i wanted to answer on three or four key points that have been made. the first is that already you can hear the debate that i have seen in so many places in this house about how to effectively support the end of violence.
honourable members here have talked about whether or not to engage in the supply of weapons in exactly the same conversations that in my experience have been happening in forums all over the world.
the first and most important issue that you wanted to discuss this evening was about how to get the humanitarian aid out.
i accept that this has been incredibly difficult to do.
honourable members know how important it is to try to work as effectively as possible with the agencies and the ngos.
but it is because we know that it needs to be more effective that we have been working hard with the coalition to look at how we can work through their committee to get aid into different areas in syria that we have not been reaching as effectively as we might have done.
my final point concerns the countries of the region and those who have increased their populations dramatically by the number of refugees.
we are putting a lot of support into those countries and working with them very effectively but it is a very big problem.
we get messages every day about how many people are crossing the borders and we have to expect that influx to continue to grow.
honourable members i share your deep concern and frustration about the situation.
mr president on behalf of the epp group i would like to propose an oral amendment to paragraph ten and the amendment is only one word.
we built our data protection regulation and privacy shield precisely because of these threats and our legislation must be able to face this test and any entity responsible for breaches must be held to account.
cambridge analytica has a lot to answer for.
this is an era where data is the new gold and where unscrupulous politicians and those who support them will use and abuse our personal information to make their propaganda appear as fact to help swing elections and referenda and to essentially subvert democratic processes.
this is about systems that were built for good being used against us.
in many cases we still do not know who the people who hired cambridge analytica were and for what purpose the six zero maltese nationals' and millions of eu citizens' data was harvested. the links between the abuse of data and our democratic processes must be investigated.
this scandal is not only about misuse of data.
we need to ensure that elections and referenda that look free on the surface are actually so in reality.
sometimes it feels like we are living in a reality closer to that imagined by orwell or huxley than perhaps we would care to believe.
we have to examine the loopholes that still exist and how these can be closed because people expect privacy online and we must ensure that their expectations are met.
i also share the disgust that many of these organisations exempt themselves for tax.
there is a clear need for an inquiry in this place and i support that call.
this is about people's daily lives and their ability to shop to go to the bank to interact and to play and if governments force people to do things like put their tax returns on line we need to recognise that cyberspace is public space it isn't a techie elite any more and public space needs regulation of behaviour in that space. it will not do simply to say that is too difficult we need serious legislation that looks to the future.
but here we have done the right thing let us be proud of it and now go ahead and be credible and have those hearings.
the indian prime minister today is at a commonwealth summit and let me tell you that millions billions of people are on facebook;
many have mentioned eprivacy because of the important consent equation within eprivacy and we should really ask why the council is blocking eprivacy.
with full compliance it would not solve the problem.
but on gdpr the overarching issue is that we have higher data protection standards than in the united states.
let me tell you for anyone who is not aware that facebook is powerful;
i want to make one clear point here which is that we have the credibility in the eu institutions and parliament not just because we have millions more facebook users than in the united states but because we have a track record here legislatively because we have tracked what facebook has done wrongly for fourteen years and because we have the credibility and expertise here in this parliament to call mark zuckerberg before us to examine what facebook is doing.
this is because we are a sophisticated parliament as the commissioner and others have said we have many tools for the job not just gdpr.
so are the other platforms.
it is powerful elections are in danger and our privacy is valuable.
i welcome the new measures on parental control but to be effective age verification tools must be put in place.
the time has come for platforms to take responsibility for the content published by users in particular concerning children privacy and safety.
i call on platforms to strengthen the reporting of abuse speed up the removal of illegal content and increase cooperation with law enforcement authorities.
an entire generation of young people is affected by hate speech and cyber bullying.
a girl victim of revenge pornography or sex extortion must be able to have her pictures taken down. these crimes can lead children to commit self harm and suicide. much more also needs to be done urgently to prevent young people from being radicalised and recruited by terrorists on social media.
access to and use of personal data must be transparent and follow our privacy rules. red lines are crossed when it affects our democracy influencing elections and spreading fake news.
the european parliament yes and also the european data protection authorities will scrutinise very closely whether the new facebook privacy arrangements are compliant with all eu legislation but we also need to take a very critical look at ourselves.
yes the facebook case is a wake up call for all of us.
he should be here.
and we are giving away our way our personal data by the truckload not just to our own government agencies but also to other countries like the united states with legal safeguards that carry about as much weight as donald's tweets.
and despite the jubilation about gdpr member states have not nearly allocated the necessary means to the national data protection authorities to enable them to properly enforce the gdpr.
worryingly decisions by the european court of justice are also being ignored. now will the commission remain deaf to the recommendations of working party twenty nine on pnr and privacy shield or act?
