Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-12-Speech-2-150"
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".
Mr President, I should like to congratulate Mrs Izquierdo Rojo because she touches on a very important and difficult problem in her report. To start with, as far as fundamentalism is concerned, I think that we have to analyse the concept outside the European Union.
According to the Treaty, the European Union is a union of independent states. Religion is a purely private matter for each individual and keeping the faith is a personal decision for each individual, assuming of course that keeping the faith does not run counter to the basic principles which unite all the Member States of the European Union. On Women's Day recently, we discussed Muslim women in Europe. Islam is the second most important religion in the European Union today. The European Muslim women who spoke highlighted the fact that the Koran is interpreted solely by men. Women are never involved in interpreting the Koran. However, any interpretation of the Koran or any other religion in the European Union cannot be respected unless the basic laws and principles of the European Union are respected first. This means that the basic principle of equality of men and women is a principle on which any other priorities and principles must be founded.
However, outside Europe, fundamentalism really is a very important problem, as many of the speakers have described. I think that identifying, describing and condemning the problem is very important, but Europe will be guilty by omission if it fails to take very specific measures to deal with it worldwide. The European Commission has proposed specific measures to mainstream the gender dimension in all forms of foreign policy, in external trade, in development aid, in all the European Union's individual agreements with third countries and at summits organised between the European Union and various continents, such as the Europe/Africa, Europe/Asia and Europe/Latin America summits.
This proposal is quite specific. First, last year, as part of mainstreaming in all individual policies, the Commission presented the action plan on development relating to women. It contains very specific actions on how to take account of respect for women's human rights, the involvement of women in development aid and the development of each country, and how to apply this action plan, with incentives and, where necessary, with sanctions. Similarly, we are organising an initial seminar in March for experts from the 15 Member States and delegates invited from all over the world to debate a foreign policy action plan to be complied with by the European Union and the Member States. We are preparing a Council of Foreign Ministers in 2003 at which the main item on the agenda will be a foreign policy action plan and recommendations.
This is a very important report because it focuses the debate on what is now one of the most serious issues at global level, the crime perpetrated against women on the grounds of religion or cultural mores, a crime which affects hundreds of millions of women."@en1
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