The European Union formally adopted its very first law on combating violence against women on 7 May.
EDF followed the negotiations closely, advocating for the rights of women with disabilities and condemning the EU institutions for failing to ban forced sterilisation.
The new law requires all EU countries to criminalise female genital mutilation, forced marriage and cyber violence. Cyber violence includes the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyberstalking, cyber harassment and cyber incitement to hatred or violence.
The law also contains measures to prevent violence against women and domestic violence and sets standards for the protection of victims of these crimes.
It refers to forced sterilisation as a form of violence against women but does not require EU countries to ban it. It also does not include a common definition and criminalisation of rape despite the calls of the European Women’s Lobby.
What does the law do for women with disabilities?
The law makes specific reference to women with disabilities and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
It creates requirements for better protection and support of women with disabilities by:
- Creating aggravating circumstances for offences committed against a person with disabilities (article 11 referring to “a person made vulnerable by particular circumstances, such as a situation of dependence or a state of physical, mental, intellectual or sensory disability”).
- Encouraging EU countries to issue guidelines for law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities, including on how to treat victims in a trauma, gender, disability and child-sensitive manner (article 21).
- Requiring EU countries to ensure the availability and accessibility of helplines for victims, including end-users with disabilities by putting in places measures such as support in a language that is easy to understand (article 29).
- Requiring EU countries to ensure that all support services covered by the law have sufficient capacity to accommodate victims with disabilities, considering their specific needs, including personal assistance (article 33).
- Requiring EU countries to adopt preventive measures and information presented in a format accessible to persons with disabilities (article 34).
- Requires EU countries to ensure justice professionals receive general and specialist training that is human-rights based, victim centred and gender, disability and child-sensitive (article 36).
Next steps
The law will be signed and published in the Official Journal of the European Union. After that, EU countries will have three years to transpose it into national law.
We will prepare a transposition toolkit and support members to advocate for an ambitious transposition of the law.
We will continue to call for a ban on forced sterilisation by EU countries.
The Directive will need to be evaluated in 8 years. While we hope that, by then, all EU countries have criminalised forced sterilisation, this revision will be an opportunity to renew our call for stronger EU legislation to protect women with disabilities against violence.