Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-13-Speech-1-067"
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"en.20060313.17.1-067"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I speak today as chairman of this Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. I also speak as a woman supportive of women forced into prostitution.
Finally, I call on you all to support the impressive work done by the Council of Europe, which launched the first ‘agreement on the fight against trafficking in human beings’ in Warsaw on 16 May 2005: to date, only 11 of our Member States have signed this agreement. None of them has ratified it yet.
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, all the legal instruments and every possible political measure must be applied in order to prevent women from being commodities whose only purpose is to act as sex workers, and this not only in Berlin but also throughout the world.
It is unacceptable that a woman should be forced into prostitution; it is unacceptable that she should sell her body. In actual fact, ladies and gentlemen, the news has never been so sad. In the German capital, on the outskirts of the Olympic stadium, a 3 000 square metre ‘megabrothel’ has just opened its doors to welcome 650 clients at any one time. Over 40 000 poor young women will be ‘imported’ from the East in order to satisfy the post-match requirements of the spectators of the World Cup football tournament.
The fight against trafficking in women and the fight against forced prostitution are a priority for female political representatives too, and are undoubtedly so for Angela Merkel. Let us call on her to add her voice to ours.
As political representatives from all sides, we have powerful tools available to us. Let us reject this instance of decadence and let us make ourselves heard not only here, in the European Parliament, but also in our Member States, at the Council of Europe and in all the fora in which we can make our voices heard. Let us make ourselves heard loud and clear. This is not the first time that the various United Nations bodies, the Council of Europe and the EU institutions have used sport as a vehicle for sending out a message of good citizenship and progress.
Those in power would have us believe that this state of affairs is an unfortunate coincidence. However, the lawyer working for the group that built this ‘pleasure palace’ has stated that ‘football and sex go hand in hand’. How is it that, in football’s highest governing bodies, nobody seems deeply shocked by this?
It would seem that encouraging young men to take part in brutish acts orchestrated against young women does not shock anyone and that the failure to prevent these acts and to protect the victims against this organised degeneracy is not a source of outrage. The FIFA President, Joseph Blatter, wrote to the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality saying that his organisation was not responsible for what took place outside football grounds. Neither UEFA nor the heroes of the national teams have said a word.
UEFA has set itself the task of promoting football in Europe, in a spirit of peace and without any form of discrimination. The footballing world is a man’s world: the reality inside the grounds shows this. It is men who demand the services of prostitutes and who abuse women. That is why I am addressing men too – my male fellow Members and all those men in positions of power.
To conclude, ladies and gentlemen, I would point out that we can already count on the public support of men in order to combat trafficking in women and forced prostitution.
I am grateful to our colleague, Mr Heaton-Harris, who is himself a professional soccer referee, for having made the Sports Intergroup a mouthpiece for speaking out against trafficking in women and forced prostitution. I am grateful to our colleague, Mr Coveney who, as a Member of this Chamber, oversees the work of ‘businessmen against trafficking in women’ and the ‘Stop the Traffic’ campaign."@en1
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