A Catholic Leader Takes the Reins at Strasbourg’s Women’s Rights Forum
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Teresa Gerns, the Council of Europe advocacy director for the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe, will lead a committee examining the barriers women face when trying to balance paid work and motherhood.
In the Agora building in Strasbourg, where the Council of Europe gathers the voices that do not sit in parliaments or ministerial cabinets but represent the organised civil society of international non-governmental organisations, on April 16th, Teresa Gerns was elected to co-chair the committee ‘Advocates for Gender Equality and Women’s Rights’ of the Conference of international non-governmental organisations (CINGO). It is a modest-sounding title that carries real weight: for the coming mandate, a Catholic-inspired federation will hold one of the two chairs of a committee that helps set the tone of civil society input into women’s rights policy across 46 European states. Gerns is the Council of Europe advocacy director of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE).
The Council of Europe, founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg, today brings together 46 member states representing some 700 million people. Alongside its three better-known pillars (the Committee of Ministers, where governments speak; the Parliamentary Assembly PACE, where elected national parliamentarians meet; and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities), the organisation has, since 2005, formally included a fourth pillar devoted to civil society. This is the Conference of INGOs, commonly referred to by its French-inspired acronym CINGO. Its remit covers the entire continent, from the United Kingdom to the South Caucasus, well beyond the European Union’s 27. More than three hundred INGOs hold this status at any given time. They gather in plenary sessions in Strasbourg, typically twice a year during PACE sessions, and the real substance of their work is carried out in standing committees on priority themes, among them the Committee on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights, which Teresa Gerns now co-chairs.
FAFCE is an umbrella organisation founded in 1997 and registered in Strasbourg, with origins that reach back to a common charter signed in 1991 by Austrian, Italian, French, and German Catholic family associations after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, it gathers 33 member associations across 20 European countries, and its general secretariat has operated from Brussels since 2009. Its work is rooted in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, and its current strategic priorities include family as an investment, demographic challenges, family and work-life balance, the protection of children online, the dignity of human life, and integral ecology.
The Federation’s institutional standing is solid. The Council of Europe granted it participatory status in 2001 and, one year later, authorised it to submit collective complaints under the European Social Charter. At the European Union level, FAFCE has for many years held the secretariat of the family intergroup of the EU Parliament. At the United Nations, it is a candidate for ECOSOC consultative status.
The concept at the heart of the subcommittee’s work is not improvised. It draws on a 2021 White Paper, “Protecting women from maternal mobbing,” published by New Women for Europe in collaboration with FAFCE and Femina Europa, which remains the most systematic attempt to date to give the phenomenon a precise shape.
Borrowing from the Swedish workplace psychologist Heinz Leymann, who in the 1980s described “mobbing” as sustained, health-harming hostile conduct at work, the paper applies the term specifically to motherhood. Maternal mobbing targets three overlapping groups: women who wish to have children, women who are pregnant, and women who have recently given birth. It takes recognisable forms—a reluctance to recruit candidates suspected of future maternity; disincentives to childbearing, including employer-funded oocyte freezing; informal demotion on return from maternity leave; excessive workload or harassment once a pregnancy is announced; and the non-renewal of fixed-term contracts.
The figures are sobering. Roughly one in three women in the European Union is ineligible for parental leave; only four member states grant universal access. Six in ten British mothers report feeling sidelined as soon as they disclose a pregnancy.
The subcommittee’s three-year mandate, running to 2027, aims to document these patterns systematically and identify legal and institutional remedies in collaboration with Council of Europe bodies. Those include the Governmental Committee of the European Social Charter, under which collective complaints can be brought. A reasoned finding that ‘maternal mobbing’ amounts to a breach of Charter obligations on work, family life, and non-discrimination would be a European first.
The political context gives this mandate its sharpness. Europe’s fertility rate has settled well below replacement for a generation, and the Council of Europe itself has begun treating demographic resilience as a human rights question. A committee focused on women’s rights that takes seriously the obstacles facing women who want to combine paid work and motherhood because of motherhood discrimination fits naturally into that emerging conversation.
It also sits within a pluralist, sometimes contested field. A Catholic-inspired federation co-chairing the women’s rights committee of the Council of Europe’s civil society platform will need to operate in coalition, build trust across ideological lines, and demonstrate that a family-centred reading of women’s rights can be substantive, evidence-based, and attentive to the lived experience of working mothers. That is both the opportunity and the test.
