Especially at a time when the European Women's Lobby has other priorities within the framework of funding.

The other matter is a perennial matter which comes up each year: the European women's lobby and finance for women's organisations generally.

For example, the violence monitoring centre in Dublin overseen by the European women's lobby provides excellent data.

Why should we apply it, especially to women's organisations other than the European Women's Lobby?

The European Women's Lobby, through its member organisations, aims:

"Economic progress is no longer sufficient," said Mary McPhail, the secretary general of the European Women's Lobby.

She remains involved today through her membership of the European Women's Lobby and Women's International Commission.

Support was granted and the European Women's Lobby and its secretariat in Brussels were formally established in 1990.

The European Women's Lobby was created in response to a growing awareness of the need to defend women's interests at European level since:

We must vote in favour of equal treatment between men and women but also between the European Women's Lobby EWL and other women's associations.

The European Women's Lobby is an organisation that concentrates on equal opportunities policy and engages in it with determination, being able to show strength by bringing together many organisations.

"When all those women were fired like that, it had an enormous effect," said Denise Fuschs, a French activist who heads European Women's Lobby, an umbrella organization for about 3,000 feminist associations.

This report is currently being drawn up jointly by experts from all Member States and the European Women's Lobby, and will also be financed by the DAPHNE programme.

We recognise that the role and the work of the European Women's Lobby need to be safeguarded but, at the same time, other organisations also need to be given the opportunity to have a viable action programme.

In addition, I consider it important for the amendments by the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality on greater financing for women's organisations, especially the European women's lobby, to be supported.

There are the Institute for Gender Equality, various NGOs, ad hoc committees, fundamental rights agencies, consultative forums on women's rights, the European women's lobby, and our own committee within Parliament.

It also has representatives to the Arab League in Cairo and the Gulf Countries Council in Riyadh, and is a member of the European Women's Lobby in Brussels.

This did not come out of Parliament's proposal; on the contrary, Parliament maintains that there must be discriminatory treatment between organisations and that organisations which do not belong to the European Women's Lobby should be in a ‘second category’.

As far as gender equality is concerned, the amendment already adopted by the Committee on Budgets on strengthening the Daphne programme and programmes to subsidise and help fund women's organisations, especially the European women's lobby, should be supported.

Finally, we urgently demand that the appropriations allocated in the 1999 budget to the European Women's Lobby, which unites 1400 women' s organisations and which performs work of a high quality, are renewed in their entirety in the 2000 budget.

She is also a member of the Executive Board of the European Women's Lobby, a board member of the Greek Council for Refugees and the Hellenic National Committee for UNICEF.

The IAW has permanent representatives in New York, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Nairobi and Strasbourg and addresses the European Union through its membership in the European Women's Lobby in Brussels.

That is why we are calling in our amendments for funding to be directed not at special actions which cannot guarantee the permanence or standard of the programmes or the viability of organisations, but at funding operations, as is the case with the European Women's Lobby.

Verstegen is a member of the Coalition for a European Union Year to End Violence Against Women, an initiative launched by the European Women's Lobby (EWL) in 2012, signing on behalf of the IAW.

Thus, for us, the objective of the present programme must be the facility for the European Women's Lobby to continue its work and, at the same time, the facility for other women's organisations to function and develop integrated activities within the general framework of equality between men and women.