Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani reaffirmed his strong support for the European Parliament’s proposal to establish a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Accidents at Work, to be celebrated on August 8 each year. The proposal will be voted on May 6 by the Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, before being put to a vote at the European Parliament’s plenary session in June 2026.
Minister Tajani emphasised his commitment to ensuring that the proposal garners the broadest possible consensus in the European Parliament, in the belief that the memory of European peoples’ collective history is one of the foundations upon which the future of the Union is built.
The establishment of a European Day on August 8 – a date of great symbolic significance for the EU – would have the merit of sending a strong, concrete and shared signal of European commitment to the objectives pursued on the World Day for Safety and Health at Work promoted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
On August 8, 1956, in Marcinelle (Belgium), in the Bois du Cazier mine, 262 miners lost their lives: 136 Italians, 95 Belgians, 8 Poles, 6 Greeks, 5 Germans, 3 Algerians, 3 Hungarians, 2 French, one Englishman, one Dutchman, one Russian and one Ukrainian. Twelve nationalities, one tragedy: our emigrants paid the highest price alongside workers who had arrived from every corner of Europe. Seventy years after that tragedy, Marcinelle can become one of the symbolic places of European consciousness: the place in which we remember where we come from and the price that was paid so that the Europe of Treaties could also become a Europe of men and women free to move and work.
