Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-29-Speech-1-129"
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I have followed these interventions with a great deal of interest and I should like to thank the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, as well as the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs and the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs for their contributions to the report being debated. I should like to congratulate Mrs Prets on her excellent report, which proposes numerous improvements to our proposal and gives it greater clarity and greater cohesion with previous Community directives. In particular, we welcome the amendments which bring the Commission proposal into line with Directive 2000/43 on racial discrimination or Directive 2002/73 on equal treatment for men and women in employment. I refer to Amendments Nos 3, 4, 5 part three and part four, 6, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 23 part one, 25 part one, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33 and 43. I should also like to thank the Committee on Women’s Rights on its proposed Amendment No 15, which clarifies the dividing line between private pensions and occupational pensions, which are covered by existing directives on employment.
I am sorry I had to overrun my speaking time, but at least the good news is that we see that we men shall live approximately the same number of years as women.
The above amendments are also in keeping with the discussions held in the Council. We cannot support a number of other amendments, even though they are constructive, because they deviate from similar provisions in current directives and because we believe that it would be preferable to maintain the same approach for reasons of cohesion. I refer mainly to Amendments Nos 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 34 and 40. Nor do we agree with the abolition of the exceptions for which provision is made in Article 1, paragraph 3, given that it is necessary to maintain a limited number of exceptions if the directive is to be applicable in practice. I refer to Amendments Nos 9 and 13. Nor can we support the amendments which extend the proposal to the education, mass media and advertising sectors. The Commission proposal focuses on a specific sector, the goods and services sector. As such, it is a step by step approach to a sector in which, as everyone knows, there is a great deal of gender-based discrimination which can be wiped out with a binding legislative act.
We recognise that the representation of the sexes in the mass media and advertising raises serious questions regarding the protection of the dignity of men and women and that, in the education sector, girls and boys are often discouraged from following non-traditional paths, but other complicated issues also arise, such as the freedom of means of communication.
Consequently, the Commission considers that, in order to deal with them, a binding legislative act is not appropriate at the present stage. I refer to Amendments Nos 38 and 39. Finally, as far as Amendments Nos 35 and 36 in Article 4 of the proposal are concerned, we cannot agree to amendments designed to allow the use of gender-based actuarial factors. The use of gender-based actuarial factors is not compatible with the principle of equal treatment and cannot therefore be justified objectively. Such actuarial factors make broad generalisations about all men and all women and cannot be justified. They reflect statistics on the average population, but these statistics are misleading because they conceal the fact that other factors relating to life style are more important than gender. In fact, studies have shown that 86% of men and women have the same life expectancy. In this group of 86%, a woman is treated differently from a man under the same conditions, purely and simply because an inaccurate generalisation is made about the life expectancy of all women. This practice infringes the principle of equal treatment and, as such, cannot be justified by a statistics-based generalisation.
Nonetheless, we welcome the fact that the proposed amendment recognises that the cost of pregnancy in life assurance should be borne by men and women equally, in order for there to be compliance with the principle of equal treatment.
As regards Amendments Nos 10, 22 and 41, which propose on the one hand, a reduction in the transitional period of six years provided for in Article 4 for gender-based actuarial factors and on the other, stricter monitoring requirements during that period, we do not agree with them because we believe that we cannot expect the insurance sector to adapt from one day to the next and because we consider that the additional six-year period provided for in Article 4 is needed in order to develop working methods for using other, more accurate factors than gender.
Nonetheless, we hope that, at the end of this period, the insurance industry will have no problems applying the principle of equal treatment and European consumers will reap the relevant benefits.
As regards the amendments which propose replacing the term ‘application of the principle of equal treatment of men and women’ with the term ‘application of equality between men and women’ throughout the proposal, we cannot support these amendments because this would go beyond the legal basis of Article 13 of the Treaty. Article 13 authorises the Community to take action to combat discrimination, in other words to safeguard the equal treatment of men and women. It does not grant it wider powers to promote equality or to guarantee full equality in practice. Although Article 3, paragraph 2 of the Treaty makes provision for the Community to aim to promote equality between men and women in all its activities, this provision cannot change the nature of the legal basis of Article 13 of the Treaty. I refer to Amendments Nos 1, 5 parts one and two, 11, 18, 23 part two and 42.
Finally, Mr President, regarding the last proposed amendment, Amendment No 45, which proposes that the Member States engage in dialogue with non-governmental organisations working to combat discrimination and the social partners, we agree in principle but we believe that the wording should be broad enough to cover all the agencies involved, because there are other organisations which represent social agents, such as consumer associations, social organisations and so on."@en1
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