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Subject: Women's Human Rights & World Conference
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/** headlines: 1019.0 **/
** Topic: Women's Human Rights & World Confer **
** Written 12:05 pm  May  4, 1993 by newsdesk in cdp:headlines **
/* Written  8:17 am  May  1, 1993 by f.soethe@oln.comlink.apc.org in igc:unhr.n/
/* ---------- "Women's Human Rights & World Confer" ---------- */
               WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
  AND THE 1993 UN WORLD CONFERENCE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

The International Human Rights Law Group submit the
following statement on behalf of NOVIB and 82 women's rights
and human rights organizations, and popular movements:

Women's rights groups, human rights organizations and
popular movements worldwide have called for effective action
by the international community to halt the grave violations
of women's fundamental human rights occurring in all
regions. As a critical step toward that goal, the World
Conference on Human Rights must examine the failure of the
United Nations to integrate women's human rights into its
human rights programs, and endorse measures to remedy this
neglect. The UN's expert and political human rights bodies
have ignored many egregious violations of women's human
rights. Violations that affect women disproportionately, or
take specific forms based on gender -- such as rape,
restrictions on women's legal capacity or constraints on
access to food, -- are frequently overlooked or
characterized as social or cultural practices beyond the
scope of human rights standards and implementation
procedures. National and international procedures for
implementing guarantees of gender equality remain weak in
the face of systematic gender discrimination in family law
and family life, political and public life, employment,
education and health care.

The World Conference should adopt recommendations for reform
of existing mechanisms and for new initiatives that will
enhance government accountability for violations of women's
human rights. Discussions under each Conference agenda item
should therefore incorporate gender-specific information and
analysis. In particular, we urge the Conference to examine
the following issues:

REVIEWING THE PROGRESS MADE IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN RIGHTS

First, in reviewing the progress made in the field of human
rights since the adoption of the Universal Declaration on
Human Rights, the Conference should address the failure of
existing implementation mechanisms to consider on a
consistent basis the violations of women's human rights that
fall within their mandates. The treaty committees (with the
obvious exception of the Committee on the Elimination of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)), the Rapporteurs and
Working Groups established by the Commission on Human Rights
and the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and
Protection of Minorities, and the experts appointed under
the Advisory Services program have all disregarded or
minimized gender specific abuses.

The World Conference should reaffirm the principle that
women's rights are inalienable human rights and must be
treated as such by all UN bodies. It should call for
training programs and oversight procedures to promote the
integration of women's human rights into the work of the
human rights mechanisms, particularly monitoring and the
formulation of recommendations to states.

In connection with this need for oversight procedures, we
emphasize that if a UN Special Commissioner for Human Rights
is established, his or her mandate must include ensuring
that women's rights are systematically integrated with other
human rights components into the UN's work. His or her
responsibilities should also include improving coordination
among the UN programs on the advancement of women, human
rights, development and refugees. Experts on women's human
rights should therefore be appointed to the staff for the
Special Commissioner.

In assessing the progress made in the field of human rights,
the Conference should examine the failure of international,
regional and national bodies to respond effectively to
violence against women. In all regions of the world, women
suffer violence that breaches their basic human rights,
including battering in the family, rape, sexual assault,
female infanticide, "honor killings" at the hands of family
members, "dowry murder" and other violence related to
traditional and customary practices, and preference for male
children leading to inferior nutrition, health care and
education for girls. These and other forms of violence
against women breach existing guarantees in the Universal
Declaration, the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and other human
rights instruments.

We welcome the recent effort to enhance international
protections against gender-specific violence through the
elaboration of a UN Draft Declaration on Violence Against
Women. There is an urgent need for a normative instrument
defining government obligations to prevent and respond to
violence against women in public and private life.
Recognition of the principle that states must exercise due
diligence to prevent, investigate and punish such violence
by non-governmental, as well as governmental, actors would
significantly advance efforts to eliminate violence against
women.

We particularly welcome the recent decision of the
Commission on Human Rights to consider the appointment of a
special rapporteur on violence against women. The Commission
on Human Rights, and not the Commission on the Status of
Women, is the appropriate body to appoint such a rapporteur,
in light of its experience in the use of independent
monitoring mechanisms and the significance that governments
attach to its work. The rapporteur's mandate should include
systematic gender- discrimination, because violence against
women is closely linked to women's structural inequality and
because there is a critical need for reporting on
gender-discrimination in countries that are not parties to
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, as well as in countries that
are parties.

