Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-144"
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"en.20041201.14.3-144"2
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"Mr President, on World AIDS Day, I would like to begin, as other Members have done, by alerting the institutions to the most dramatic aspect of this tragedy: its spread amongst women and girls. By doing so, as well as acting in accordance with my personal political commitment to women, I am stressing the enormity of the problem in human terms, in terms of development and in terms of the future of the world.
Half of the 40 million people infected with the virus are women and girls, and this proportion is increasing in almost every region, reaching 57% in Sub-Saharan Africa. With regard to the industrialised world, I will give just one example: Hispanic and African-American women make up a quarter of the women in the United States and account for 80% of AIDS cases.
The feminisation of AIDS is one further form, the ultimate form, of violence against women, and we have not provided them with the resources to defend themselves against the disease, the fundamental resources, such as sexual education, protection of reproductive health rights or information on measures to prevent infection. The social norms which keep young women and girls ignorant about sexuality and do not criminalise sexual violence inside and outside marriage increase the danger of the infection spreading.
The Socialist Group would like to congratulate the Commission on treating education as a priority in its political framework for combating diseases relating to poverty.
I would like secondly, Mr President, to express a complaint. I would like to say that the Catholic hierarchy is guilty of negligence in the fight against AIDS. Today the Vatican is marking World AIDS Day by condemning the disease as a spiritual illness, which it calls ‘moral immunodeficiency syndrome’, which demonstrates the ethical and technical shortcomings of the Catholic Church. Via the Secretary of the Spanish Episcopal Conference – Spain being the European country in which the number of infections is increasing most – the Catholic Church intends to politically undermine the world campaign for combating AIDS by warning that contraceptives are unsafe and advocating chastity and fidelity as a method of prevention.
That statement would not warrant any further comment were it not for the fact that AIDS is killing millions of people, including children; if sexual violence, which leaves no chance of chastity, were not a daily reality in many African and Asian societies; if there were not 15 million orphaned children; if it were not an attack on the sexual and reproductive freedom of men; if it were not, therefore, an attack on human rights and a veritable genocide.
We are talking about life or death; we do not know whether the Episcopal Conference has understood this."@en1
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