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General Assembly |
Distr. GENERAL A/HRC/7/6/Add.2 13 February 2008 Original: ENGLISH |
HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Seventh session
Agenda item 3
94. Women’s status in
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
(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
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
(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
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.