IV. Conclusions and Recommendations

94. Women’s status in Algeria is characterized by contradictions. On the one hand, in the context of Algeria’s modernization project, many women have made remarkable advances in education and in certain professional fields. On the other hand, exclusion and poverty with a distinctly female face remain strikingly visible.

95. Women lack equal access to the labour market and decision‑making positions. Moreover, many women are still subjected to oppression and discrimination in the family circle. The Family Code has been considerably improved, but retains provisions that disadvantage women, most significantly with regard to inheritance and the material consequences of divorce. Women who are socially stigmatized, including divorced and deserted women, single mothers and street women, are particularly vulnerable and urgently need more State support.

96. Violence against women in the private sphere by various family members is pervasive but insufficiently recognized and acknowledged in society at large. The ejection of women and girls into the street is a particularly egregious form of such violence. Sexual harassment and abuse at work and in places of education is another area of major concern.

97. Women face immense social pressures preventing them from reporting such crimes, while the State fails to encourage, protect and support those women that do want to report them. This failure manifests itself in gaps in the penal and labour law framework; an inequitable marital property regime; the lack of specialized women’s shelters; and gender‑biased police, as well as lax sentencing practices.

98. Contrary to the terms of the Charter on Peace and National Reconciliation, the perpetrators of sexual violence committed during the black decade effectively enjoy impunity, while their victims continue to experience considerable social problems. Families of the disappeared, consisting mainly of women, are still denied their right to truth and face difficulties in accessing the compensation promised under the Charter.

99. In the light of my findings and conclusions, I wish to make a number of recommendations to the Government and other relevant actors.

100. In terms of legislative reform, the Government should:

(a) Reform the Family Code to ensure that it fully respects the principle of non‑discrimination on the basis of sex. As a minimum, this reform should:

(i) Abolish all provisions that deny women equal access to inheritance;

(ii) Outlaw polygamy;

(iii) Abolish the legal requirement of the institution of the marital guardian (wali);

(iv) Make the necessary legal changes to recognize the marriages of Muslim women to non‑Muslims;

(v) Reform the marital property regime to allow all assets attained during marriage to be shared equally between partners in the case of divorce. The distinction of property as “male” or “female” as a basis for the distribution of household goods after divorce should be abolished;

(b) Reform the Penal Code to ensure non‑discrimination and enhance the protection of women against violence. As a minimum, the legislation should:

(i) Explicitly criminalize marital rape;

(ii) Classify physical assault committed by a spouse, former spouse, cohabitant partner or former cohabitant partner as aggravated assault and impose penalties comparable to assault against parents or children;

(iii) Abolish article 279 of the Penal Code and any other provisions that can be used to avoid or mitigate punishment for crimes committed by family members;

(iv) Reform article 269 to outlaw any corporal punishment of children;

(v) Criminalize all forms of sexual harassment regardless of the relationship between perpetrator and victim;

(vi) Redefine sexual crimes as crimes against physical integrity;

(vii) Explicitly decriminalize abortion in cases of pregnancy due to rape;

(c) Introduce judicial protection orders to enable the authorities to physically remove and ban perpetrators of domestic violence from their domicile for a specified period of time;

(d) Reform the Labour Code and give victims of mobbing, sexual harassment and sexual abuse at work or in the recruitment process effective remedies against their employers, including the right to compensation for material loss and emotional suffering where employers engage in or fail to adequately protect employees against such conduct. Adequate measures to protect victims and witnesses of such conduct from intimidation and reprisals should also be introduced by law.

101. The Government should undertake the following international commitments:

(a) Remove impermissible reservations to articles 2 and 16 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the redundant reservation to article 9;

(b) Consider ratifying the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa and the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance;

(c) Consider issuing a standing invitation to all mandate‑holders of the Human Rights Council and monitoring mechanisms of the African Union;

(d) Invite the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to carry out official visits to Algeria. Schedule the agreed visit of the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

102. To improve the institutional framework, the Government should:

(a) Adopt the National Strategy to Combat Violence against Women and fully implement it in close cooperation with other stakeholders such as women’s associations and the United Nations;

(b) Upgrade the office of the Delegate Minister for the Family and the Status of Women to a fully‑fledged Ministry with the mandate to coordinate and monitor all Government action on gender equality and to initiate proposals to reform policies and laws, and provide adequate budget resources to the Ministry to carry out these functions;

(c) Create a programme within the Consultative Commission on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights to address discrimination and violence against women, as well as harassment of women’s rights defenders, and include these concerns in the annual reports to the President;

(d) Publish and widely disseminate all reports issued by the Consultative Commission;

(e) Require the Minister Delegate for the Family and the Status of Women, the Minister of National Solidarity, the Director‑General of National Security and other relevant authorities to hold periodic round‑table meetings open to all women’s rights organizations and other human rights groups to discuss any human rights challenges concerning women.

