Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-14-Speech-3-164"
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"en.20000614.7.3-164"2
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"Mr President, I thank the Commission, the presidency and all my fellow delegates for the excellent cooperation which we have enjoyed and which has greatly impacted on the conference. The conference has shown that, over the past couple of years, we have indeed made progress and we have done so in many areas. For example, women are taking part in peace talks, improvement has been made in the field of women’s health problems, employment for women has improved in a number of countries and violence towards women has been put on the agenda in a number of countries. As such, we can trace the progress that has been made, although new problems have emerged in the meantime, of course.
I am thinking of the problem of AIDS in women. In some African towns and cities, up to 40% of pregnant women suffer from AIDS. There is also the problem of trafficking in women, rape of women during armed conflicts, etc. Consequently, Beijing +5 could not afford to just focus on the progress that was made in respect of decisions taken at Beijing. Beijing +5 also had to incorporate a number of new issues into the text, which it did, after a hard fight.
In my opinion, we have three tasks within the European Union. Firstly, as a European Union, we should remain the driving force behind the Member States. We played this role very distinctly in the past and we must continue to do so in future. It will be evident from the Fifth Action Programme and the financial resources used for this purpose whether the European Commission is serious about applying the Beijing Platform in years to come.
But it is not only vis-à-vis our own Member States that we have a role to play, we also have a responsibility towards the candidate countries, those which we as MEPs have brought together in New York. We have proposed to continue the cooperation with them and asked the Commission, during the screening activities it carries out in the context of the
to assess the achievements with regard to the Beijing Platform too.
We also have a role to play vis-à-vis third countries. It is dreadful to have to listen to the problems which women face in third countries: genital mutilation, killing if they have been unfaithful or if they had sexual relations before marriage and all these kinds of problems. It is the most atrocious form of violence perpetrated against women. In my opinion, the aid which the European Union grants to third countries should definitely be conditional on what these third countries need to do in order to solve the problems faced by women.
Finally, I would like to make it clear that I am a Catholic, but an open-minded Catholic. I was greatly shocked by the news that the Church which I belong to has associated itself with the most fundamentalist groups which exist in society. It was shocking, mainly because my Church offers so few opportunities to women within its own structures."@en1
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