‘Jordan to consider recommendations on policies towards gender equality’

BEIRUT — The government said on Tuesday it will study the policy recommendations issued by participants in a two-day Euro-Med women’s rights conference, and will consider the application of some of them.

Speaking to The Jordan Times on the second and final day of the conference, Minister of Political and Parliamentary Affairs and Minister of State Musa Maaytah said the government will examine the outcomes “once they are submitted to it”.

“We will surely consider the recommendations and adopt or apply the ones that benefit women and society as a whole,” Maaytah said.

Minister of Social Development Wajih Azaizeh — who also participated in the conference, titled “From the Union for Mediterranean (UfM) Ministerial Conclusions to Gender Equality Policy Making in the Euro-Med Region”, stressed the need to have strong cooperation between the government and civil society.

“We should all work on gender equality tools and mechanisms to implement the outcomes of the policy recommendations once they are presented to the respective governments,” Azaizeh told the gathering at the conclusion of the conference.

The conference, organised in Beirut by the Euro-Med Feminist Initiative (EFI) and supported by the EU, featured over 100 participants from 22 countries in the region representing civil society, state actors and EU officials, in addition to lawmakers and media professionals, according to the EFI.

It was held to discuss and finalise the policy recommendations as well as create favourable conditions for monitoring the implementation of the Ministerial Conclusions in several areas related to discrimination against women, education and gender stereotyping.

In their recommendations, the participants called for drafting policies that would ensure the full implementation of international conventions and legislation on human rights to better safeguard women’s rights in their respective countries.

They also called for drafting policies that would tackle the gender gap in the labour market and ensure gender equality in the public and private sectors, stressing the need to empower the work of civil society organisations by lifting the restrictions imposed on them.

The gathering urged an end to violence against women by amending laws that discriminates against them and improving services provided to victims of violence.

Turning to education, the participants agreed that there is an urgent need to work on school textbooks to amend the stereotypical image of women, train and rehabilitate teachers and create a monitoring system to observe the work of teachers after their training is completed.

Earlier in the day, Jerash Deputy Wafaa Bani Mustafa spoke about the status of women in Jordan, including several laws that still need to be addressed or amended.

“Our Constitution still discriminates against women because it does not clearly call for gender equality or incriminate gender inequality,” Bani Mustafa said at the conference.

She added that female deputies have established the Women’s Parliamentarian Coalition that “worked with the government and women’s groups to amend or address many controversial issues and laws”.

“Women’s issues are always at the bottom of the agenda. Today, we are working hard as a female bloc in Parliament to push women’s issues forward,” Bani Mustafa added.

The policy recommendations will be presented to all the relevant ministries of the Euro-Med region, as well as the UfM Ministerial Process (UMMP) on strengthening the role of women in the region and improving gender equality, according to Boriana Jönsson, the executive director of the EFI.

“We are hopeful that our policy recommendations will be adopted by the EU ministers and the UMMP in order to encourage governments in the region to adopt [them] in [their] own policies,” Jönsson told The Jordan Times.

The main aim of the meeting was to identify ways to translate the Paris Ministerial Conclusion into action and how to make next year’s meeting focus on concrete measures to push gender equality forward and to be adopted in countries of the region.