Euromed Feminist Initiative urges measures towards improving the status of gender equality in the Euro-Med region.

Euromed Feminist Initiative IFE-EFI welcomes the new law amendments and recommendations in Morocco, Palestine and Jordan and expresses its full solidarity with women’s rights, civil society and human rights organizations and movements and their continuous efforts to attain equal rights for women and to remove gender discrimination in law. The Gender Regional Platform, with policy recommendations to the decision makers that was developed during a one year process in the frame of the project “Gender Regional Platform” funded by the European Union and gathered over 1000 representatives from women’s rights CSOs, CBOs, gender experts, academics and researchers with decision makers and legislators, identified four priority areas of work among which ending discrimination and violence against women. Consequently, IFE-EFI appreciates the recent amendments as important steps to improve women’s rights status in the region and hope that these amendments will lead to annulling all discriminative articles in national legislations existing mainly in the Personal Status Laws and Penal Codes, such as the concept of guardianship in law, inheritance law and the current legal exceptions in the child marriage laws in Morocco, Palestine and Jordan, as well as legislation that exempts the rapist from sanctions if he marries his victim in Palestine. 

The  Gender Regional Platform underlines the necessity to strengthen the connection between legislations and actual implementation with follow up mechanisms.  Legislation is needed to challenge and change the deeply rooted gender-based discrimination against women but it must be translated in concrete actions. The Declaration of the Euro-Med Women’s Rights Civil Society Conference, which was handed to the Ministers in the Euro-Med Region during their 4th UfM Ministerial Meeting on women’s rights on 27th November 2017 in Cairo, urges and proposes concrete and tangible measures towards improving the status of gender equality in the Euro-Med region. 

http://www.efi-ife.org/sites/default/files/TOWARDS%20GENDER%20EQUALITY.pdf