Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-13-Speech-4-040"
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"en.20080313.3.4-040"2
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"Mr President, gender equality and women’s empowerment are values and principles that we all praise in the European Union. As such, they definitely need to be shared with the developing countries within the framework of existing cooperation. We all have a huge responsibility when addressing them because promoting double standards would morally outlaw us, and we certainly lose credibility. I am referring specifically now to the amendments tabled for voting today, the same amendments that were rejected by the Committee on Development.
I fear that we risk using different yardsticks when, on the one hand, we express these values to our development partners and when, on the other hand, we use them inside the European Union. We cannot afford to exclude references to reproductive rights from this report because this is a core topic when we target the promotion of women’s rights and their empowerment.
As the report correctly emphasises, women’s full enjoyment of their sexual and reproductive health and rights is a prerequisite for achieving gender equality. The protection of reproductive rights, such as planning their family in terms of birth timing and spacing, and decision-making regarding reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, provides women with the freedom to participate more fully and equally in society.
We cannot go only halfway towards our partners and claim at the same time that our goal is to have healthier and stronger women who are able to participate actively and equally in society. Please excuse my tough words but to me this is mere hypocrisy. We will fail to achieve these goals if we start by excluding core issues or give a different impression of our principles, different to what we have back home.
In today’s world, promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in the developing countries is not an easy task. Reaching these targets implies a genuine commitment and action and, most of all, it implies our good faith in our relations with developing countries."@en1
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