Ms Rósa Björk Brynjólfsdóttir, member of the Selection Panel of the Vigdís Prize for Women’s Empowerment, Office of the Prime Minister of Iceland Thank you so much for your good questions. I just want to, if I may, just short remarks from several of you. Our most powerful tool in Iceland - just to share the experience that we have - is regarding the working market is shared parental leave and then prolonging the parental leave. And we have had also the experience of free or low-cost day care, public day care, high quality public day care, and that we need to educate people and persons within the day care sector to be able to provide high quality, free or low-cost day care. And believe me, we have had many committees and delegation from abroad to come to Iceland to do research on the parental leave, the shared parental leave, the experience and what measures we have done to do so. This has been one of the most powerful tools that we have experienced in Iceland. So, yes, we can wait for another hundred years that the free market will realise that they have to give women more the same salaries and the same benefits. But the official governments and the municipal must come in and step in and provide day care and fight for parental leave. I just also want to say to my Irish friend here from the Caucus of Women in Ireland. The Irish public show a remarkable victory, I would say, when the Irish people voted against or to legalise abortion a few years ago. That was a remarkable campaign and a turnover of many decades of a very difficult and hard story. So, this can be done. You are thinking about the pay gap. Believe me, we in Iceland, we had decades of mapping and researching and reports on the pay gap between genders. And when we peel everything away, we have in general recent report shows us we have 12% pay gap difference between men and women who is not explained by any other things than their gender. Not the length of the work, not the type of the work we have done all this work and this is the only explanation left. 12%. So, women are paid 12% less than men because they are women. So, this is something that you have to tackle, my dear friends. And also, I want to say to my Italian friend here, I have been watching very closely the debate in Italy. And yes, you have the first Prime Minister who is a woman in Italy now, but in the middle of the 16-days awareness project of fighting and raising awareness of gender-based violence you have these terrible cases of gender-based violence and murder, feminicides in Italy. We have that in France, we have that in Iceland and Nordic countries as well. Equality is never given. You have to fight for it, you have to demand it. As with other human rights. The ones who are in power, they will never give human rights or equality. The ones who are marginalised, they have to fight for it. And when it comes to the judge system or a jurisdictional system, the punishment for rape and gender-based violence must be more severe. We have to send clear messages out there that gender-based violence will not be tolerated. We will not agree upon gender-based violence and we have to educate our young boys and then that is where the man has to step in. You have to educate young boys not to use gender-based violence against women. And it is not out of the blue that one of the most powerful slogan for fighting against gender-based violence is “believe the victims”. So, you have to believe the victims.

Ms Mariia Mezentseva, Chairperson of the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination of the Parliamentary Assembly Thank you very much, dear Rósa, that was a very powerful statement. And last but not least, dear President, I will give the floor to you for final remarks and then I will thank two more people in this hall and then I can already feel the smell of food. We will go for lunch.

Mr Tiny Kox, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Thank you very much, dear Mariia, thank you very much all. Let me make five short answers to issues that you have put on the table. First, Simon refers to the fact that misery is unequally divided. Women are far more often the victim of misery than men. We have half of humanity is female, but far more than half of all the misery is first delivered at the doorstep of women. And that means that when it was quoted that if we want to save the world, women have to do it, that is not a fancy idea, it is reality. If women don't do it, it will not happen. So, it is an obligation. Secondly, Simon and also Iulian, they asked more or less what we are doing ourselves in the Assembly, in the Council of Europe. Yes. The good thing is that I think we are managing quite well. Despina and our staff, they check and also the Equality Committee whether we deliver or whether we only have good ideas. There are positive developments and there are quite a lot not so positive developments. We have now seen a lot of positive developments, I think, in our staff, in the Secretariat, where we see ever more women playing an important role. But we still see - Iulian mentioned that - that although we have such nice proposals, in fact it is too many men and too few women. I think this should be indeed the discussion in our Organisation. And also, we have to look carefully to how do we behave. Rósa reminded me we had the MeToo report in 2017. Sometimes we really do ugly things, and we should be held accountable for this. There should be a follow up, I think, of the decisions that we took. Then we had a “Not in my Parliament” campaign, which was a good initiative, but this too needs to be followed up. You cannot do that once. You have to do it on a regular basis, otherwise it will not work. With regard to the so important issue of

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