STRASBOURG — You can say pretty much anything in the European Parliament — but can you always get away with it?
A trio of female EU lawmakers are demanding an immediate investigation into whether fellow MEPs committed hate speech during a debate on women’s rights in the European Parliament on Tuesday.
MEPs Anders Vistisen, Isabella Adinolfi and Cristian Terheș “gave statements that we believe constitute hate speech,” according to a letter from the three to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola seen by POLITICO.
MEPs Malin Björk, Evin Incir and Samira Rafaela alleged in the letter their colleagues breached Parliament’s rules on offensive language during a debate on the ratification of the 2011 Istanbul convention against gender-based violence. They urged Metsola to investigate.
“All three of us reacted verbally and called out these speakers during the debate,” the EU lawmakers wrote in their letter. “But it is our firm belief that the European Parliament itself also needs to put its foot down and show that it does not tolerate this kind of hate speech in its chamber.”
“The only thing the president can do is to sanction their daily allowances — but the most important thing, of course, is to say: They crossed the line,” Left MEP Björk told POLITICO.
A spokesperson for President Metsola confirmed receiving the letter and added: “We will look into it with the Plenary services and with the Vice President chairing at the time.”
‘Hate speech’
Right-wing MEPs took incendiary culture war stances at the Parliament debate on Tuesday.
In his speech, Anders Vistisen — a far-right MEP from the Danish People’s Party in the Identity & Democracy group — blamed the influence of Islam for violence against women in his country, appearing to accuse Muslims of “many examples of murder and rape.”
Immediately afterward, Renew MEP Samira Rafaela, who is a woman of color and one of the letter’s authors, spoke up in the hemicycle, saying: “This kind of speech can foster aggressiveness and attacks toward people, for example with a migrant background.”
Rafaela urged Parliament’s Vice President Heidi Hautala, who was chairing the debate, to “look into this matter.” Hautala replied that an internal rule about the respectful conduct of MEPs and reputational damage to the Parliament “could be referred to.”
The writers of the letter argued Vistisen’s remarks were a “clear example of hate speech” based on ethnicity and religion.
In an email to POLITICO, Vistisen defended his speech as “based on facts” and said he would “gladly present it” to President Metsola. “I haven’t heard anything official from the European Parliament’s administration nor the President,” he wrote.
Isabella Adinolfi, an MEP with Forza Italia in the European People’s Party group, at the same plenary debate spoke about Italians being sexually assaulted by Pakistani, Bengali, Moroccan people, or “African immigrants.”
Addressing this, the letter said: “Adinolfi links violence against women as a phenomenon that exclusively exists in ‘foreign’ cultures as opposed to her own ‘Italian’ or ‘European’ culture, even though we know that violence exists in all countries around the world.”
Björk added to POLITICO, “I think it’s appalling that the far-right are such hypocrites [that] the only time they pretend to care about women’s rights is when they can use women’s rights to bash minorities.”
In response, Adinolfi told POLITICO: “This attack is, by all means, an intimidation from Green and left-wing colleagues. The violence and fanaticism shown by these colleagues only damages Europe.”
Cristian Terheș, a Romanian MEP from the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, in his speech to the plenary described transgender women as “male perverts.” He said that legally acknowledging the existence of transgender women is the “biggest threat to women,” and made a parallel between men identifying as women and men identifying as cars.
The letter to Metsola stated that this was “directly transphobic and constitutes hate speech on the base of sex and sexual orientation.”
Terheș told POLITICO he hadn’t received a copy of the letter.
He added: “Any law that allows a man to be acknowledged as a woman, just because he claims so, is a grave threat and form of violence again women. I will happily stand up to protect the truth and the women from this severe form of violence promoted by the aggressive gender ideology.”
Other MEPs also reacted strongly after the debate. French Renew lawmaker Irène Tolleret told POLITICO: “It was monstrous.”
MEP Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a woman of color in the Greens group, said she was “stupefied” by the words they used, and added: “They should be sanctioned.”