Strasbourg, 11/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 10 February in Strasbourg, MEPs had the Commission up against the wall on the question of the zero tolerance policy against female genital mutilation. They wanted to know whether the Commission was indeed putting the 2013 action plan into practice. The European Commission appears, at this stage, to be mainly concentrating on data gathering.
During a plenary session debate, Iratxe Garcia Perez (S&D, Spain) asked the Commissioner responsible for women's equality, Vera Jourova, about the action undertaken and planned for tackling female genital mutilation. 3 million women are the victims of this practice in the world, 500,000 of them in Europe. MEPs appeared sceptical about the European action taken to eradicate a practice that has been described as both scandalous and barbaric. They deplored the fact that the Commission action plan of 2013 does not have a deadline that will enable an evaluation to be made of the results or set out future concrete action.
Lack of data. The Commissioner outlined a number of different areas of action taken over recent months (conferences and workshops on the subject, European External Action Service training). The Commission, however, admitted that it had been powerless due to the lack of available data, with the most recent data dating back to 2007. Jourova admitted that it had been difficult to tackle this scourge, without reliable statistics and this kind of data was difficult to gather, “the action plan will not be effective without reliable data and we are working on this”. The Commission is currently working with the European Institute for Gender Equality in view of developing a common methodology and indicators to estimate the risk of female genital mutilation in EU member states. The Commissioner explained “The European Institute studies will tell us more about the reasons behind female genital mutilation being continued or abandoned among migrants in the European Union. This will help us to create an effective strategy for ending the practice”.
The Commissioner regretted that member states seldom used their laws authorising legal proceedings in cases of female genital mutilation. So far, only 41 legal procedures have been launched in 11 member states. (Marie-Pauline Desset)