What changed between the plenary report and the adopted text

13. Welcomes the introduction of broadcasting and live-streaming in 2022 by the Court of Justice to facilitate partial public access to its judicial activity;

Freedoms

14. Expresses deep concern about the increasing threats to the freedoms of association, speech and assembly; reiterates that the right to peaceful assembly can only be restricted when provided for by law and when necessary and proportionate to protect a general interest recognised by the Union or the rights and freedoms of others; condemns the use, in some instances, of violent and disproportionate intervention by law enforcement authorities during peaceful protests and condemns cases of discretionary mass arrests of potential protesters; encourages the relevant national authorities to ensure transparent, impartial, independent and effective investigations into the suspected or alleged use of disproportionate force; calls on the Member States to use alternative practices to maintain public order that have already proven to be effective in other Member States;

15. Emphasises that in order to ensure the right to freedom of expression and information, which is foundational for any democracy, information must be universally accessible and diverse; underscores that artistic freedom must be guaranteed; stresses that disinformation can be highly disruptive to the functioning of democratic societies, economies and political systems; recalls the need for media and digital literacy to be included in civic education in order to counter the spread of disinformation; reiterates its recommendations to take effective measures to tackle disinformation from malicious foreign powers, in particular with a view to the upcoming European elections; underlines that an independent and pluralistic media landscape, both online and offline, is indispensable to effectively counter disinformation and propaganda, and therefore must be promoted, including through effective action against media concentrations;

16. Stresses that, under Union law, national regulatory authorities and/or bodies must be functionally independent from their government and must not seek or take any instructions from any other body; notes that the political independence of media regulation and oversight by the Member States and the Commission, the protection of editorial independence throughout the EU, the protection of journalists from surveillance and the protection of journalistic sources are of paramount importance; calls, in this regard, for the adoption of a strong European media freedom act to guarantee the independence, plurality and freedom of media across the EU, ensuring transparency of ownership and financing;

17. Underlines the crucial role of CSOs in promoting active citizenship, fundamental rights and democratic participation in Europe; urges the Commission to present a strategy and establish minimum standards for the protection of CSOs in all Member States in order to promote a regulatory and political environment free from chilling effects, threats and attacks, to provide CSOs with sustainable and non-discriminatory access to resources and to support their engagement in civil dialogue and participation in policymaking; deplores the fact that the situation of human rights defenders in the EU has deteriorated alarmingly in recent years; urges the Commission and the Member States to take the necessary measures to ensure that human rights defenders are able to work free from hindrance and insecurity;

18. Recalls that, under Article 6 of the Charter, everyone has the right to liberty and security, which means that everyone in the EU should be protected from unlawful and arbitrary arrest; calls on the Member States to follow the Commission Recommendation on procedural rights of suspects and accused persons in order to improve detention conditions and, thus, ensure a higher level of protection for the right to liberty and security;

19. Condemns the rise in religion or belief-based discrimination and racist incidents in the EU; calls on the Commission and the Member States to take decisive action in this regard, including at international level; recalls that, under Article 10 of the Charter, everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; deplores the fact that incidents of discrimination and racist and xenophobic crimes are often not reported to the authorities, which leads to de facto impunity; regrets the fact that not all Member States have fully transposed the framework decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law;

20. Is concerned over the increasing number of incidents of police violence against the Romani population; calls on the Member States to rigorously investigate these incidents to ensure that there is no impunity for introducing and/or implementing repressive, violent measures against Romani individuals or communities; calls further on the Member States to address biased police recordings, reporting, prosecution and court judgments and the inadequate access to justice of Romani people;

21. Points out that, as a result of the datafication of everyday life and data scandals, the right to the protection of personal data is of growing importance; reiterates its concerns about the uneven application of the General Data Protection Regulation; supports the initiatives to strengthen the legislative process on an EU regulatory framework on artificial intelligence providing for strong safeguards for fundamental rights;

22. Strongly condemns the widespread fundamental rights violations and the use of disproportionate violence at EU borders against migrants including refugees, such as arbitrary detention, inhumane living conditions and lack of access to healthcare, unlawful returns and violent pushbacks; is very concerned about Member States codifying the use of pushbacks into their national law; condemns all laws in the Member States that undermine the effective protection of the human rights of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants on the land and at sea, as well as the criminalisation of humanitarian workers and activists; highlights that almost a third of asylum seekers are children and reiterates that immigration detention of children should not be permitted;

