Mr President, following on from the famous ruling by the European Court of Justice on 17 October 1975, it will soon be six years since we started to discuss the amendment of the 1976 Directive on equality as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion, and working conditions. The Commission believed that it was doing the right thing by submitting a proposal to us in 1996 to amend that directive – a directive which at least had the great advantage of encouraging, in practical terms, equality between men and women in the workplace, in the areas concerned. The amendment proposed in 1976 was intended solely to safeguard positive actions, which were put at risk by the 1975 judgement. As the rapporteur on that proposal, which failed to reassure me, I believed I was doing the right thing, this time, in waiting for another ruling by the Court of Justice in a similar case, the Marshall case. This ruling was issued in November 1997 and, this time, was not in favour of Mr Marshall, who felt that he was being discriminated against when a positive action was taken in favour of a female colleague. We looked at certain aspects again, to determine whether or not positive actions are, in fact, discriminatory, because there had been this U-turn on the part of the Court. Even so, on the basis of the truism that we are all in the hands of God, whether at sea or in court, Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities was, at the time, willing to support me in asking the Commission to withdraw its proposal, which was considered to be inadequate, particularly because the Treaty of Amsterdam had since been signed. On 8 March 1999, therefore, we asked the Commission, here in Parliament, to withdraw its proposal and to submit to us a new one based on the ratified Treaty of Amsterdam. We explained this request, emphasising that under Articles 2, 3 and 141 of the Treaty of Amsterdam the right to equality between men and women is a fundamental right of a democratic society, which requires equality to be achieved by a series of real steps towards positive action. Our message was clear: the proposed directive should contain an imperative legal mandate to take positive measures whenever they are necessary in order to achieve equality between men and women and to remedy the under-representation of women in the decision-making process. The Commission braced itself for the task. It is already coming up to a year since it submitted a proposal to us to amend the 1976 Directive. Personally, I should have preferred the Commission to present us with an entirely new version, rather than piecemeal amendments here and there, because the Commission’s text gave rise to almost 200 amendments by the rapporteur and the various committees involved, and these were often drawn up without reference to the basic text, and with the intention, albeit worthy, of trying in that directive to reinvent the entire policy on equality in a number of other fields covered by other directives. One might rightly regard these other directives as being in need of improvement, but this amendment has nothing to do with those directives. This did not make my task, as the previous rapporteur and as the notional rapporteur, for my group this time, any easier, because unfortunately I was not prepared to forget the message I referred to earlier in the context of my 1999 report. Personally, I take the view that the text proposed by the Committee on Women’s Rights has taken too much on board, and in some places, it is not very stable, in legal terms; it does not demonstrate the responsible attitude which the Council and the Commission are entitled to expect from their co-legislator, namely Parliament. I have tried to make people see reason, but I have been only partially successful. In particular I regret those amendments, which disregard Article 141 of the Treaty. I regret the amendments that introduce so-called definitions. I regret the muddle over maternity protection, and the confusion between maternity leave for women and parental... (The President cut the speaker off)

Political group: PPE-DE