The World Conference should affirm that states have a duty
to prevent and respond to violence against women and call on
states to take immediate steps to fulfill that duty. The
Conference should reiterate that acts of gender-based
violence must be regularly addressed in UN monitoring,
reporting and complaints procedures as violations of
existing guarantees, and should call on the Commission on
Human Rights to appoint a special rapporteur on violence
against women and systematic gender discrimination.

Finally, in assessing the progress made in the field of
human rights, the Conference should affirm that women's
ability to control their own fertility is an aspect of
gender equality, of the right to health, and of the equal
right to determine the number and spacing of children under
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. Coercive practices or policies
regarding women's fertility and childbearing, such as forced
sterilization or forced childbearing, violate the
Convention, as well as international guarantees of the
integrity and security of the person.

OBSTACLES TO PROGRESS IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Second, the Conference should review obstacles to the
realization of the principle of gender equality, and in this
context consider means for strengthening the implementation
of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. Among the chief obstacles to
effective implementation are the large number of
far-reaching reservations entered to the Convention. Several
of these purport to exclude the State parties concerned from
the basic obligation to eliminate gender discrimination and
so appear to be incompatible with the object and purpose of
the treaty. Moreover, several are so broad and vague that it
is impossible to determine the scope of the States parties'
remaining obligations under the Convention.

The Conference should call on States parties to withdraw
broadly-worded reservations and those reservations that
exclude the basic obligation to eliminate discrimination or
obligations of means that are essential to the objectives of
the Convention. It should urge states to undertake regular
review of the need for, and desirability of reservations to
all human rights treaties, with a view to withdrawing them
as soon as possible. States parties should be encouraged to
object to such reservations as appropriate. The Conference
should also endorse the suggestion of the meeting of
Chairpersons that the Sub-Commission prepare an analysis of
questions of incompatibility arising from the reservations
to the principal human rights treaties.

An additional step toward strengthening implementation of
the Convention would be the adoption of an optional protocol
creating an individual and interstate complaints procedure.
An optional complaints procedure would provide an important
means of redress for victims and an avenue for furthering
interpretation and application of the Convention. It would
place the Convention on an equal footing with the other
human rights treaties that have optional complaints
procedures.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT, DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN
                      RIGHTS

Third, in addressing the interdependence and indivisibility
of all human rights, the Conference should recommend
measures to promote effective implementation of economic,
social and cultural rights and to ensure that development
models are compatible with the realization of all human
rights. Twenty-five years after the adoption of the
Proclamation of Teheran, which emphasized that the promotion
and protection of one set of rights does not exempt states
from the protection and promotion of another, the UN's
efforts to advance economic, social and ycultural rights
continue to lag far behind its efforts to promote civil and
political rights. This neglect and the failure to protect
all human rights in the development process have had
devastating consequences for women.

The denial of economic, social and cultural rights and the
negative effects of structural adjustment policies have had
a disproportionate impact on women due to gender
discrimination in public and family life and the nature of
women's roles in economic production. In public life, women
suffer from economic discrimination within the labor force
and the informal sector, and from development policies that
reduce their access to economic resources. Within the
family, gender discrimination in the distribution of
household resources (including the preference for male
children in several societies that results in inferior
nutrition, medical care and education for female children)
leaves women and girls more vulnerable to violence and
restricts their ability to exercise rights in public life.

The Conference should call for national and international
administrative, judicial and other means for vindicating
economic, social and cultural rights and for ameliorating
the negative effects that structural adjustment policies
have had on women's economic, social and cultural rights in
many countries -- including their rights to work, food,
housing, health care and education. Financing institutions
should be urged to include criteria concerning women's
ability to exercise their human rights in assessing
development programs and to include "social safety nets" in
structural adjustment programs.

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Fourth, the Conference must give careful consideration to UN
peacekeeping activities, emergency response mechanisms, and
humanitarian assistance as "contemporary trends in and
challenges to the full realization of all human rights of
men and women." In this context, the Conference should
recommend measures to prevent and to respond to
gender-specific abuses in situations of internal or
international armed conflict and ethnic conflict. The
Conference should also consider means for responding to the
particular needs of women as a group in crisis situations,
including international or internal armed conflict. In many
such situations, women constitute the majority of the
refugee or displaced population and suffer gender-specific
abuses, including sexual assault and exploitation.

