JUSTICE AND HOME AFFAIRS : EP MOVE TO STOP FORCED PROSTITUTION AT WORLD SPORTS EVENTS.

MEPs have come forward with a strategy for preventing women being trafficked to this summer's World Cup football event, in Germany and forced to work there as prostitutes. The German authorities should set up a multilingual telephone hotline that victims can ring to get counselling and find out about safe housing and legal aid, a resolution adopted on 15 March says. To curb the demand for such services, authorities throughout the EU should raise awareness among the general public and among sports people of the scale of the problem. Potential victims should be targeted in a separate campaign to prevent them getting caught up in a trafficking racket. Sports associations including the International Olympic Committee, FIFA and UEFA are called on to back the campaign and roundly condemn forced prostitution.

The non-binding resolution was adopted as part of Parliament's response to International Women's Day on 8 March. According to Anna Zaborska (EPP-ED, Slovakia), Chair of the EP's Women's Rights Committee, thousands of girls are expected to be trafficked for the World Cup which takes place from 9 June to 9 July. She made her remarks during a debate in the plenary session of 13 March, which preceded the vote. Danish Green Margete Auken told the House that all prostitution was forced: "it is important to blow up the myth of the happy prostitute", she said. Swedish deputy Eva-Britt Svensson (GUE-NGL) noted that in Sweden it is the customers, not the girls, who are penalised.a

FRATTINI REVISES PLANS

Also during the debate, EU Justice, Freedom and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini...