16 | - Número: 010 | 30 de Novembro de 2012

It is a great pleasure to see many known faces amongst you. Many friends with whom common battles were fought in the past and will be fought in the future – I am sure.

2. The reform Let me start by saying that the Gender Equality Commission and the Committee on Equality and NonDiscrimination have many features in common, starting from the fact that they are NEW structures, SET UP AS A RESULT OF A REFORM PROCESS.
In 2011, the Assembly underwent a restructing, with a view to rationalising its activities and acquiring more visibility and relevance. At the time, various ideas were expressed on how to address the issue of gender equality and the fate of the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. According to some proposals, the Committee should have been merged with the Social Affairs Committee, as gender equality is a social issue. According to others, the Committee should have been merged with the Committee on Legal Affairs, because gender equality is a legal issue. I cannot hide that some some members of the Assembly would have liked to suppress the Committee altogether, perhaps because they think that gender equality has already been achieved or because they do not want gender equality EVER to be achieved.
I believe that the final outcome has been the most positive we could have hoped for. It was decided that the mandate of the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men should be expanded. It would be transformed into the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, with a mandate to consider questions of equality and non-discrimination on any ground, the issue of national and other minorities and the issues of racism, xenophobia and intolerance.
Far from what some might have feared, this enlargement of the mandate has not watered down the work of the Assembly in the area of gender equality.

On the contrary, the enlargement has led to an upgrading of the importance and political weight of the Committee, which has increased the attention that the Assembly devotes to gender equality; the enlargement has also increased the capacity of those who deeply believe that gender equality is of crucial importance to reach out to a larger audience, including parliamentarians who have never given great thought to gender equality and women’s rights. In a way, the Committee has stopped preaching the converts, and has started to involve – and perhaps one day TO CONVERT – also parliamentarians who DO NOT BELIEVE that gender equality is an issue; finally, the enlargement of the mandate has enabled us consider gender equality in a broader context.
As we all know, gender is not always the only ground for discrimination; it often interacts with other grounds, such as ethnicity, race, religion, and gives rise to multiple discrimination. In this sense, the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination is better equipped to deal with the multiple discrimination experienced by women in its complexity.

3. Activities of the Committee of relevance for GEC For the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, 2012 has been a year of transition and challenge.
One of the most tricky problems has been how to ensure continuity with the previous work of the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, while diversifying the work programme so as to cover the broad range of issues which now fall under the Committee’s enlarged remit.
To do so, the Committee decided to focus on some priority issues, which included:
violence against women, and women’s empowerment, in particular in politics.

In 2012, therefore, amongst the reports debated by the Assembly and presented by the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination were:

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