Women's Rights in the Aftermath of Egypt's Revolution. Arab Citizenship Review No. 9, 26 August 2015 [also EUSpring Working Paper No. 5]

Addressing the issue of “women’s rights” in Egypt may seem like an easy topic from a purely legal standpoint, but the most enlightening way to do so is to adopt a holistic approach by understanding the political, social, cultural and class effects of this issue. Since 1952, people in Egypt have looked at “women’s rights” as a purely state matter, one characterised mainly by legal reforms. Until 2011, women’s rights were manipulated via a top-down approach by making changes in some policies and laws. Since 2011, with the emergence of the question of social movements, tackling women’s rights has been transformed via the use of certain tools and different perspectives. This is clearly manifested in the vast mobilisation that took place in governorates outside Cairo, which featured the use of artistic tools such as graffiti, story-telling performances, the production of feminist songs, open-microphone sessions, etc., in addition to the extensive use of social media and online campaigning to mainstream feminist ideologies and highlight violations experienced by women. Before 2011, the public space in Egypt was limited to citizens, political groups and civil society for employing legal approaches such as litigations and policy changes by direct pressure on authorities. The 2011 revolution opened the public space to the use of new tools that are not limited to protests and sit-ins, but also new media windows and new political forces who carried the question of certain rights in their agendas as well as the accessibility of different governmental actors. This paper will highlight different topics around women’s rights and gender issues in Egypt after 2011. This paper will review different gender issues after 2011, including the targeting of women in public spaces, women’s representation in decision-making bodies, legal reform, economic and social rights, and sexual and reproductive rights. It will also investigate how the feminist movement has changed and evolved since 2011, and to what degree women's issues and feminism can be analysed in a multidisciplinary way.

Performance of long-term care systems in Europe. ENEPRI Policy Brief No. 13, December 2012

The evaluation of long-term care (LTC) systems carried out in Work Package 7 of the ANCIEN project shows which performance criteria are important and – based on the available information – how European countries score on those criteria. This paper summarises the results and discusses the policy implications. An overall evaluation was carried out for four representative countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland. Of the four countries, the Dutch system has the highest scores on quality of life of LTC users, quality of care and equity of the LTC system, and it performs the secondbest after Poland in terms of the total burden of care (consisting of the financial burden and the burden of informal caregiving). The German system has somewhat lower scores than the Dutch on all four dimensions. The Polish system excels in having a low total burden of care, but it scores the lowest on quality of care and equity. The Spanish system has few extreme scores. Some important lessons are the following. The performance of a LTC system is a complex concept where many dimensions have to be included. Specifically, the impact of informal caregiving on the caregivers and on society should not be forgotten. The role of the state in funding and organising LTC versus individual responsibilities is one of the most important differences among countries. Choices concerning private funding and the role of informal care have a large effect not only on the public expenditures but also on the fairness of the system. International research into the relative preferences for the different performance criteria could produce a sound basis for the weights used in the overall evaluation.