Parliament asks for help to safeguard women

In light of the meeting in New York on the Status of Women, members of the European Parliament hope to adopt a global plan to prevent all forms of violence against women.

Yesterday the European Parliament convened for the Plenary Session in Strasbourg and approved with a clear majority of votes a resolution to stop violence against women, which asks the European Commission to enact a new directive with strong content to prevent and protect women and girls from any type of oppression. A document all the more important since, preceding the 57th session of the CSW (Commission on the Status of Women), organized by the United Nations and which takes place every year in New York during the month of March, highlights the urgency of a global approach to the problem.

Therefore the resolution voted in Strasbourg seems to be “a good omen.” Through the intercession of the FEMM Commission – the parliamentary group for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality presided by Mikael Gustafsson – the provision encourages the EU to wholly sustain the recommendation that the group of experts, according to whom, the CSW 2013 should decide to develop a global action plan to eliminate violence against women and girls.

There’s one problem, this amounts to the most common of violations against human rights and that – it reads in the text of the Resolution voted in Strasbourg – represents one of the main obstacles of achieving gender equality and women’s rights; it affects women and girls of all countries of the world, independently of factors such as age, social class or economic situation, it ruins the family and the community, and incurs substantial economic and social costs and limits and compromises economic growth and development.

The Italian MEP’s from the Pd delegation at the European Parliament are greatly satisfied. Silvia Costa, Francesca Balzani, Rita Borsellino, Debora Serracchiani, Patrizia Toia e Francesca Barraciu ask that the adopted plan be combined with favorable measures to promote awareness and implemented in specific legislation. This request is specifically directed toward Union and Member States to sign and ratify the Convention of the Council of Europe for the prevention and fight against violence towards women and domestic violence, which today represents 85% of types of violence against women.

“In the European plan – the MEP’s commented – we ask that the EU put to use a strategy directed specifically toward the prevention and contrary to this phenomenon that, as highlighted by the Resolution, is configured as a structural given of the violation of human rights in all countries of the world, in the numerous forms and situations in which it is exhibited: from domestic and psychological violence to that undergone on the job, violation often portrayed also by the media, to cases of violence in situations of disability and damages to minority women, all the way to MGF (female genital mutilation) and the violations undergone by women during humanitarian conflict and crisis.”

Even Tiziano Motti, MEP of the new group Popolari per l’Europa, in which fused the UDC (Christian Democrats) delegation in Strasbourg and Brussels, sustained the project: “Italy and Europe – he said – need to regulate superior safeguards for women from the phenomenon of domestic violence, a shame indicative of barbarism still hidden under the carpet of beautiful European homes that needs eradicating.”

Loredana Recchia