Mr President, more than a year has passed since we gave this proposal to amend the 1976 directive its first reading, a proposal which was referred to the European Parliament in July 2000; this means that it has taken us practically two years to reach an agreement with the Council and the Commission on amending a directive that Parliament has been discussing since as early as 1996, when we received the first proposal to amend the directive. We had rejected that proposal on the basis of my report, which was debated on 8 March 1999, and had asked the Commission to table a more robust text. For once, it is neither the Commission nor the Council that are responsible for this deplorable delay. The rapporteur lost us a lot of time, firstly by tabling her report late and secondly by overloading it with proposals that had no sound legal foundation, some of which related to other directives. At conciliation we were able to discard these counterproductive amendments that had been adopted at first and second reading against my group’s wishes. If people had listened to us then, women would already have been benefiting from the new directive for at least a year now, and it does represent a genuine improvement on the text that has been in force since 1976, a text which nevertheless has had the great merit of making progress in particular on equal treatment for men and women in the workplace. I am pleased to note that, thanks to the Treaty of Amsterdam, the positive measures have been safeguarded: the right of women to return to the same job or an equivalent post after maternity leave is essential; the right of men to the same job guarantee after a period of paternity leave is recognised, if such leave exists in the Member State of which they are nationals, and this is also the case after adoption leave, if it exists in a Member State. The definitions of sexual harassment, like those of direct and indirect discrimination, are useful and I hope that they will prove to be relatively robust, so as not to cause unnecessary litigation. I should like to distance myself from Paragraph 9 of Mrs Hautala’s report, because it states that the delegation regrets that the Council was unwilling to prohibit a general exclusion of representatives of one sex from a particular professional activity or professional training. This general prohibition is enshrined in the existing directive, the article in question, Article 2 Paragraph 1, being maintained. It would therefore serve no purpose to repeat it. I am all the more pleased with the outcome of the conciliation because finally – as I have said – my group’s responsible and reasonable position has prevailed, thanks also to the Council and the Commission, who have done a great deal to talk round some over-excited members of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, who had not understood that the best is often the enemy of the good. If Parliament wishes to be taken seriously as a co-legislator then it must not confuse a legal text with a resolution, in which anyone can indulge in wishful thinking and reveal all of their wildest dreams. Above all, we must not forget that a legal text has to have a sound legal base and be possible to implement. Thank you.

Political group: PPE-DE