UNIVERSALITY IN THE CONSIDERATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES

Fifth, the Conference should emphasize that governments must
counter all forms of religious or cultural intolerance
denying women's human rights and liberties, as affirmed in
the resolution on the protection of women's human rights
adopted by the Regional Meeting for Africa. In considering
the need to ensure the universality of human rights, it must
be recognized that fundamentalism in many religious and
cultural traditions has resulted in systematic restrictions
on women's basic rights.

COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Sixth, in formulating recommendations for enhancing
cooperation in the field of human rights, the World
Conference must ensure that the human rights dimensions of
issues implicating the work of the specialized agencies are
not neglected. For example, the human rights issues arising
from the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS can only be addressed
by the combined efforts of the specialized agencies and
human rights bodies of the UN, with specific attention to
the needs of women. As CEDAW has stated, "programmes to
combat AIDS should give special attention to the needs of
women and children, and to the reproductive role of women
and their subordinate position in some societies which make
them especially vulnerable to HIV infection."

ADVANCE MEASURES

In order to ensure that these and other issues relating to
women's human rights are fully integrated into the work of
the World Conference, this preparatory meeting should (1)
affirm the principle of broad NGO participation in the
Conference, including women's groups and popular movements;
(2) call on states to provide resources to facilitate NGO
participation in the Conference, particularly for NGOs from
countries in the South; (2) ensure the equitable
participation of women and men in official government
delegations; (3) include gender-specific information and
analysis in background documentation prepared for the
Conference; and (4) authorize the Secretariat to create
formal procedures for communication between NGO meetings and
the official World Conference, including briefings by the
Secretariat before and after consideration of major agenda
items and procedures for distribution of written statements
by governments and NGOs.

                                    RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE
                                    WORLD CONFERENCE

We urge the World Conference to endorse the following
measures to ensure the realization of women's human rights:

1. Steps should be taken to ensure that the UN's expert and
political human rights bodies regularly address violations
of women's human rights, including gender-specific abuses,
in the areas that fall within their mandates, including:

** training for UN human rights and humanitarian relief
personnel and for independent experts to ensure that they
will address human rights abuses specific to women and carry
out their work without gender-bias;

** periodic evaluations of the effectiveness of the UN
monitoring, reporting and complaints procedures, as well as
its advisory services and training programs in addressing,
and devising more effective responses to, violations of
women's human rights.

** goals and timetables for securing equal representation of
women on all UN treaty committees and among the Special
Rapporteurs and Working Groups established by the Commission
on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission, and in the program
on advisory services in human rights;

** the preparation of a report on the effectiveness of these
initiatives for the 1995 World Conference on Women.

2. A UN Special Rapporteur on systematic
gender-discrimination and violence against women should be
appointed by the Commission on Human Rights. The Rapporteur
should be authorized to receive and report on information
from governments, non-governmental organizations and inter-
governmental institutions; to respond effectively to
allegations of these violations against women; and to
recommend measures to prevent continuing violations. 
                                                      3 .
In order to strengthen implementation of the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women, the Conference should:

** urge states that have not done so to ratify the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination; Against Women, stressing the goal of
universal ratification;

** call on State parties to withdraw those reservations to
the Convention that are obstacles to its effective
implementation, and to object to reservations by other
States parties that are incompatible with the object and
purpose of the Convention;

** request the Centre for Human Rights and the Division for
the Advancement of Women to prepare a joint study outlining
procedures for drafting an optional protocol that would an
individual complaints procedure under the Convention, and
endorse the elaboration of such an optional protocol;

** call for adequate material and human resources for the
CEDAW and more effective exchange of information and
interaction between CEDAW and the other treaty bodies.

4. To give effect to the principle of the interdependence
and indivisibility of all human rights, the Conference
should:

** call for measures to better ensure the full realization
of economic, social and cultural rights, including national
and international means of vindicating those rights;

** call for measures to ensure the full integration of women
into all stages of the development process;

** call for measures to ameliorate the effects of structural
adjustment policies on women's human rights and their
ability to secure nutrition, housing, and health care.

