Greater female participation urged in Albania

TIRANA, Nov. 9 – A conference “Enhancing Women’s Role in Governance” was held for two days, in Tirana.
It urged more participation of women in Albania’s political, decision-making and public life. It called upon all the political parties, state institutions, media and international organizations to provide systematic assistance for the enhancement of equality between women and men in Albania’s political and public life.
They also urged the main political parties working on the electoral code reform to consider the gender criteria so that women play an active role and guarantee the representation of women at all levels of central and local decision-making, boards of public and private companies, and media.
They made also called for rules requiring a 50 percent representation of women in the parliament (at a time when it is just 17 percent) though the political parties had agreed before to have 30 percent representation.
Parliament Speaker Jozefina Topalli of the governing Democratic party said that female representation would mean a calmer placeبinting that men were somewhat linked to the presence of violence in the country’s life.
Opposition Socialist Party leader Edi Rama, though he agreed on the presence of more women in the country’s political life, opposed Topalli’s words on the men.
But Eugen Wollfarth of the OSCE said that during the last two elections held in Albania in 2009 and 2011 the number of elected women at a central and local level remained far too low. He questioned why progress has been so poor, despite a gender quota being carefully inserted into the Electoral Code. He added that though a lack of compliance with the gender quota was obviously one reason, it could not be the only reason.
He criticized the political parties for doing “only the very barest minimum possible” saying that “while the letter of the law was respected, the spirit was not.”
The conference was part of a three year project funded by Swedish International Development Agency and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.