Statement from Hellen Felter, Board Member of the EWL, for the Launching of the European Campaign on Women Asylumseekers

I am speaking to you here today on behalf of the EWL, the largest coalition of women’s organisations in the EU, to demand the right to asylum for women as individuals in their own right.

At a time when most EU Member States are experiencing an increase in the numbers of women and men seeking asylum we welcome the fact that the European Commission has initiated a debate about common standards and procedures in relation to asylum.

We are here today to join this debate and our campaign " Persecution is Not Gender Blind" is our first step in opening a dialogue with the EU institutions and with women and men across Europe who want to support a just and gender sensitive asylum policy. Our message is a simple one and that is that women are asylum seekers too and that women have the right to seek asylum in their own right.

The European Women’s Lobby believes that women's experience of persecution, sexual violence and other forms of human rights violations constitute legitimate grounds for claiming asylum. We also believe that the EU has a duty to take a lead in ensuring that the human rights of women are secured in a European Policy on Asylum.

For far too long, tradition and culture have been used to justify and excuse practices which have shattered the integrity of women and girls. FGM is, in some countries, carried out on newly born infant girls in their first days of life. In some countries women are stoned to death for presumed adultery; communities put pressure to "save the honour" of the family by killing the guilty members, the less valued ones, i.e. the women.

For some women sexual violence is a daily occurrence which goes untold; testimonies of women in times of conflict and war have provided sufficient evidence that rape is a weapon of war. We must stop making excuses and name these acts for what they are: torture and persecution against women.

Women's experience of persecution differs to that of men. While media and press portray the distress, the anxiety, the fear and the human costs of war and displacement through the images of women and their double responsibility of caring and protection the children, policy makers have been slow to recognise that women are also asylum seekers, candidates for refugee status in their own right.

We must create an environment in which women feel safe to seek asylum. Often accompanied by children of all ages who are feeling as much fear, insecurity, anxiety as she does, not knowing what the future will hold, how can anyone expect a woman to speak freely about her experience of rape or other violations to an official whose prime concern is to verify if she is telling the truth? What if her family and those accompanying her don't know of the rape? What if this official has never heard of "gender persecution"?

Asylum is about the protection of women, men and children faced with persecution and violence in their own countries and the governments of Europe have a duty to extend such protection to legitimate asylum seekers. We, women of Europe, in solidarity with other women of the world, demand that the EU takes the leadership in developing a European Policy on Asylum, in which women asylum seekers, in their own right can find protection and safety in all the EU Member States, for the torture and persecution they experience, simply because they are women.