In the National Assembly Building, the Fourth National Conference of Women’s Parliamentary Network was held, presenting the results achieved by the WPN Coordinators in the previous year, as well as the goals for the upcoming period and good practice examples in women’s networking.
The Conference was opened by Maja Gojković, Speaker of the Parliament, who congratulated WPN on its results, in particular concerning the networking of women at the local and central levels. She thanked the 500 women municipal assembly members from 116 municipalities from Serbia for their support and their participation in the Conference. Ms. Gojković listed the achievements of WPN, such as the economic empowerment of women, combat against gender-based violence, and introduction of gender-sensitive budgeting which resulted in the allocation of budgetary funds for women’s entrepreneurship and encouragement of women to engage in agriculture.
“We can proudly say that our country has excellent laws that make women and men equal in all areas. The question for me and for every woman MP here is what we should do to implement these laws and to bring more women to those places where the key decisions for the fate of our country are made,” said the Speaker of the Parliament.
“We can say that we are truly equal to men only if these laws are implemented in practice. There has to be more women CEOs of public companies, heads of steering committees, and mayors,” said Ms. Gojković. She stated the fact that the Republic of Serbia was on the fifth place in Europe when it came to the number of women in Parliament, but the real life was a tad different. The unemployment rate of women was dramatically higher than the unemployment rate of men, and men were better paid than women for equal jobs in equal positions.
Marija Obradović said that, for this year’s National Conference, the idea was to gather women who dealt with the legislative power, MPs and municipal assembly members. To do this, WPN was strongly supported by the Speaker of the Parliament Maja Gojković, the Secretary General Svetislava Bulajić, OSCE and ODIHR.
“The MPs and WPN have organised this Conference, but you, municipal assembly members, you are the heart of this story,” said Ms. Obradović. She also highlighted that the fact that out of 250 MPs 85 were women, and out of 20 parliamentary committees 9 were chaired by women, proved that gender equality in Serbia was getting stronger.
Before the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality Brankica Janković took the floor, the participants have applauded to the women MPs from Kosovo and Metohija. Marija Obradović said that the women MPs of the National Assembly would always be there to provide them support. “We will continue to work together, our joint forces will allow us to achieve great success on daily basis,” said Ms. Obradović.
Brankica Janković, Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, said that the knowledge, experience and creativity of women must not be neglected. There were impressive results achieved in past 16 years concerning the equality between men and women, and the increased participation of women
in political and public life. She illustrated this by stating that, in the year 2000, there were only 7% of women in political and public life, whereas today this figure was greatly increased, standing at one third of the total number of representatives. However, she underlined that in spite of all this, the equality issue was still not at the satisfactory level. The Commissioner said that, even though there was a solid legal framework against gender-based discrimination and gender-based violence, the results in practice painted a different picture. This meant that we needed a stronger combat against the patriarchal stereotypes and gender and cultural prejudice. She expressed her hope that the quota system, thanks to which the number of women in politics was increased, would become a matter of the past in the upcoming few years, in order to reach a true equality between men and women in public life. WPN is a good example that, in spite of political differences and different ideologies of women MPs, it was possible to join forces and advocate for common causes, and thus achieving impressive results.
The next speaker was Jan Lueneburg, Head of the Democratisation Department of the OSCE Mission to Serbia. He said that he was very pleased to have the honour to speak before 500 women MPs from 111 assemblies of towns and municipalities. He was proud to say that he participated in the combat against violence and discrimination in the Republic of Serbia since its very beginning, and that he supported gender equality mechanisms.
After the introductory speeches, members of WPN Stefana Miladinović and Tatjana Macura presented the work and the results of WPN for the period between the Third and the Fourth National Conferences, and gave an overview of the goals of the Fourth National Conference. The good practice examples in women’s networking and experiences from OSCE member states were presented by Tiina Kukkamaa-Bah.
During the working session, the participants of the conference were split into three working groups with the following topics: introduction of gender-sensitive budgeting in Serbia – overview of the results achieved and identification of upcoming challenges at all levels; women’s alliances in the combat for a better position for women in the society; and gender mainstreaming in local assemblies.
Fourth National Conference of Women’s Parliamentary Network