Tobias Teuscher is a writer for europeanconservative.com with extensive professional experience in the European Parliament.
A Catholic Leader Takes the Reins at Strasbourg’s Women’s Rights Forum
euconedit
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In the Agora building in Strasbourg, where the Council of Europe gathers the voices that do not sit in parliaments or ministerial cabinets but represent the organised civil society of international non-governmental organisations, on April 16th, Teresa Gerns was elected to co-chair the committee ‘Advocates for Gender Equality and Women’s Rights’ of the Conference of international non-governmental organisations (CINGO). It is a modest-sounding title that carries real weight: for the coming mandate, a Catholic-inspired federation will hold one of the two chairs of a committee that helps set the tone of civil society input into women’s rights policy across 46 European states. Gerns is the Council of Europe advocacy director of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE).
The Council of Europe, founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg, today brings together 46 member states representing some 700 million people. Alongside its three better-known pillars (the Committee of Ministers, where governments speak; the Parliamentary Assembly PACE, where elected national parliamentarians meet; and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities), the organisation has, since 2005, formally included a fourth pillar devoted to civil society. This is the Conference of INGOs, commonly referred to by its French-inspired acronym CINGO. Its remit covers the entire continent, from the United Kingdom to the South Caucasus, well beyond the European Union’s 27. More than three hundred INGOs hold this status at any given time. They gather in plenary sessions in Strasbourg, typically twice a year during PACE sessions, and the real substance of their work is carried out in standing committees on priority themes, among them the Committee on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights, which Teresa Gerns now co-chairs.
FAFCE is an umbrella organisation founded in 1997 and registered in Strasbourg, with origins that reach back to a common charter signed in 1991 by Austrian, Italian, French, and German Catholic family associations after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, it gathers 33 member associations across 20 European countries, and its general secretariat has operated from Brussels since 2009. Its work is rooted in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, and its current strategic priorities include family as an investment, demographic challenges, family and work-life balance, the protection of children online, the dignity of human life, and integral ecology.
The Federation’s institutional standing is solid. The Council of Europe granted it participatory status in 2001 and, one year later, authorised it to submit collective complaints under the European Social Charter. At the European Union level, FAFCE has for many years held the secretariat of the family intergroup of the EU Parliament. At the United Nations, it is a candidate for ECOSOC consultative status.
The concept at the heart of the subcommittee’s work is not improvised. It draws on a 2021 White Paper, “Protecting women from maternal mobbing,” published by New Women for Europe in collaboration with FAFCE and Femina Europa, which remains the most systematic attempt to date to give the phenomenon a precise shape.
Borrowing from the Swedish workplace psychologist Heinz Leymann, who in the 1980s described “mobbing” as sustained, health-harming hostile conduct at work, the paper applies the term specifically to motherhood. Maternal mobbing targets three overlapping groups: women who wish to have children, women who are pregnant, and women who have recently given birth. It takes recognisable forms—a reluctance to recruit candidates suspected of future maternity; disincentives to childbearing, including employer-funded oocyte freezing; informal demotion on return from maternity leave; excessive workload or harassment once a pregnancy is announced; and the non-renewal of fixed-term contracts.
The figures are sobering. Roughly one in three women in the European Union is ineligible for parental leave; only four member states grant universal access. Six in ten British mothers report feeling sidelined as soon as they disclose a pregnancy.
The subcommittee’s three-year mandate, running to 2027, aims to document these patterns systematically and identify legal and institutional remedies in collaboration with Council of Europe bodies. Those include the Governmental Committee of the European Social Charter, under which collective complaints can be brought. A reasoned finding that ‘maternal mobbing’ amounts to a breach of Charter obligations on work, family life, and non-discrimination would be a European first.
The political context gives this mandate its sharpness. Europe’s fertility rate has settled well below replacement for a generation, and the Council of Europe itself has begun treating demographic resilience as a human rights question. A committee focused on women’s rights that takes seriously the obstacles facing women who want to combine paid work and motherhood because of motherhood discrimination fits naturally into that emerging conversation.
It also sits within a pluralist, sometimes contested field. A Catholic-inspired federation co-chairing the women’s rights committee of the Council of Europe’s civil society platform will need to operate in coalition, build trust across ideological lines, and demonstrate that a family-centred reading of women’s rights can be substantive, evidence-based, and attentive to the lived experience of working mothers. That is both the opportunity and the test.
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