Mr. Didier Reynders:

On the explanation on the different regulations in recent years about lobbying, it is important and it is a difficult and sensitive issue in all institutions including the European institutions, but we are trying to organise a real process. On ethics, I have seen that the Irish Government has said it will go further forward with reforms of the code of ethics but it is in the Government's hands and in the national discussion. We will continue to monitor that in the next report.

On the European Public Prosecutor's Office, I am trying to start the operation as soon as possible. In my mind it was yesterday. We have appointed a chief prosecutor, Laura Kövesi, with an agreement between the Council and the Parliament. After the summer of last year, we appointed the college of prosecutors with prosecutors coming from all member states. There is a college in Luxembourg. Now we need implementing legislation in all member states but we have been waiting for that for three years. We need the appointment of the delegate prosecutors in the member states to work with the college in Luxembourg. At the moment we are trying to convince the last member states to be in full compliance with their obligations. We have seen the crisis in Italy so that may be the last participating member state where it will be possible to move. I am sure it will start in the first semester of this year but not this month because we need to have full compliance of all member states on the implementing legislation and the appointment of the delegate prosecutor. That is why I said it is important for non-participating member states like Ireland to adopt the implementing legislation to transpose the PIF directive.

There are some common law countries in the EPPO process, such as Malta and Cyprus, so it is possible to see the differences and the different ways to organise a process, but why not Ireland? If there is a need for constitutional change, it is difficult and takes some time but it is possible. In Sweden, they decided some years ago to opt out but now they are discussing the possibility of going to the parliament next year with draft legislation to take part in the EPPO. We are open to explaining and discussing how it is possible for all common law member states to become a member and the process involved. First, we want Ireland to be a good partner to the EPPO. I am sure that will be the case.

On media platforms, it is a long process with the code of conduct and with decisions taken at European level. Due to the Paris attacks it was possible to work with the platforms to rapidly remove any terrorist content. There are many discussions about doing the same with regard to child sexual abuse. During the pandemic, we have seen an increase in criminality on the web and we are trying to work more closely on that. We are doing the same for the safety of products because we have seen more and more sales online. We are working with the platforms but with the Digital Services Act it will be possible to put an obligation on the platforms to remove illegal content, such as hate speech. With the level playing field, this will not only be the major platforms, but all platforms. We are working in the same way with regard to the safety of products and we will have the possibility of imposing financial sanctions for a huge amount of money if they do not deliver. We will continue to do that with new obligations and maybe with new so-called pledges.

We may ask some platforms to do more than the legislation and to continue to work with us about the disinformation and illegal content with real effect. The Vice Chairman spoke about harassment. It is a difficult issue because sometimes one message on social media is not illegal content, but if there are many different kinds of legal messages together about one person in the same way then we have harassment of one person. We have seen that happen with some young people and children with very difficult consequences. It may be possible to then take that into account when discussing it with the platform. It would be useful for the platform in such a new sort of criminal offence to use artificial intelligence to detect promptly the situation. It is about working on this.

On the perceived impunity of some member states, it is the goal of the Rule of Law Report to show that we tried to do the job to deliver in the EU first because it is very important to protect the shared values such as those we put in the treaties. The Union is a union of values. I am aware that there are many discussions about the Internal Market and the economic development in the EU but the EU is first of all is a political union with shared values among the member states. We need to verify the full respect of those values.

For conditionality we organised a process to verify compliance with the values before the accession, but not so much afterwards. We are now working more on a mechanism to continue to verify the full compliance with the values, as we would verify the full compliance with the economic criteria from the Maastricht treaty, for example. This is why we have Article 7, the infringement proceedings, the Rule of Law Report and the new mechanisms about the conditionality. I must insist that it is also very important to do the job at home in the EU to be credible when we try to say something if we see something odd about the European Union. If we do not show to our partners in the world that we are delivering our message in the EU about the values, it will become difficult to express some criticism against different kinds of powers. To be concrete, just before this meeting we had a college meeting with the US envoy on climate, Mr. John Kerry, as a guest. We discussed the rule of law on both sides of the Atlantic. If we want to say something about the situation in the US, or about the situation in many places in the world, we need to show that we are able to do the job at home in the European Union. There is a real problem, however, about such a kind of perceived impunity as the Vice Chairman has said. It is the reason that discussions such as we are having today, and the presentation of the Rule of Law Report, are so important.