Erdoğan's Remarks On Gender Equality Draw More Criticism

Although President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has defended controversial remarks he made on Monday on gender equality, saying they were distorted by the media, some senior officials from the European Union and the United Nations have voiced criticism.

Maja Kocijancic, the spokesperson for Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Johannes Hahn, told the Hürriyet daily that Erdoğan's remarks were unexpected and recalled that EU laws require gender equality to be provided in every field.

Disagreeing with Erdoğan's remarks, the European Parliament's (EP) newly appointed Turkey rapporteur, Kati Piri, said although Turkey has a proper law to protect women's rights, such remarks do not help women who fight to gain respect for their rights.

Nicole Ameline, the head of the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), expressed her disappointment and called on Erdoğan to consider the expectations of Turkish civil society in terms of women's rights.

Erdoğan said on Monday that women and men cannot be equal because they have different “natures and bodies.”

Addressing a recent conference on fighting violence against women, Austrian member of the EP Georg Mayer repeated Erdoğan's words. “I have attracted your attention, right? However, these are not my words, but belong to Erdoğan," he said.

Portuguese member Liliana Rodrigues has said it is a "weird coincidence" that the İstanbul Convention -- the Council of Europe's (CoE) convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence -- is named after a city in Turkey while the Turkish president says men and women are not equal.

Erdoğan slammed the Turkish and international media on Wednesday for “distorting” his remarks on gender equality, saying his record for defending women's rights speaks for itself. “Two days ago, I said, ‘You cannot bring women and men into equal positions.' I said what women need is to be equivalent, rather than equal; that is, I emphasized that there needs to be justice. Yesterday [Tuesday], some national newspapers and international media outlets took just one part out of this statement, the meaning of which is very clear. They presented it in a wrong manner. Such weak morality does not get anyone anywhere,” Erdoğan said at a business meeting in İstanbul.

Women's groups expressed outrage over Erdoğan's widely reported remarks, which were made at a meeting of a women's rights association on Monday, saying they go against the Constitution.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)