Madam President, I shall speak for two minutes on behalf of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, and for the other two minutes on behalf of the group that I represent within the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs on the EQUAL report. The EQUAL Community initiative, whose objective is to promote new practices and combat all forms of discrimination and inequality, has been discussed in detail by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities with regard to discrimination against women. This is because discrimination based on sex is structural and horizontal, and – given the fact that women are not a minority but represent more than half of the world population – the Committee on Women’s Rights is of the opinion that it might have been a mistake to include discrimination based on sex with all the other forms of discrimination. We believe that it should have been incorporated in a special Chapter of the Treaty devoted to Equal Opportunity between women and men. This would have been a logical consequence of the new central role given to equality between women and men in the Treaty. Having said that, we nevertheless welcome the Commission’s proposals and feel that equality between women and men is to be promoted as an integral part of all four pillars of the employment strategy and thematic fields, and that equality should also be targeted specifically in a separate pillar. With regard to the EQUAL proposals, in the Community Initiative Programmes, there should be a clear distinction between priority actions aimed at combating gender discrimination and actions aimed at combating other kinds of discrimination. A gender-mainstreaming approach must be adopted by Member States, and they therefore need to put the emphasis on projects that not only aim to promote the fight against gender discrimination, but also facilitate reconciliation of work and family life. In more general terms, there was a major debate in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs on Mrs Stenzel’s report because the approach proposed by Mrs Stenzel and the one proposed by my group were very different. Our assessment of the Commission’s proposal is very favourable, although we are trying – because the aim is for the European Parliament to express an opinion which will then have an influence on the Commission and Council’s assessments – to find solutions that might lead to a convergence of opinions, so that the report will be adopted by a broad majority. Some issues were more sensitive than others: partnerships, for example, on which we need to reach a compromise in order to assert and support the Commission proposal. At the same time, we nevertheless need to ask the Commission for a certain amount of flexibility so that we can subsequently include other topics. Technical assistance and simplification must also be included among the fundamental points. From a political point of view, the most sensitive issue was asylum-seekers. I would like to spend a few moments on this since we feel that the Commission’s proposal is considerate and positive. We have put a lot of time into coming up with a definition of ‘asylum-seeker’ because it is difficult from a legal point of view, but I think that we have now achieved a compromise with the rapporteur – at least I hope we have – and the silence on the report on asylum-seekers, which Parliament is going to put to the vote must be seen as Parliament supporting the Commission’s position. We would never have accepted Parliament backing down – this is our position – from what the Commission has already proposed, and I am keen to stress this. I agree with the rapporteur that we should hold the vote on Wednesday, as she proposed, to allow more time to seek out every possible solution in order to hopefully make Parliament’s report more progressive, and not more backward-looking, than the Commission proposal.

Political group: PSE