Disclosing the hypocrisies between internal and external feminist ambitions around the debate on the EU Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence.
In early February, EU institutions reached a political agreement on new rules to combat violence against women and domestic violence. While the directive is yet to be finally adopted, the agreement follows an almost two year process, starting with a Commission proposal for a Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence set forth in March 2022, and ending with an accord between the European Parliament (EP) and the Council on 6 February. The decision-making process in the preparations of the directive as well as the final political agreement illustrate uncomfortable mismatches between the EU’s internal and external ambitions regarding gender equality and women’s empowerment, particularly the fight against gender-based violence.
EU directives are legislative acts that set out a goal that EU member states must achieve, and as such form part of the EU’s secondary law. If they are adopted through the legislative procedure, directives are binding legal acts. After their adoption they then need to be transposed by EU member states into national law. However, individual member states can determine for themselves how they will reach the goals set out in the EU directive.
As enshrined in the Commission’s Gender Equality Strategy (2020-2025), gender equality and women’s empowerment are core objectives of EU internal and external action. The 2022 proposal for the directive specifically derives from the Commission’s self-set goal to introduce “additional measures to prevent and combat specific forms of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, abuse of women and female genital mutilation (FGM)” that were set out in the Strategy. The Strategy explicitly states that the EU “will do all it can to prevent and combat gender-based violence, support and protect victims of such crimes, and hold perpetrators accountable for their abusive behaviour”. The directive was initially proposed with the aim to “criminalise rape based on lack of consent, female genital mutilation and cyber violence” and to “strengthen victims’ access to justice”. This is the very first time an EU-level law is dedicated to this. The directive is therefore an important step in criminalising violence against women, including domestic violence, both offline and online, throughout the EU. Importantly, it criminalises female genital mutilation (FGM) as well as forced marriage and will help victims, especially in countries where these acts have not yet been criminalised.
So, what is the fuss about? While the EP’s mandate was prepared by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) and approved without objections, the member states had more difficulties in negotiating a Council position. In particular, agreements on whether rape based on the lack of consent should be included as a crime in EU law posed the biggest challenge for member states.
The agreement as it is now falls short of the historic precedent this directive could have set based on the proposal put forward by the Commission and EP. Many progressive proposals from both Commission and EP got lost in the trilogue with the Council. Crucially, the agreement now misses out on criminalising rape based on the lack of consent, i.e. it fails to include the much demanded ‘yes means yes’ regulation, and sets only minimum standards in the fight against gender-based violence, offering no protections for undocumented women.
Against the backdrop of the latest available EU-wide data on gender-based violence in the EU, this downtoning is especially concerning. The data shows that one in two women in the EU has experienced sexual harassment and one in three women in the EU has experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly perpetrated by intimate partners. Cases of domestic violence have sky-rocketed during the covid-19 pandemic, a rise in cyber violence against women has been recorded, and recent cases of femicides in Austria, Italy, and other EU countries sound the alarm bells.
Germany and France were among the member states to block the agreement in Council despite having placed the fight for gender equality and women’s rights at the top of their political agendas: Germany adopted its Feminist Foreign Policy and Feminist Development Policy in 2023 and France recently enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution, adopted an International Strategy for Gender Equality (2018-2022) and is also currently preparing a new strategy on feminist diplomacy. Debates on Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) have gained momentum worldwide and in European capitals, leading to the formation of an FFP+ group consisting of countries (including France and Germany) allegedly willing to push for committing their governments “to take feminist, intersectional and gender-transformative approaches to [their] foreign policies”.
With the EU-internal data on gender-based violence in mind, this externalisation of feminist principles adds a layer of discrepancy to the already existing problems in the adoption and implementation of feminist foreign policies (for more on existing problems read e.g. here, here or here). It invokes the misguided perception that feminist principles only need to be applied externally, to the “other”, and that there is no need to adopt clear feminist approaches to internal policies. Externalising feminist principles while at the same time blocking much-needed progress in the fight against gender-based violence on a European level through toning down the directive to minimum standards only, is a disappointing step back from feminist commitments. The political agreement on the directive not only decreases EU countries’ credibility in adopting feminist principles for external action, but also falls short in effectively combating gender-based violence on the EU’s own territory.
EU countries with feminist foreign policies need to reflect on feminist principles at home first. They need to do better in facing discrepancies between domestic policies on gender equality and women’s empowerment and the high ambitions for including gender equality as a central dimension in the EU’s external action.
When implementing the directive, member states need to go beyond the minimum standards the directive sets out, push for stronger domestic laws and reflect on the externalisation of feminist policies and the mismatches and challenges of credibility this provokes.
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