"Are ongoing debates" is a perfectly acceptable sentence in written English.
You can use it when you want to indicate the existence of debates that are currently in progress or ongoing. For example: "Are ongoing debates about the implications of the new regulation, but its full impact remains to be seen."
(e.g., there are ongoing debates among traditional theologians about the relation of God to time).
The simultaneous use of RDF and REST is not yet widespread and there are ongoing debates on various related topics.
There are ongoing debates in the philosophy of science concerning the nature of background assumptions in basic research and their origins.
Even though there are ongoing debates concerning how many emotion categories exist, the emotion categories (fear, anger, happiness, disgust, sadness, and surprised) defined by Ekman [14] are commonly used in most of the studies on automatic emotion recognition.
There are ongoing debates about the answers to these questions in the philosophy of music and the philosopher of theater, just as there are in the philosophy of dance.
There are ongoing debates concerning how many emotion categories exist, whether the categories should classically be represented in a discrete (i.e., sad, happy) or continuous manner and how to approach long-term and short-term transitions of emotional states and debates as to how to seek measurable correlates of emotions.
There have been ongoing debates concerning the effect of systemic antihypertensive treatment on the incidence of POAG.
Since then there has been ongoing debate.
There has been ongoing debate about whether rising top income shares is a good thing.
There is ongoing debate about whether psychedelics are good, bad, safe or unsafe.
There has been ongoing debate within the Indigenous community on a treaty versus constitutional recognition.
