Spain calls for Europe-wide protection for battered women

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/08/spain-europe-protection-battered-women

Spain launched a campaign for a Europe-wide system of restraint orders aimed at curbing violence against women, calling for crime statistics to be reconfigured to highlight gender violence and for EU legislation offering protection to battered women across national borders.

Opening Madrid's six-month rotating presidency of the EU and seeking to build on its progressive governance agenda, Alfredo Rubalcaba, the interior minister, called for a new approach to the problem, for special police units dealing with battered women, and for special treatment of the issues by European judiciaries.

In Brussels yesterday Spanish officials, supported by officials from 11 of the 27 EU member states, initiated draft legislation on a European protection order which would, if it became law, mean that a woman protected from an abusive and violent male by a police restraint order in any EU country would enjoy the same protection across all member states. The initiative is supported by countries from Bulgaria to Finland. The list of backers includes France and Italy, though so far neither Britain nor Germany.

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If the campaign to legislate for battered women fails, there are moves afoot aimed at establishing an "observatory" for gathering and monitoring sexual violence across the EU, perhaps building on the work of a European human rights agency based in Vienna.

Officials pointed out that if a woman is murdered by her husband, in most systems the crime will be catalogued under the murder statistics and will not surface in the gender violence ledgers.

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