This Valentine's Day Swedish MEP Cecilia Wikström spoke out in "The Parliament Magazine" about a right which is denied to millions of girls and adolescent women around the world: the right to decide on your partner, body and destiny...

For the past month public anger across North Africa and the Middle East has been raging, and the rights of people that have been ignored by undemocratic and authoritarian regimes for too long are at last being heard. The future of EU Development policy is also currently under discussion, as the role and priorities of the External Action Service are still to be determined. But once the dust settles in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, stability is restored and people clear the streets and pavements, whose rights will still not have been improved?

On Valentine’s Day this year people who have been allowed to choose their partner will celebrate the happiness they have found as a result. But unknowingly they will also be celebrating the social convention that they are taking part in. They will be celebrating having the right to choose not only their partner, but also their destiny.

Across the world, from Latin America to Asia and from Africa to the Middle East, millions of young women are systematically being denied the right to decide upon their partner, their body and their future. Forced marriage of women under 18 will often have been banned by national law, but it is the people closest to these women – usually their own parents – that are disobeying the law and deciding upon the future of their children for them.

In rural India, for example, it is common for children - sometimes as young as two or three - to be coercively married to each other, and then to be forced to live together as soon as they reach puberty. 25% of Indian girls are married by the age of fifteen, 50% of them by the age of 18: and despite breaking the laws of India, no-one is ever prosecuted as a result. This, coupled with a lack of education and abject poverty, will invariably lead to early pregnancy for the girl and the boy will be forced to give up his schooling to care for his wife and children. And besides losing any hopes she might have had for pursuing her education and a destiny of her choosing, the girl will face the single greatest threat that any woman in the developing world will face to her health: underage pregnancy and the associated lack of ante-natal care, skilled birth attendance and post-partum care.

Development should not only measure itself on a balance sheet, or in the headlines we see about which leader will replace an incumbent despot once he has fallen out of favour. Real development, with a long-term potential to improve citizens’ quality of life and a country’s economy, is measured by its citizens’ right to decide when to marry and when to have children; increased years of schooling; and greater gender equality.

As you stand on the pavement waiting for your taxi on Valentine’s Day, spare a thought for Shanti, Fatima or Laxmi; three young Indian women who recently died after giving birth alone on similar patches of pavement in central Delhi. Denied the right to know what a loving partner is, to choose when to have a child, or to understand how to control their fertility; these are the people whose rights deserve the world’s attention too. And the world will benefit as a result.


Cecilia Wikström MEP is a member of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament, where she is a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs. She has previously been a Member of the Swedish Parliament, and served as a Minister in the Church of Sweden.