The German Presidency of the EU was forced to shelve its draft Council conclusions on gender equality in the field of culture because it could not count on the support of Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria.
In fact, the final text, which was published during the evening of Tuesday 1 December, is no more than some “Presidency conclusions”, as Monika Grütters, the German Minister of Culture and Media, had suggested to the press earlier in the day (see EUROPE 12613/27).
She stated simply that some States did not wish to “make this a horizontal issue at European level”.
On 16 November, the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU sent a statement by the Polish delegation on this issue to the Member States’ Ambassadors to the EU. EUROPE has obtained a copy of the statement.
In the statement, Poland asserted that the Union’s gender equality strategy (see EUROPE 12440/7), to which the Presidency Conclusions refer, “should be interpreted with due regard to national competences and the specific circumstances in each Member State”.
Poland refused to talk about ‘gender’, which its representatives regularly refer to as ‘ideological’ (see EUROPE 12609/5), and emphasised that it would be interpreting the term ‘gender equality’ as “equality between women and men”.
Last week, the European Commission was forced to reaffirm its commitment to the term “gender equality” following similar protests by Poland and Hungary at a Development Council meeting (see EUROPE 12609/20).
Finally, the content of the Presidency conclusions – which, despite the actions of the three countries, were supported by 24 Member States – are in line with the draft conclusions set out in one of our articles at the beginning of November (see EUROPE 12596/19).
The final version published by the Presidency can be found at: https://bit.ly/2VqvYZn (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)