103. In order to provide protection and support for women facing violence, the Government and other relevant actors should:

(a) Carry out a needs assessment in cooperation with the United Nations and non‑governmental women’s rights associations and set up and run shelters for women facing violence, or provide non‑governmental associations with the necessary funds to do so;

(b) Set up and support women’s help centres and telephone hotlines for women and girls facing violence, harassment or family problems;

(c) Provide social reintegration training in women’s shelters that gives women a real choice as to whether to seek reconciliation, remarry or establish a life of their own;

(d) Ensure that street women, divorced, separated, deserted or widowed women, single mothers and their children, benefit from special protective measures against all forms of discrimination, harassment and violence, including through financial assistance;

(e) Take all necessary measures to ensure that all families of the disappeared and all victims of sexual violence committed during the black decade receive prompt and adequate compensation. Presidential Decree No. 06‑93 of 28 February 2006 should be amended so that a declaration of death for the disappeared is no longer a prerequisite for compensation;

(f) Respect the rights of women who suffered violence during or in relation to the black decade, as well as human rights defenders, journalists and others who support them, to publicly present views on national reconciliation, peace, truth and justice that diverge from official policy. They should be allowed to organize without bureaucratic impediments or legal obstacles and public officials at all levels of Government should receive written instructions to this effect. Officials who threaten or harass persons with such divergent views should be subject to disciplinary measures and, where appropriate, prosecution. Article 46 of Presidential Order No. 06‑01 of 27 February 2006 (criminalizing the abusive use of “the wounds of the national tragedy”) should be revised and its overly broad ambit curtailed.

104. Investigation and prosecution. In this regard, the Government should:

(a) Adopt a zero tolerance policy towards all forms of violence against women and girls and diligently record, investigate and prosecute all cases. Police and other officials who fail to register or process criminal complaints should be subject to disciplinary/prosecutorial measures;

(b) Appoint an independent commission to investigate sexual violence committed during the black decade. The final report of the commission should be published and widely disseminated. On the basis of the findings of this commission and all other information available to the Government, all identified perpetrators of sexual violence should be exempted from amnesty and brought to justice;

(c) Publish the final report of the Ad hoc Inquiry Commission in Charge of the Question of Disappearances. It should also systematically gather all available information on the fate and whereabouts of disappeared persons and provide the information to the families of the disappeared.[1][1]

105. In regard to awareness raising the Government and other relevant actors should:

(a) Include specific modules on CEDAW, the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, and the interpretation of relevant domestic legislation, including the Family Code and the Penal Code, in the light of these international instruments, in the programmes of the Judicial Academy, the police academies and other public service training institutions;

(b) Promote, through media, school curricula and public campaigns, gender roles and relations that are compatible with human rights and equality norms, including masculine images that are de‑linked from domination and violent expressions of power;

(c) Promote gender‑sensitive media reporting to avoid stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes towards all women and to ensure respect for victims and their families when covering incidents of violence against women;

(d) Support researchers and statisticians in order to improve research and data collection on gender issues and violence against women and disaggregate all official statistics on the basis of sex.

106. With regard to women’s empowerment, the Government and other relevant actors should:

(a) Ensure that all girls and boys complete mandatory education and fund special programmes in areas with particularly low schooling rates. Establish, with the support of the United Nations, an indicator system to monitor educational quality and outcomes in all schools, with gender equality as a key indicator;

(b) Take measures to better meet women’s housing and employment needs, particularly for victims of violence, single and other marginalized women;

(c) Create special programmes to protect women from harassment and abuse in the workplace, including the creation of free telephone hotlines. Employers should take measures to address obstacles hindering the participation of young and married women in the labour market. The rate of women beneficiaries in the microenterprise support programme should be increased to at least 30 per cent;

(d) Introduce a 30 per cent quota system for women in political parties, labour unions, national and local elected bodies and for senior positions in the public and private sector.

‑‑‑‑‑

[1][1] These recommendations seek to address the emotional violence suffered by female relatives of the disappeared resulting from the uncertainty as to the fate and whereabouts of the disappeared. Questions of accountability, justice and reconciliation that arise in relation to the enforced disappearances themselves are beyond the scope of my mandate as Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences. Such questions have been addressed, for instance, in the most recent report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, A/HRC/4/41, paras. 50‑72. As of November 2006, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances had registered and transmitted to the Government 1,622 cases of disappearance that remain to be clarified.

Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil,
Political, Economic, Social and Cultural, including
the Right to Development

Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women,
its causes and consequences, Yakin Ertürk

Addendum

MISSION TO ALGERIA*

IV. Conclusions and Recommendations

Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural, including the Right to Development

Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Yakin Ertürk

Addendum

MISSION TO ALGERIA*

IV. Conclusions and Recommendations

Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil,
Political, Economic, Social and Cultural, including
the Right to Development

Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women,
its causes and consequences, Yakin Ertürk