23. Calls for the EU and the Member States to ensure that effective oversight mechanisms are put in place to ensure fundamental rights compliance at the external borders, which should also cover the monitoring of border surveillance activities; calls further on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that the individuals whose data are stored in the databases of the EU’s large-scale information systems are informed about their rights and have access to available remedies;

24. Strongly deplores the numerous deaths of refugees and migrants at sea who are often victims of trafficking of human beings and have to face inhumane and degrading treatment without any consideration for their safety; reiterates the obligation under the international law of the sea to assist persons in distress and urgently calls for permanent coordinated search and rescue operations with swift disembarkations, and for Member States to take every action possible to save the lives of people at risk at sea; calls for the right to asylum of all persons rescued at sea to be respected, by assessing individual circumstances on a case-by-case basis;

25. Notes that several Member States use national security as a determinant for internal policies, such as migration; stresses that any measures taken on the basis of national security must be necessary and proportionate, and must not undermine the rights guaranteed by the Charter; recalls that Article 19 of the Charter provides for protection in the event of removal, expulsion or extradition by prohibiting collective expulsions and, therefore, requires individual assessments and prohibits the rejection of applications for international protection based solely on a specific nationality;

26. Welcomes the activation of the EU Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) following the war in Ukraine, which aims to ensure access to protection for refugees and asylum seekers of any origin; recalls that access to accommodation, employment, education, healthcare and social welfare services under the TPD must take into account a gender approach; deplores the unequal treatment, racial discrimination and violence faced by non-Ukrainians fleeing the conflict, in particular people of colour and LGBTIQ+ people; deplores the double standards on migrants and refugees in the EU and calls for an end to this situation;

27. Welcomes the recommendation of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers on protecting the rights of migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women and girls, calling on Member States to take measures to prevent discrimination against such women, including by promoting access to employment and sexual and reproductive healthcare, and facilitating access to services and justice for survivors of gender-based violence;

28. Notes, with concern, the large population of stateless persons in the EU, especially children being born stateless; calls on the Commission to develop a comprehensive strategy and action plan to address statelessness in the EU and to protect them from expulsion; calls on the Member States to properly identify, recognise and protect stateless people, addressing the specific vulnerabilities of stateless persons;

Equality and dignity

29. Calls on the Commission to ensure that the right to non-discrimination and equal treatment is respected across the EU; deplores the fact that the proposal on the horizontal anti-discrimination directive has remained blocked in the Council since 2008; considers that any update of this proposal by the Commission must build on Parliament’s position, address intersectional discrimination and explicitly prohibit discrimination on any combination of grounds listed in the Charter; regrets the fact that the Council has ignored these requests and urges the Council to integrate them into its mandate and to take all appropriate actions to fight discrimination in the EU;

30. Calls on the Commission to monitor and ensure proper follow-up of the implementation of the Member States’ national action plans against racism and the EU anti-racism action plan; urges, furthermore, the Commission to mainstream anti-racism and anti-discrimination in all EU policies; calls on the upcoming Council presidencies to seriously consider establishing a Council configuration on gender equality and equality;

31. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to tackle racial discrimination in all areas of society, with a specific emphasis on education and the prevention of school segregation, through effective legislative and policy measures, both in the Member States and in enlargement countries;

32. Recalls, with regard to digitalisation, the need to pay close attention to discriminatory biases being introduced into new technologies and the need to require developers and deployers to provide publicly accessible information on how these systems are trained; calls on the Commission and the Member States to put in place measures to prevent new technologies, including artificial intelligence, from exacerbating discrimination, existing inequalities and poverty; calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that artificial intelligence systems are guided by the principles of transparency, explainability, fairness and accountability, and that fundamental rights impact assessments are put in place; calls further on the Commission and the Member States to tackle the gender and diversity gaps in the information and communications technology (ICT) and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sectors, particularly in the development of new technologies, and especially in decision-making positions;

33. Recalls the importance of children belonging to national minorities being able to find dedicated schools offering education in their language; encourages the inclusion of national minority representatives in decision-making processes impacting their education systems;

34. Recalls that gender-based violence is highly prevalent in all Member States across the EU; strongly condemns the rapid backsliding on women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights in several Member States; strongly condemns the denial of access to safe and legal abortion services as it is a form of gender-based violence; highlights that the ECtHR has ruled that restrictive abortion laws and lack of implementation violate women’s right to bodily autonomy and integrity; reiterates its condemnation of Poland’s law that imposes a near total ban on abortion; recalls that citizens who help people to access abortion services when it is not freely or legally available should not be persecuted; reiterates its call for the right to abortion to be included in the Charter;

