New Pressure Needed to Scrap Gender-Biased Laws

by Thalif Deen

February 15, 2006 - (IPS) - The United Nations is studying the feasibility of appointing a special rapporteur -- a human rights expert -- who will focus specifically on national laws that discriminate against women in their home countries.

"The goal of eliminating all sex discriminatory laws has so far not been achieved," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan confesses in a new report to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) scheduled to meet Feb. 27-Mar. 10.

Such laws, he points out, continue to exist despite the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and a wide-ranging Platform for Action for gender empowerment adopted at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women.

The U.N.'s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has already declared that in "no country in the world has women's full de jure and de facto equality been achieved".

"Discriminatory laws are still on the statute books" of many of the U.N.'s 191 member states, says the new report, adding that "nationality laws also continue to discriminate against women by curtailing their capacity to confer their nationality to their children".

The proposal for the creation of a "Special Rapporteur on Laws that Discriminate Against Women" has garnered strong support from several member states, including Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Mauritius, Namibia, Uruguay, the Philippines and South Korea. But it has been cold-shouldered by countries such as Barbados, Colombia, Iran, Jamaica, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam either for political or financial reasons. The 25-member European Union has said it could not comment definitely on the advisability of creating a special rapporteur "without a specific proposal or a draft mandate".

The United States, the Holy See, Mexico and New Zealand have offered conditional support -- provided the mandate of the special rapporteur "does not duplicate the work of existing mechanisms".

Annan, who supports the proposal for a special rapporteur, points out that "while U.N. human rights treaty bodies and special procedures to some extent address discrimination against women within their mandates, their attention to such discrimination is not systematic". The existing discriminatory laws against women relate mostly to nationality and citizenship rights; labour legislation; sexual violence and crime; and marriage, divorce, inheritance and property rights.

Last week, the executive director of the Nairobi-based U.N. Human Settlements Programme (Habitat), Anna Tibaijuka, urged member states to enact legislation that will ensure gender equality in housing. "In order to remove the barriers to gender equality in the human settlements sector, we must deal with housing laws and by-laws, urban planning regulations, laws dealing with property rights and inheritance rights, access to credits -- and the list goes on," she said. Tibaijuka said there are "myriads of laws and restrictive legislation that remain major obstacles to gender equality and empowerment of women".

Jessica Neuwirth, president of the New York-based Equality Now, said her organisation has been campaigning for the repeal of discriminatory laws since 1999. "While a number of laws in a number of countries have been changed there are many laws still in force that institutionalise second-class status for women with regard to property rights, citizenship rights, employment rights, parental rights and marital rights," she said.

"These laws are a fundamental violation of human rights, and we want the United Nations and its member states to recognise this violation as a more immediate and pressing priority. It costs nothing to change these laws. It is merely a question of political will," Neuwirth told IPS.

Doris Mpoumou, gender and governance programme coordinator at the Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), told IPS that 10 years after the passage of the Beijing Platform for Action, WEDO reported stories from hundreds of women documenting the discriminatory laws and practices that afflict women worldwide, in its 2005 global monitoring report "Beijing Betrayed".

"A special rapporteur on laws that discriminate against women is critical to examine and transform the discriminatory laws currently upheld by states parties and would be an important tool to further monitor the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action," she added. Mpoumou also pointed out that special rappoteurs have historically been an effective mechanism for other U.N. bodies, and the creation of a special rapporteur that reports annually to the Commission on the Status of Women would make possible a more consistent dialogue on women's issues and discriminatory laws. "It will also bring women's voices and experiences to the forefront of the debate, and actively push for positive transformation of harmful laws and practices that continue to haunt women worldwide," she noted.

Charlotte Bunch of the Centre for Women's Global Leadership said the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has occasionally had special rapporteurs in the past -- "and I think that we have learned from the systematic use of rapporteurs by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) that this is a very useful way to extend the work of the commissions, especially with regard to monitoring and implementation".

Some of these U.N. special rapporteurs appointed by the CHR include those monitoring torture, violence against women and the right to food and shelter.

In terms of this particular rapporteur, Bunch told IPS, governments have repeatedly committed themselves to eliminating such discriminatory legislation --- "in the Beijing Platform they agred to do so by 2000 and it has come up at two subsequent review conferences, 'Beijing plus 5 and Beijing plus 10 reviews' "It is time for the CSW to take stronger measures to pressure and embarrass governments to meet this very basic normative commitment to women's equality," Bunch added.

Neuwirth of Equality Now said the Human Rights Commission has dozens of special rapporteurs, and those with a thematic mandate have generally been considered the most successful "Yet none of the existing special rapporteurs covers the most basic right to equality for women under the law," she added.

Neuwirth said the Beijing conference restated the commitment made by governments in CEDAW as well as many other international human rights treaties to rescind laws that discriminate against women.

In 2000, the Beijing plus five Outcome Document established a target date of 2005 for repeal of these laws. "2005 has come and gone, and as the secretary-general's report makes clear, there are many discriminatory laws in force despite the existing procedures," she said.

A special rapporteur will have the flexibility to work with governments in a constructive way to accelerate legal reform, much of which is underway already but moving forward at a glacially slow pace, Neuwirth added.

From: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32171