i also note that the european data protection authorities have hardly responded to earlier reports on cambridge analytica and facebook.
because amongst those who are voicing their outrage at facebook are many who have consistently voted against stricter privacy protection and continue to do so.
yes thank you mark this one's for you! i think mr zuckerberg would be well advised to appear before this house out of respect for hundreds of millions of european facebook users who feel deceived.
we talk the talk but do we also walk the walk commission council and dear friends?
and all subsequently scrapped by the european court of justice.
like those including the president of this house dear friends who summoned mr zuckerberg to the european parliament but they voted against e privacy so a bit of consistency please.
because while we are busy barricading the front door to keep the likes of mr zuckerberg out the back door is wide open.
but today's debate is not about facebook.
there are actually more users here than in the us and i think zuckerberg should be here. we should not be visiting him in the united states.
i am grateful that you have asked the presidency to participate in your discussion on data protection and citizen's privacy as a line of defence against election manipulation'.
however well functioning data protection rules do not provide the full answer against manipulating elections.
the gdpr will help to protect personal data in the european union as it empowers persons to more easily find out what personal data companies hold about them and for what purposes such data are processed.
the rights to protection of personal data and privacy are enshrined in the european charter on fundamental rights.
in this context we have all seen the recent but very timely opinion of the european data protection supervisor on online manipulation and personal data.
this will discipline companies to comply with the rules.
this ensures that the national data protection authorities coordinate amongst each other their decisions so that the european union speaks with a single voice. the facebook and cambridge analytica case poses a lot of other fundamental questions than data protection how can we protect democratic elections in times of massive digital disinformation or manipulation? in october two thousand and seventeen
it has also led commissioner jourov to demand further clarification from facebook about the extent to which eu citizens were affected.
new challenges to the rule of law and human rights such as increased levels of disinformation have to be counterbalanced by increased levels of media literacy.
at eu level the article twenty nine committee which gathers the data protection authorities of the member states is following the developments closely.
current legislation is deemed to be sufficient in broad terms but it must be better applied and supported by flanking measures such as fact checking websites voluntary codes of conduct and intensified cooperation with service providers. this is already in place in several countries as well as at eu level.
furthermore the gdpr provides for the possibility for data protection authorities to impose high fines.
finally the gdpr provides for a consistency mechanism.
those rights are the basis for the new eu data protection rules laid down in the general data protection regulation which will become applicable in a few weeks.
the debate here today gives another political signal from the european union that we are worried.
other measures going beyond data protection are also necessary for safeguarding the rule of law and democracy.
two seven million europeans could have been affected by this scandal.
this case is too important to treat as business as usual.
in this house you have known the importance of these issues for many years and have adopted the data protection package the so called the general data protection regulation known under the acronym of gdpr.
i am fully confident that european enforcers will make sure that facebook fixes the mistakes and complies with the new data protection laws.
the commission is carrying out a pilot project requested by the european parliament on algorithmic awareness building which will focus on how algorithms can shape filter or personalise information flows that may reinforce biases. and last week the commission proposed the new deal for consumers package which includes collective actions in case of mass harm situations.
we have foreseen that cases like this might happen and we wanted to be well equipped.
i was told that facebook has started to inform people last week.
this scandal is a wake up call for all of us to start a serious debate on what role social media plays today and what role they should play in our elections in the future.
finally there are the important criminal law investigations in this case which need to be carried out by the national law enforcement bodies.
there is no time to be complacent about this.
social media largely cooperate without any limits in this respect.
all eu data protection authorities met in brussels last week and i am pleased they decided to launch a dedicated working group to social media not only facebook.
as you might know the commission has initiated a code of conduct on hate speech such as racism and xenophobia which has shown good results.
for instance consent under the gdpr must be given by a clear and affirmative action and cannot be hidden among legalistic terms and conditions that nobody ever reads.
the proposed e privacy regulation further specifies the transparency requirements for browsers and apps but aside from this positive effect there is a serious situation which must be investigated and which must be prevented from occurring again.
so we need to understand better what the current situation in europe is. organising elections is largely in the remit of the member states. however as a commissioner responsible for union citizenship rights i have invited the eu electoral authorities for a meeting at the end of april.
it has been said that the way we deal with privacy is the defining fundamental rights issue of our time.
the data protection authorities issued information last week about how their interest is protected and what they can do to ensure better protection of their privacy. finally i was directly in contact with facebook and i spoke to the chief operating officer ms sheryl sandberg last week.
vice president ansip referred to the invitation by the european parliament as a measure of rebuilding the trust.
this will be a first opportunity to refer to the very first lessons to draw from the scandal in the official policy paper.
the time for leniency is over and it is good that the data protection authorities are getting ready for it.