Mr President, the annual report reiterates Parliament's call for the EU institutions and Member States to place human rights at the centre of our relations with all third countries, including strategic partners. But Parliament continues to be bluntly disregarded, and not just in Syria and Iraq, as Lamiya and Nadia today pointed out.

Recent evidence of this is the European Council's silence and the Commission's perfunctory criticism over the recent arrest of Professor Merera Gudina, a prominent Oromo opposition leader, who is being tortured in Ethiopia and continues to be denied access to a lawyer. His crime was to speak at a public hearing hosted by me in this Parliament on the situation in Ethiopia with exiled Oromo athlete, Feyisa Lilesa, and Professor Berhanu Nega, said to be a terrorist by the real terrorist, the Ethiopian Government. The External Action Service and the Commission have yet to join the European Parliament's President in demanding the immediate release of Professor Merera Gudina.

The EU cannot be credible about human rights and the rule of law when it prepares to further finance, via the migration compact, the undemocratic regime in Ethiopia, which is already Africa's top recipient of our development aid - a country under a state of emergency where thousands of peaceful protesters have been massacred, assassinated or languish in jails crowded with journalists and other prisoners of conscience. A country from which thousands have to flee as refugees and migrants - 88 000 this year alone - into war-ravaged Yemen according to UNHCR. How many Ethiopian citizens will have to die, and how close will Ethiopia have to come to civil war to end the EU's complicity with this brutal and callous dictatorship?