Opening presidency of EU, Spanish minister launches campaign for restraint orders to be effective across all member states

Spain launched a campaign for a Europe-wide system of restraint orders aimed at curbing violence against women, calling for crime statistics to be reconfigured to highlight gender violence and for EU legislation offering protection to battered women across national borders.

Opening Madrid's six-month rotating presidency of the EU and seeking to build on its progressive governance agenda, Alfredo Rubalcaba, the interior minister, called for a new approach to the problem, for special police units dealing with battered women, and for special treatment of the issues by European judiciaries.

In Brussels yesterday Spanish officials, supported by officials from 11 of the 27 EU member states, initiated draft legislation on a European protection order which would, if it became law, mean that a woman protected from an abusive and violent male by a police restraint order in any EU country would enjoy the same protection across all member states. The initiative is supported by countries from Bulgaria to Finland. The list of backers includes France and Italy, though so far neither Britain nor Germany.

"There is an EU-wide consensus on the need for this protection order," said María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the deputy prime minister. "But it is technically difficult."

Spanish officials admitted they may fail because of the problems of reconciling different legal and administrative systems across the EU.

"It's not easy," said Rubalcaba. "I'm not sure we'll be able to develop a joint restraining order within six months."

But while officials called for a new system of collating and comparing statistics on violence against women across the EU, Rubalcaba urged much greater police co-ordination on the issue and complained that European police, justice, and home affairs officials never discussed the problem of sexual violence.

He pointed out that he had been attending EU councils of police and justice ministers for more than three years. "We have never ever specifically discussed gender violence. We've never exchanged experiences and views on this."

He denied all suggestions that this might be because the meetings were dominated by male officials and politicians and also emphasised his disagreement with notions that women might suffer disproportionately from violent male conduct in the southern Mediterranean countries of the EU.

"It's a human problem we share whether we live in the south or the north," he said. "I don't think being a man reduces your sensitivity to this problem."

It is unclear what kind of impact the protection order might have. Officials admitted that extending protection across national borders would affect at best a small minority of victims.

"Even if only one victim is protected, it's worth it," said Cristina Gallach, a Spanish EU presidency spokeswoman. "It's the minority that deserves protection."

Different European systems use different methods and instruments to try to deal with the issue, ranging from magistrates to social services to police units, meaning that standardising the practices is more of a technical than a substantive problem, according to the Spanish, who are pushing equality of the sexes as a theme of their EU presidency.

If the campaign to legislate for battered women fails, there are moves afoot aimed at establishing an "observatory" for gathering and monitoring sexual violence across the EU, perhaps building on the work of a European human rights agency based in Vienna.

Officials pointed out that if a woman is murdered by her husband, in most systems the crime will be catalogued under the murder statistics and will not surface in the gender violence ledgers.