35. Welcomes the Commission’s proposal for a directive to combat violence against women and domestic violence and calls for the swift conclusion of the negotiations and for gender-based violence to be included in the list of EU crimes; highlights that such a directive should guarantee the obligations laid down in the Istanbul Convention as a minimum standard and aim to strengthen these standards to increase the level of protection; welcomes the EU’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention which entered into force on 1 October 2023; calls on the remaining Member States to swiftly ratify the Convention in order to protect women against violence;

36. Underlines that persons with disabilities, in particular women with disabilities, continue to face multiple and intersectional discrimination based on their disability, gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion or belief, sexual orientation, migration status or socio-economic background; stresses that women and girls with disabilities are particularly subject to gender-based violence, including physical, sexual, psychological and economic violence; calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that mechanisms for reporting violence against persons with disabilities, as well as support services for victims, are put in place and are made accessible;

37. Stresses that the rights of the child are universal and that every child should enjoy the same rights, free of discrimination, such as the right to the recognition of parenthood, including for same-sex couples; welcomes the Commission’s proposal for a regulation on jurisdiction, applicable law, recognition of decisions and acceptance of authentic instruments in matters of parenthood and on the creation of a European Certificate of Parenthood to protect the rights of all children by ensuring that their parental ties, including, in particular, same-sex parents, established in one Member State are recognised in all EU Member States;

38. Calls on the Member States to make forced sterilisation punishable as a criminal offence; reiterates its position that the directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence should include forced sterilisation as a criminal offence under Article 83(1) TFEU;

39. Recalls that hate crimes and hate speech motivated by racism, xenophobia or religious intolerance, or by a hostility or prejudice based on a person’s disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics are extreme examples of discrimination; notes that the Member States have a duty to combat and investigate hate crime, punish perpetrators and take preventive measures; stresses the need for the appropriate recording of hate crimes by law enforcement authorities in order to better understand the nature and prevalence of the phenomenon and its impact on victims, and to address its root causes;

40. Welcomes the Commission’s initiative to expand the list of EU crimes in Article 83(1) TFEU to hate speech and hate crimes, highlighting the need to ensure a robust EU criminal law response to hate speech and hate crime; strongly deplores the delayed approval of the initiative, and reiterates its call on the Council to work diligently towards a consensus;

41. Recalls that EU legislation on hate speech and hate crimes should universally protect human dignity and combat hatred and intolerance irrespective of their motivation, with a special focus on targeted persons, groups and communities; strongly condemns all forms of hate speech and smear campaigns in public media against journalists, politicians, public officials, activists and other actors;

42. Calls on the Commission to effectively monitor the implementation of the measures contained in the various equality strategies, such as the EU LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2020-2025, the EU Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025, the Strategy on Roma Equality and Inclusion, and the EU anti-racism action plan 2020-2025; urges the Member States to swiftly draw up and implement national action plans against racism;

43. Welcomes the fact that the Commission, for the first time, invoked an isolated violation of Article 2 TEU when it referred the Hungarian ‘child protection law’, which camouflaged other objectives, to the Court of Justice;

Social, economic and environmental rights

44. Recognises that poverty is another form of discrimination that leads to the violation of fundamental rights and unequal opportunities to access goods and services; highlights the particular vulnerability of children and the impact that poverty has on them and on their physical and psychological development; calls on the Commission, the Council and the Member States to develop policies to reduce poverty and social exclusion, taking into account an intersectional approach and paying particular attention to individuals in vulnerable situations; welcomes the approval of the European Child Guarantee, but considers that more efforts are needed, particularly in the area of social protection; calls on the Member States to guarantee equal access and opportunities for quality education and employment, as they play a critical role in helping to alleviate inequality and lifting people out of poverty;

45. Is deeply concerned about the increase in poverty, inequalities and social exclusion in the EU; calls on the Member States to tackle ‘period poverty’ and to eliminate VAT on personal hygiene products; stresses that the long-term economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in food and energy prices have severely impacted the rights of people living on low incomes or in poverty, including to an adequate standard of living, to food, to health, to housing and to social security; calls on the Commission and the Council to develop macroeconomic policies guided not only by economic growth, but also by social standards and recalls the importance of social standards in the European Semester;

