Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 15 January 2020 - Strasbourg

Annual report 2018 on the human rights and democracy in the world and the European Union's policy on the matter (A9-0051/2019 - Isabel Wiseler-Lima)

  Tatjana Ždanoka (Verts/ALE). – Madam President, I also do not support the persistent willingness of the European Union to teach all the others how to behave in the field of human rights. We will have the right to be a teacher only when becoming champions, not self—declared human-rights defenders.

But nevertheless, I voted in favour of this resolution by reason of just one paragraph: very important and mentioning that the problem of mass statelessness must be solved by 2024, not only outside but also within the European Union. And mass statelessness is a huge problem for my country, Latvia: every tenth resident of Latvia is stateless, deprived of a number of rights, including the right to vote in local elections (we recommend this for those who will stay in the UK and in the European Union after Brexit). These people were declared to be stateless just by reason of origin, despite the fact that the majority of them are local natives. By the way, in this resolution, the reason for discrimination by origin is not mentioned, and it is a shame.