Brussels, 13/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - The Conservatives and Greens have justified their vote of Tuesday 11 March, which led to the plenary rejecting the non-legislative resolution on gender equality in 2012. If the report by Inés Zuber (GUE, Portugal) had just obtained nine more votes, it would have gone through. The report referred to the impact of austerity on gender equality, as well as on abortion and prostitution. The two political groups stated loud and clear that they supported equal rights between men and women.
How the Greens see prostitution. Many environmentalists abstained on this report (two of the EFA members voted against). Article 67 on prostitution presented a problem for them because, whilst calling member states to recognise prostitution as violence against women, it also said that it should not be considered work, even though it is “voluntary”. The Greens believe that the best way to fight against prostitution is through debate and that this final clause was a “red line” that some of them could not cross, which explains why many of them abstained from voting. Nicole Kiil-Nielsen (Greens/EFA, France) regretted that these abstentions had weighed more heavily than expected and that “our colleagues had failed to assess the political repercussions of this abstention”. Nevertheless, the Kiil-Nielsen said that the issue of equality between men and women was not up for debate at the Greens Group.
Crisis for the EPP. The same applies to the EPP Group, whose members, however, voted against the own initiative report. The Conservatives believed that what was most important was to denounce the ideological line followed by the left and the “political recuperation” on the question of equality. Mariya Gabriel, the EPP coordinator in the women's rights and equal opportunities committee at the European Parliament, explained that “we want a text that envisages equality between men and women in all its different forms and not only through the prism of the economic crisis”.
Meeting with Barroso. It should be pointed out that on Wednesday 12 March a working breakfast took place between the members of this parliamentary committee and the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the European commissioner for fundamental rights, Viviane Reding. In a follow up to International Women's Day they discussed the links between domestic violence and social exclusion. (MD)