Reden

Rede - Montag | 13 März 2023

Good evening. Let me begin by thanking Rapporteur Pelletier, the shadow rapporteurs and the Petitions Committee for their strong endorsement of our work in 2021. The COVID crisis continued to dominate much of our lives that year but since then the multiple crises provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have done so. The loss of life has been immense as has the devastation of Ukrainian families fo...

Rede - Donnerstag | 26 Januar 2023

Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf had an arresting title for an essay he wrote in that newspaper last weekend. He called it “In defence of democratic capitalism”. No less arresting, but infinitely more poignant, was his opening paragraph. Wolf wrote: “In May 1940, as the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, my mother, then 21 years old, escaped from the country in a trawler hijacked by her father, ...

Rede - Donnerstag | 17 November 2022

Thank you and good morning everybody. This conference has been a long time in the planning, a testament to the importance that my colleagues and I place upon it and to our wish to come away from these two days re-inspired and re-invigorated when it comes to planning for the future of the European Ombudsman. Your work as academics is critical to that work by feeding into the intellectual underpinni...

Rede - Dienstag | 27 September 2022

Good afternoon everyone, Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you. The last time I was in Washington was in December 2018 and I’m using these few days - as I did then - to meet largely with people and organisations whose work focuses on the protection and maintenance of high ethical standards in your public institutions. A lot has happened in the four years since 2018 including the a...

Rede - Donnerstag | 08 September 2022

Ambassador Conmy, honoured guests, members of the Association de Femmes d’Europe. I’d like to begin by thanking the Ambassador for the invitation to speak with you this evening and to congratulate the Association on the quiet, understated, but vital work it continues to do around the world. I will shortly speak about the situation of women more generally in the EU, but I want first to remark upon ...

Rede - Mittwoch | 07 September 2022

Honourable Members of the COVI Committee, Dear Chair Van Brempt, Thank you for the invitation. It is my pleasure to meet with this new Committee charged with a most important task. The war in Ukraine might have displaced some of the attention paid to Covid-19 but the lessons to be learned from this Committee’s work and future report will have relevance not just to future health threats on that sca...

Rede - Montag | 05 September 2022

Honourable Members, Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. In July last year, I launched an initiative to look into how the European Commission ensures that human rights are respected in the context of international trade agreements. This initiative followed the Commission’s adoption in February 2021 of a new trade strategy that includes the commitment for the EU to “take a more assertiv...

Rede - Montag | 20 Juni 2022

Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today. You come together almost five months since Russia invaded Ukraine and brought Europe back to a time that we had thought consigned to history, when great powers used military force in pursuit of irredentist dreams. Even in 2022, one sovereign state can still invade another, Europeans can still be forced to flee their homes, and peace on our contine...

Rede - Donnerstag | 09 Juni 2022

Good morning and thank you to the High Authority for organising today’s conference. Next year, I will have been an Ombudsman for 20 years, ten as Ombudsman for Ireland and ten as European Ombudsman. Prior to that I spent more than 20 years as a journalist largely covering Irish politics including the conflict in Northern Ireland. I have therefore always worked precisely in that space where public ...