5. The World Conference should endorse policy and
operational guidelines to ensure the full integration of
human rights components into UN peacekeeping operations,
emergency response mechanisms, election monitoring
activities, and humanitarian assistance initiatives. These
guidelines should be aimed at integrating human rights
considerations into the planning, implementation and
follow-up to all such activities, with particular attention
to:

** measures to protect women in crisis situations, including
women refugees and displaced persons;

** measures to prevent and respond to abuses against women
in situations of international or internal armed conflict;

** measures to ensure that the UN's initiatives in these
areas promote respect for women's human rights, including
appropriate training and supervisory procedures for UN
personnel. 6. The Conference should call for expanded access
of NGOs with expertise on the human rights of women to all
UN activities relating to human rights, including the work
of the specialized agencies.

Endorsed by the following organizations:

Arab Lawyers Union
Article 19
CHANGE
France-Libertes: Fondation Danielle Mitterand
Habitat
International Coalition Human Rights Advocates
International Alliance of Women
International Council of Jewish Women
International Council on Social Welfare
International Council of Voluntary Agencies
International Federation of Human Rights
International Federation for the Protection of the
   Rights of Ethnic, Religious, Linguistic and Other Minorities
International Federation Terre des Hommes
International Fellowship of Reconciliation
International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples
International Service for Human Rights
International Women's Tribune Centre
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
Latin American Federation of Association of Relatives of
   Disappeared Detainees
Oxfam
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
World Federation of Methodist Women
World University Service
World Young Women's Christian Association

Black Lawyers Association (South Africa)
Corporaci"n Colectivo de Abogados (Colombia)
Programa Venezolano de Educacion-Accion en Derechos Humanos (PROVEA) (Venezuela)
Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF)
CLADEM (Peru)
Regional Centre for Human Rights and Development (Eritrea)
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
AGHS Legal
Aid Cell (Pakistan)
Punjab Women Lawyers Association (Pakistan)
The Uganda Association of Women Lawyers, FIDA
The Malik Ghulam Jilani Foundation (Pakistan)
Oficina Jur!dica para la Mujer (Bolivia)
University of Durban-Westville (South Africa)
WIDE (Ireland)
Servicio, Paz y Justicia en America Latina (Equador)
Centro de An lisis y Difusi"n de la Condici"n de la Mujer,
   Casa de la Mujer La Morada (Chile)
Asian Human Rights Council (AWHRC)
Reseau Sou-Regional Femmes Africaines et Droits Humains (REFAD)
Ain o Shalish Kendro (Law and Mediation Center) (Bangladesh)
Terre des Hommes Germany
Centro de Promoci"n de la Mujer
Gregoria Apaza (Bolivia)
Pakistan Institute of Labour Education & Research
Bureau d'Assistance Juridique (Rwanda & Zaire)
Instituto Brasileiro de Analises Sociais e Economicas (Brasil)
Center for Women's Global Leadership (USA)
International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INGI)
(Indonesia) Friends of Woman Foundation (Thailand)
Nederlandse Vereniging van Vrouwen met Academische Opleiding
   (VVAO) (Netherlands)
Interm"n (Spain)
PROFAMILIA (Colombia)
Sudanese Women Union, Cairo Branch (Egypt)
Justicia et Pax (Netherlands)
Women for Change (Zambia)
Groupe Developpement (GARD) (France)
Actionaid (United Kingdom)
Forum-Asia for Human Rights and Development (Thailand)
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (Malaysia)
Centro Santo dias de direitos humanos (Brazil)
Legal Research and Resource Center (Egypt)
Association Libanaise des droits de l'homme (Lebanon)
Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (Germany)
Oikos (Portugal)
Fundacion Dialogo Mujer (Colombia)
Instituto Democracia Education y Accion Social (Chile)
Society for Community Organisation Trust (India)
Tamil Nadu Network of Voluntary Organisations (India)
Society for International Development (Germany)
El Taller (Tunisia)
Institute for Women, Law and Development (USA)
B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
   Territories)
Actionaid (United Kingdom)
Bonded Labour Liberation Front (India)
Bhartiya Arya Pratinidhi Sabha (India)
Entre Mujeres (Peru)
Shrikat Gah (Pakistan)
Vrouwenberaad Ontwikkelingssamenwerking (Netherlands)
Namai Khamateen (Pakistan)
Asociacion Venezolana para una Educacion Sexual Alterniva (Venezuela)
** End of text from cdp:headlines **