Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to thank Mrs Pack for her persistent efforts. To start work on a dossier in 1995 or 1996 and to still be working on it today could really be called fighting for a cause. That is my first point and I would like to thank you for having shown such commitment. My second point is that I am a member of two parliamentary committees, namely the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport, and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, both of which have the rather sad or dubious privilege of working long hours on a regular basis. If I may, this evening, I would like to bring together these two concerns and discuss both equal opportunities and sport. This is the purpose of my amendment, which I would like to come back to, as I think that this is a very important point. In its decision, the Commission is, in actual fact, highlighting discrimination alone. Yet, I do not feel that this aspect, which Mrs Pack has also emphasised in a recital, is sufficient. I think that sport, for girls and for women, is a factor which encourages identification and emancipation and that we must, therefore, give it the importance that it deserves. I would remind you that the subject of equal opportunities in sport was highlighted during the Beijing +5 Conference held in New York in June 2000, and that Article 26 of the Helsinki report of September 2000 also mentions this issue. Furthermore, the IOC organised a conference on ‘Women and Sport’ in Paris in the year 2000 and the French Minister for Sports placed the issue of ‘women and sport’ on the agenda back in 1997; the success of this initiative speaks for itself. Thanks to this initiative, the media now gives coverage of sporting competitions for women. I think that we must take all of this on board. I know, Commissioner, that you intend to organise a symposium on ‘women and sport’ in the near future and this is something I welcome. I think that we must stress this point in the report. In the Mediterranean countries, for example, in Iran or in Algeria, women achieve emancipation through sport. Sport is therefore an important factor in emancipation. In France and in other countries of the Union, young immigrants manage to achieve emancipation, perhaps not through the right of vote and citizenship, but through their bodies and sport. Sport is therefore an extremely important social link, which is something the previous speaker pointed out. I would, therefore, like us to stress this point. As a final point, I would like to mention that there is a problem with one of my amendments because the French word mixité has been translated into English as ‘mixed-sex sport’. In actual fact, I did not mean mixed-sex sport; I meant diversity in sport; women’s sport must be encouraged at school and at competition level. I have brought this translation problem to light, but I did not notice it until it was too late, and I hope that Mrs Pack will take this into account. Well, we know that the Olympic Games are approaching. We know that from one Olympic Games to another, the role that women play in sport is increasingly important. I would hope that this role is even more important in Athens than it was in Sydney and I know that I am not the only one who is hoping for this. Education obviously serves as a basis for what may come later, namely performance and competition. I hope, Mrs Reding, that these considerations regarding women and sport will be of interest to you.

Political group: GUE-NGL