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Laura Onofri, Feminist activist and President of SeNonOraQuando? – Turin
The proposed European directive on violence against women and domestic violence, which resulted from the trilogue held on February 6, has sparked strong criticism from women’s and feminist organizations that combat gender-based violence and work on prevention. This trilogue was an informal tripartite negotiation between representatives of the European Parliament, the European Commission (EC), and the Council of the European Union (the latter composed of the ministers of the member states).
The EC has been working on this directive since March 2022, with the aim of identifying the tools necessary to prevent and combat rape, femicide, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, sexual harassment—including in the workplace—and online violence.
The objective of the directive proposed by the European Commission, which is led by a woman, Ursula von der Leyen, was to provide the European Union (EU) with legislation aimed at preventing and combating these serious forms of discrimination against women, drawing inspiration from the principles of the Istanbul Convention, which entered into force in the EU on October 1, 2023. Despite the fact that many countries have not yet ratified it and that some, such as Turkey, have withdrawn from the Convention.
Women workers and activists, anti-violence centers, unions, and all those who care about protecting women and fighting against all forms of violence have been disappointed, and their expectations have not been met.
Indeed, the proposed directive that resulted from the trilogue—the informal interinstitutional negotiation between the European Parliament, the EC, and the Council of the EU which results in a provisional agreement that must then be adopted through formal procedures—ended up being very impoverished in comparison to that voted by the European Parliament’s Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) with 71 votes in favor out of 83.
To start, Article 5 of the initial draft of the directive—the one that was to define rape as sexual intercourse without consent, was removed.
The reason this fundamental principle was eliminated is that the EU would have no competence to legislate in this matter. But many jurists believe that rape is attributable to sexual exploitation, which is a crime for which the EU can devise policy, as explained by judge Maria Grazia Giammarinaro who was—from 2010 until 2014—the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Special Representative and Coordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings.
In an article published in the Italian newspaper Domani, Giammarinaro writes, “Exploitation is no longer understood only as an unfair advantage (of an economic nature, etc.) deriving from the performance of others, be it sexual, work-related, or of any other type, and which ends up including the instrumental use of the person, for the pursuit of the objective desired by the person who instrumentalizes the victim despite the will of the latter.”
The text of the directive originally proposed by the European Commission stated, “In many Member States, the condition of rape remains the use of force, threat, or coercion. In others, however, the simple condition that the victim has not consented to the sexual act is sufficient. This approach is the only one that guarantees complete protection of the sexual integrity of the victim. It is therefore necessary to ensure an equal level of protection throughout the Union by specifying the defining elements of the crime of the rape of a woman.” After this interinstitutional agreement, it is no longer the case.
Article 4, which provided for the inclusion of the definition of sexual harassment in the world of work, was also removed.
This is a very serious decision because we know that violence and harassment in the workplace constitute a human rights violation and that violence and harassment are a threat to equal opportunities and are incompatible with work based on the dignity of the human being, as stipulated in the 2019 ILO Convention.
Another major step backwards is that the onus of proof now devolves on the victim when it comes to different forms of online violence, such as online sexual harassment, cyberbullying, or the non-consensual distribution of audiovisual material with sexually explicit content. These changes were introduced by the Council of the EU during the last phase of the negotiations.
The stands taken against certain fundamental articles of the directive by countries such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, but also France and Germany, conditioned the agreement and thus profoundly devalued the directive.
Many women activists demonstrated and protested across Europe in an attempt to convince their countries’ governments to adopt clearer positions that are more protective of women, but they failed to make any change in the governments’ positions, and these were in fact able to remove certain key passages from the proposal.
In Italy, the NGO Differenza Donna launched a petition demanding that the text approved by the European Parliament’s FEMM Committee be kept. The petition obtained more than 90,000 signatures in just a few days.
Pina Picierno, Vice President of the European Parliament and Italian rapporteur for the directive, worked hard to defend the original text. According to her, “Certain national interests rooted in a reactionary, retrograde culture have prevailed. It is regrettable that Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, head of government, was not able to effectively exercise its negotiation abilities as it has often boasted of doing for other issues.”
In protest, Picierno did not participate in the FEMM Committee’s vote on the finalized text on February 6 and declared that “this directive is little more than a title.”
Once adopted, European directives must be transposed by member states within three years by adapting national legislation to the European text. The goal of the directive was that violence against women would be treated in a consistent manner in the laws and policies of the member states, transposing the main principles of the Istanbul Convention.
To this end, the directive had introduced measures aimed at standardizing the definition of crimes and offenses punishable by law, the protection of victims and access to justice, assistance to victims and their compensation, the improvement of data collection, and prevention, coordination, and cooperation within the EU.
But with the many articles removed from the initial proposal, achieving this goal has been pushed farther into the future. Once again, women’s bodies have been shamefully compromised.
There is no doubt that national interests and electoral alliances in view of the upcoming European elections influenced and served the negotiation process. Now that this decision has been made, it seems clear that violence against women is not a priority issue of which states and governments have understood the scale or origins, let alone the effective instruments needed to combat it.
Even in Europe, patriarchy has profoundly impacted the choices governments make, and what could have been a major turning point in the fight against violence against women is now just a weak measure with no real effectiveness to speak of.
The European Parliament will have to approve the agreement reached during the negotiations next April. The margins for improving the directive are limited, but European women’s organizations will continue to exert pressure, seek alliances, and make more information available regarding this issue which may only seem “technical,” far removed from our daily concerns, but which will potentially have a very negative impact on the lives of millions of women and girls.