46. Welcomes the Council Recommendation of 30 January 2023 on adequate minimum income ensuring active inclusion as a step forward in implementing principle 14 of the European Pillar of Social Rights; regrets, however, the lack of concrete measures to overcome structural discrimination towards vulnerable groups; calls on the Member States to collect disaggregated data on minimum income for these groups;

47. Stresses that digitalisation is a transversal process that impacts access to all services, particularly healthcare, and the exercise of fundamental rights; underlines that digital poverty in the EU should be monitored and assessed in relation to access to essential services and fundamental rights, including for elderly people, people living in remote areas, people living in situations of homelessness and Roma people; recalls the obligation of Member States, under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to ensure that people with disabilities have full access to society; recalls that technological addictions constitute a public health problem that particularly affects minors and their physical and mental integrity;

48. Notes that housing is not a commodity, but a necessity, and that it is a precondition for participating fully in society; calls on the Member States to step up investment in social and affordable housing to eradicate housing cost overburden, particularly among disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, and to avoid competition between these groups;

49. Welcomes the recognition of the universal right to access to a healthy and sustainable environment by the UN Human Rights Council on 8 October 2021; highlights that environmental impairment and the failure of some public authorities to provide information about serious environmental risks to which individuals are exposed, may have severe harmful consequences for individuals; recalls the need to fully align the EU ambient air quality standards with the latest World Health Organization guidelines by 2030;

Institutional safeguards for fundamental rights

50. Welcomes the progress made since the resumption of the negotiations towards EU accession to the ECHR in June 2020 and the provisional agreement on the draft revised accession instruments reached in March 2023; calls on the Commission and the Council to resolve the remaining issue on the situation of EU acts in the area of the common foreign and security policy as swiftly as possible in order to complete the accession process;

51. Supports the FRA’s work on analysing data in order to document discrimination and welcomes further developments in this field; welcomes the Commission’s proposals for two directives on standards for equality bodies, aiming to ensure the implementation and enforcement of EU anti-discrimination rules; calls on national bodies cooperating with the FRA to provide impartial data; calls on the FRA to consult additional sources when serious concerns persist on the quality of data;

52. Highlights the importance of supporting and strengthening cooperation between the EU institutions, the Member States, OLAF and the EPPO; calls on the Commission to present a report assessing the possibility and modalities of expanding the mandate of the EPPO, as provided for in Article 86 TFEU, to include serious environmental crimes that are detrimental to the interests of the Union or that affect the consistent application of EU policies related to the protection of the environment;

53. Calls for the FRA to be established as an independent human rights authority, similar to national human rights institutions and in line with the UN General Assembly’s Paris Principles of 1993, to protect and promote the Charter policies and practices from Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies, and from Member States when implementing EU law; considers that this requires a legal basis in the Treaties for the creation of an EU authority for fundamental rights, enshrining its independence and introducing the ordinary legislative procedure for adopting and amending its mandate; calls for this new authority to be entitled to bring actions under Article 263 TFEU on grounds of infringement of the Charter; calls for the power to handle complaints and the mandatory consultation by the Commission of the FRA when preparing proposals for legislative acts or recommendations which have an impact on fundamental rights to be included in its mandate;

54. Recalls the importance of the relevant Court of Justice case-law upholding the respect for fundamental rights and further defining the rule of law; is concerned by the persistent refusal of some Member States to implement domestic, Court of Justice and ECtHR judgments, which contributes to the erosion of the rule of law; stresses that the non-implementation of judgments can lead to human rights violations being left without remedy; highlights that the primacy of EU law constitutes the bedrock of the EU’s legal order; calls on the Commission to ensure adequate follow-up in case of non-implementation of this principle;

55. Stresses the role of national and local administrations, and the Member States’ parliaments and law enforcement authorities in promoting and protecting Charter rights;

56. Notes the FRA observation that Member States appear to lack a structured engagement with the implementation of the Commission strategy to strengthen the application of the Charter, such as definitions of clear targets, milestones and timelines; calls on the Member States to fully implement the strategy;

57. Recalls that the right to participate in democratic life and the obligation to ensure that decisions are taken as openly and as close to citizens as possible are protected under the Treaties and Article 10 TEU in particular; calls on the EU institutions and the Member States to ensure sufficient time for public consultation and transparency and to publish public documents in a proactive manner;

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58. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council and the Commission.