Mr President, honourable Members, fundamental rights are increasingly under attack in Europe.
The classist and authoritarian agenda of the far right is plain to see. Yet in times of crisis and war, even democratic forces end up accepting too many downward compromises. For us, by contrast, the rights of each and every person are non-negotiable: they are our red line, our barricade.
To those who justify the curtailment of rights in the name of security, we reply that security without rights produces subjects, not citizens. And subjects are never truly safe. To those who set social rights against civil rights, we say this is a mistake. It is not a zero-sum game, but a struggle in which each strengthens the other. And to those who claim that rights are for some, we reiterate that either they belong to everyone or they are called privileges.
Defending acquired rights and winning new ones is the same struggle—our struggle. They want us to be subjects of the nation. We want to be citizens of the world.
And how many rights we have depends on us, on our ability to fight together. The history of democracy is a history of rights won: it is up to us to continue writing it.