For years, women world-wide have been fighting for their rights and to have equality with their male counterparts. While some nations have progressed much more rapidly for the equality of women, other nations are still struggling to give women the rights and freedom that men have.

According to the dailybeast.com, “in the last year, Denmark elected a female prime minister, Brazil elected a female president and a female took the helm of the International Monetary Fund. In the last decade, Ethiopia passed the most progressive abortion laws in Africa to combat unsafe abortion rates and Mali passed a law that says women are not required to obey their husbands.

It seems the state of women’s rights and freedoms worldwide are perhaps better than ever before. But, large and sobering discrepancies remain. Women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, are subject to genital mutilation in Mali and are killed for honor in Pakistan.”

Another country, which is considered one of the worst to live in for women, is Turkey. Their rights are extremely limited. But for Turkish women, things might start looking up for those who have succumbed to inequality for decades. According to the United Press International (UPI), “the European Parliament (EP) recently adopted a report urging Turkey to follow up on its recent work toward securing gender equality and women’s rights.”

The report, written by Socialists & Democrats Member of European Parliament Emine Bozkurt, lays out a series of goals for Ankara, Turkey’s capitol, to accomplish by 2020 in raising the status of women to fully equal members of Turkish society as Brussels and Ankara seek to breathe life into the country’s stalled European Union (EU) accession bid.

Bozkurt, the EP’s rapporteur on women’s rights in Turkey, discussed the passage of the report and named it, “A 2020 Perspective for Women in Turkey” which is meant to ensure that the European Commission keeps the issue of women’s rights and domestic violence in the forefront of its efforts to promote a “positive agenda.” Also, the report “stresses that there can be no democracy without women and that women should be treated as individuals rather than just as family members or as mothers.”

While ministries are working toward gender equality in Turkey, many problems remain.

According to the report, Turkey’s new law against domestic violence “lacks a mechanism which immediately removes [alleged perpetrators] from the vicinity of the woman who has been subjected to violence.” Stefan Fule, the European Commissioner for Enlargement, believes Turkey still has a long way to go and that several inequalities still need to be addressed.

Fule says, “On women’s rights, every step needs to be taken to implement the recent law on violence against women, also, to improve the situation on the ground of women in Turkey as regards education, employment and political representation.”

Image Courtesy of  homeros / Shutterstock.com

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