Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk about these urgent topics. It is a pleasure to be here at the ALDE new year's seminar.

For us it might be stating the obvious that a Union can only successfully protect democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights if it performs an exemplary role on all these points. And unfortunately it is currently also obvious that the EU is not yet fulfilling that role.

Two points need to be stressed. For one the EU should vigorously respect the rulings of the European Court of Justice and secondly, the EU must become (even) more transparent in its legislative processes.

So if we take a bird's-eye view, we can see for example that the Court of Justice has ruled twice against data retentionEuropean Court confirms: Strict safeguards essential for data retention and those rulings have been wilfully ignored (so in the Netherlands we had to go to a Dutch court to get the unlawful retention of data stopped).

We have seen the Court of Justice of the EU (thanks to tireless work by key ALDE MEPs like Sophie in't Veld) rule against the proposed deal between Canada and the EU on PNREU Court rules that draft EU/Canada air passenger data deal is unacceptable, the registration of air passengers. But the consequences of this ruling for the EU/Australia and EU/US agreements have been left wilfully unexplored.

We have seen the Court of Justice rule against the mandatory blocking of internet access and social media services while at the same time seeing this ruling being explicitly circumvented through the introduction of an upload filterLead Parliamentarian for Culture Committee defends upload filtering in the proposed Copyright Directive.

We've seen the EU adopt the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which requires that restrictions on our rights have to be necessary and provided for by the law, while also seeing the Europol Regulation giving unaccountable powerEuropol: Non-transparent cooperation with IT companies to Europol's Internet Referral Unit to make referrals not based on the law, but based on terms of service for the "voluntary consideration" of internet companies. There is no review process for these referrals, no statistics on subsequent investigations and —ironically in light of the data retention demands for records of innocent people— no retention of the associated evidence.