Mr President, this initiative report is the European Parliament’s contribution to the special session of the United Nations General Assembly which will be held in New York in three weeks’ time and where the actions of the past five years will be assessed as a follow-up to the World Conference on Women in Beijing and where, at the same time, a declaration will be issued to re-establish the commitments made and to see what needs to be done in the next five years. As such, it is an important report, because it will be the only report from the European Parliament. I hope that we will be given the opportunity – and this is also a request to the Commission – to do some preparatory work with the Commission before we leave for New York to ensure that we are singing from the same hymn sheet. I think it is useful to be on the same wavelength because, as regards women’s liberation, we could expect Europe to play some sort of a pioneering role. Europe has done this in the past and we must be able to continue to do this. But before I talk about this pioneering role, I would like to say a few words about the assessment itself. Commissioner, it is particularly difficult to carry out an assessment if there is no data available to check on the precise extent of progress made by the different European countries over the past few years. No statistical data exists. There are reports on the twelve topics which we need to discuss in New York for each country, which show exactly how much progress has been made with the assessment. I am therefore delighted that you announced in the discussion on the fifth action programme that you would like to set up a kind of observatory where an effort will be made to collate all possible gender-related data. After all, there is an enormous gap in this field. I would like to direct my second point to Parliament itself. The efforts we needed to make in order to finish this report suggest that the Secretariat of the Women’s Committee is heavily understaffed. There was very little in the way of cooperation, and had it not been for the fact that Mrs Gröner and myself had hard-working collaborators, then there would probably not have been a report now. It is a disgrace for Parliament that other committees can apparently acquire excellent secretariats and well-equipped secretariats with many staff, but that this is not possible for the Women’s Committee. It may be useful that we, together with the women involved, should take an initiative. That is all I have to say as regards assessment and I will not touch on it any further. For the next five years, I believe that the action programme, the five-year programme which the Commission is presenting for discussion at the moment, is of huge importance. It obviously comprises the traditional themes, which is quite normal because, although the world moves on, these themes are still on the agenda. Admittedly, there are new emphases but, at the end of the day, they are the same recurring themes. The first theme I would like to mention is the world of employment and the new emphases which should, in my view, be applied. These include the new technologies and the fact that there are too few women in this sector, if any. This was also said a moment ago. Other matters to be emphasised are the division between work and family, as is provided for in the employment guidelines, and equal pay for equal work, something which I find the Commission is not emphasising enough and which is receiving insufficient attention. There is still a chasm between men and women in terms of wages. Another theme is decision making. The Commission has made efforts, as has Europe, but mainly in the political sphere. I think that efforts should also be made with regard to both sides of industry. Far more attention should be paid to them since they manage and control a large part of social life. On the theme of violence, too little attention is being paid to violence within the family, in my opinion. Attention is being paid to violence in the work sphere, and so forth, but not so much within the family. In my view, more attention should be paid to the media, which is such a determining factor in social life. Women are very much absent in the media. As for women’s rights and human rights, I hope that some progress can be made at the Intergovernmental Conference. Finally, I already said that Europe is expected to play a pioneering role. I would mention two areas, in particular. Firstly, if we grant development aid or if we have contacts with third countries, we should not just prescribe conditions with regard to the economic position of women. We are now familiar with this. We know that in many developing countries, the economy is carried by women, and we support this. This much we now know. What we do not emphasise enough in our contacts with third countries is that human rights should be respected with regard to women, too. What is happening in Afghanistan is unjustifiable. It is unjustifiable that, in a number of countries, female circumcision is still practised and that we maintain the best relations with these countries as a matter of course. Secondly, with regard to the Union’s enlargement to include the former Eastern Bloc countries, it will be vital that the screening report to be compiled by the Commission should give a sound account of what is happening there, because there are signs of regress instead of progress in this regard.

Political group: PPE-DE