SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 28 Sep. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The deputy for Equality and Gender Violence of the Common Council, Beatriz Barrera, has met with three Canarian lawyers who denounced the impossibility of reconciling their profession with motherhood.
On many occasions they detailed that the group must choose between being a mother or exercising their profession, since the resources and deadlines are not suspended and the future mother is forced to work during the 16 weeks that the law contemplates as maternity leave.
“Many lawyers do not have children or do not consider having the second because they must paralyze the office and this means not working. We have to be sending letters asking for the favor of being suspended or changing the deadlines, so we are always at the discretion of the judge or judge,” they assured in a note sent by the Common Council.
In this regard, they placed special emphasis on the need to automatically suspend the legal deadlines during legal proceedings when women take maternity leave, since, although trials can be suspended in this situation, in the vast majority of cases cases this does not occur automatically and, on many occasions, the application is not effective.
“We ask for awareness and sensitivity in the profession in the face of a situation that is temporary, so that we lawyers have the right to motherhood like any other woman,” they point out.
The jurists expressed their satisfaction at the call from the Common Council to find out the situation of something that they have been “manifesting and denouncing for a long time, and it is the non-suspension of deadlines and the denial of the suspension of hearings when it is or she is going to be a mother”.
For his part, Barrera asserted that “it is necessary to modify the legislation at the national level so that maternity protection is effective for lawyers, and also for fathers who take paternity leave.”
From the Office of Equality and Gender Violence, he continued, “we must defend the rights of this group, so I will take advantage of the visit of the Ombudsman next week to convey this concern to him, since a reform has to be carried out of the legislation at the national level and, from the state defense, it could be activated”.
