In the lead up to International Women’s Day, Amnesty International and several civil society organisations want to remind the EU institutions that corporate accountability is a women’s rights issue, and EU legislation, including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), needs to reflect this.
15 organisations united under the European Coalition on Sex Workers’ Rights and Inclusion and the 170 organisations signatories call on all Members of the European Parliament to support sex workers’ rights and their inclusion and to reject any attempts to criminalise sex work as a part of the Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence Report 2022/0066(COD) that is currently being negotiated in the European Parliament.
As the Swedish government prepares to assume the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), Amnesty International calls on you to ensure that human rights are at the forefront of the Swedish presidency’s mandate. This presidency comes at a time of increased challenges in Europe, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its implications for the international human rights system, backsliding on the rule of law, the growing anti-gender movement and a recrudescence of the disembarkation crisis, putting further in danger the lives of people crossing the Mediterranean.
An activist who faces a potential fine after speaking about abortion rights and women’s rights at a United Nations forum, should have the defamation charge against her dropped, Amnesty International said ahead of the organization’s participation in an event on sexual and reproductive rights in Andorra.
Together we call on the European Union to adopt a forward-thinking and truly inclusive approach to gender-based violence – that leaves no one behind and strives to achieve real change in the lives of all people, without discrimination. To meaningfully address gender-based violence in the European Union, we must promote inclusion, safety, protection, well-being and effective remedies for those most at risk.
European governments should urgently guarantee safe and timely access to abortion care for women and girls in the region during the COVID-19 pandemic, 100 nongovernmental organizations said today.
Following a vote today rejecting a that would have forced women seeking an abortion to view an ultrasound scan of the embryo or foetus, Amnesty’s Senior Campaigner on Women’s Rights, Monica Costa Riba, said:
The severe crackdown on civil society in Saudi Arabia, especially since 2011 and more acutely since May 2018, has not been matched by a clear or resolute EU strategy to ensure the support and protection of HRDs. The policies of the EU and its member states have instead been characterized by restraint and a lack of creativity to overcome the obstacles associated with supporting HRDs in an already severely restricted environment. While some positive practices have been adopted in the past four years, these have often failed to improve the situation of individual HRDs due to a lack of ownership and follow up on the part of the EU and its member states.
Following the publication today of a new Council of Europe report which finds that Finland is failing survivors of rape, Amnesty International’s women’s rights researcher in Europe, Anna Blus said:
European governments are complicit in the systematic,unlawful and frequently violent push backs and collective expulsions of thousands of asylum seekers to squalid and unsafe refugee camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Amnesty International in a report published today.
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Women in Poland are strong and determined and we will defeat this threat. But we should not have to fight our own members of parliament to get our basic rights.