Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-19-Speech-4-109"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20021219.4.4-109"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, I would firstly like to congratulate Mrs Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou on her work, this Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities for the excellent work it has been doing and the European Commission, in relation to equal opportunities policy.
It is very important that we take equality seriously. Not only through declarations, but also through intentions, policies and actions. We therefore need to take the pulse of the equality policy, measure it and assess it. We therefore call for quantitative objectives for policies on employment and access for women to information, training and politics.
Amongst all of us, men and women, we must make it possible for both governments of the current countries of the Union and the governments of the candidate countries to take equality seriously, to transpose the directives when necessary and ensure that they do not fail to comply with Community legislation. A new stage is beginning in which we will have to be very vigilant.
Equality – as many of us here know – needs to be fought for every day and every day no progress is made is in reality a step backwards. Many women are looking to the European institutions. Many of them live far from our prosperous Europe. For them, the progress we can make here is absolutely essential. It is possible that for many of them their only hope is that the European institutions will take equality seriously, both for the women within the Union and for all of those who, because they are outside the Union, encounter many more difficulties fulfilling their expectations of life.
We often say that there is no discrimination worse than that which comes from happening to be a woman. One does not choose to be born a woman. One is born one and, from that moment, one faces a huge number of obstacles which would not be there if one were a man. Therefore, given that we women make up half of the citizenship of the European Union, it is essential to attend to their needs and expectations, because they are the needs and expectations of the majority of the European citizenship. We are also talking about the expectations, the rights and the defence of equality for the majority of women in the world.
This Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities has been working very intensively on all these issues. This committee has achieved, I believe, significant progress, but it is not sufficient. We are interested to see the work the European Commission is doing as well and I believe that this report reflects perfectly both what we have assessed and also everything we are asking for for the more immediate future.
I believe that this excellent cooperation in our committee has borne fruit. Now that the time has come to evaluate the work of the year, we can all be pleased."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples