10/12/2009 Equality and Non-Discrimination
Immigrant women are victims of a “triple penalty”, that of being a woman and an immigrant, and the fact that they are often there illegally, according to Jean-Claude Mignon (France, EPP/DC), speaking at the opening of a conference on migration and violence against women in Europe, in Paris on 10 December. “Fear of being forced to leave a country where they have found at least a precarious refuge is not an incentive to seek the protection of the law, for fear that they will once again find themselves on the move,” he said.
Their almost total absence of rights made their situation still more insecure. In these circumstances, he said, the only possible guarantors of their physical and psychological integrity were the state and the law, so that they did not become the prisoners of their communities of origin, or of those who sought to exploit their current weakness.