Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-12-Speech-1-119"
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"en.20070312.19.1-119"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am particularly pleased that we can get down to the final debate on the gender equality roadmap this evening. In this respect, the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality has spent the last few months examining a very important document sent to us by the Commission. It is significant that the roadmap work has also been pushed through by Commissioner Špidla, not least because this is one of those subjects that are never finished once and for all.
The third, and no less consequential issue that was taken into consideration was the need to reconcile family life and work. A number of policies were identified that could make an enormous contribution to reconciling family life and work, not only at European level but also applicable to the Member States. They touch on the subject of the costs of maternity and paternity, which should be borne by society as a whole in this Europe where fewer and fewer babies are being born, and address the age-old but as yet unsolved problem of the need for better, more accessible, more flexible services that are aimed not just at childcare but also at care for the disabled, the seriously ill and the elderly.
To achieve that, we believe it is essential to mainstream gender policy in the EU budget and in Community programmes, such as the Structural Funds, the Seventh Framework Programme and so forth. External policies also need to be taken forward: we believe that all the accession policies as well as the neighbourhood, foreign and development policies need to take account of respect for women’s rights. Lastly, but not because they are any less important, we must address all the immigration-related issues, from enslavement to polygamy and genital mutilation: on these the Union must take a strict stand. As I said at the beginning, we must aim at zero tolerance.
In examining it once again and analysing all the topics that were put to us, we were able to focus on a number of basic issues in particular. We started from the principle that underlies all our actions, which is that promoting the rights of the individual must be mainstreamed in all our policies and therefore, as a natural consequence of that, there must be zero tolerance across Europe.
In this roadmap, we started by establishing the fact above all that promoting the rights of the individual underlies …
I shall start again. Our starting-point was the promotion of the rights of the individual and, as a natural consequence, we arrived at the conclusion that in focusing on the promotion of rights we must also aim at zero tolerance of any failure to respect such rights.
Unfortunately we all know that violence is still a major, significant issue in Europe: available data in fact show that one woman in three suffers violence at some time in her life. We also know that women make up 52% of Europe’s population, and that makes you realise that there is an enormous percentage of people in our Europe even today that suffer violence during their lifetime. We are asking the Union to pay particular attention to this point.
The other point that we took into consideration was the subject of poverty. In this case as well, a great many reports, including previous ones, have shown how the risk of poverty affects women most of all, in view of the fact that 85% of single-parent families are headed by women and, on average, this is considered the situation in which it is easiest to drop down to the poverty line. In that respect as well, we think that one of the main actions that we can carry out at an EU level is to enhance all those policies that can provide women with economic independence, in other words those policies that facilitate access to the job market.
There is still a considerable gender gap in employment levels, although admittedly the situation varies from one country to another. When women have jobs, it has been shown that on average they are paid 15% less than men for the same work. In this context as well, therefore, we are calling for policies and monitoring to prevent this from happening any more."@en1
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