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Women's Right to Equality Needs Implementation
& Enforcement - UN Experts
“Implement and enforce,” UN experts urge Governments to
ensure women’s right to equality
GENEVA (8 March 2011) – On the International Women’s Day centenary, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo, urged States to respect, protect and fulfill women’s right to non-discrimination and equality.
“This must be amongst their highest priorities but is too often neglected or subject to inadequate or token efforts,” Ms. Manjoo said in a joint statement with other UN independent experts*. “The challenge is to move more decisively from an era of rhetorical engagement to one of implementation and enforcement.”
“The human rights of women and girls are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights,” the group of experts said, reminding Governments around the world of their obligations to ensure the realization of women’s rights.
The experts urged States to ensure that laws, policies, programmes and institutional structures ultimately result in the equal enjoyment by women of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
On International Women’s Day, they also called for the protection of women and girls against discrimination committed by private actors. “Discrimination that takes place within ostensibly private spaces is not beyond the control and regulation of State institutions.”
“While, in many cases, advances have been made in the adoption of standards
and the recognition of women’s rights,” the experts said, “the reality of the
lives of so many women shows that implementation of standards and commitment on
the ground is still unacceptably weak.”
The UN independent experts emphasized that States’ obligations remain
applicable even during armed conflict or in states of emergency caused by
mankind or natural disasters and without discrimination, to all those within
their territory or under their jurisdiction, including refugees, asylum seekers,
migrant workers, victims of trafficking and stateless persons.
(*) Special Rapporteur on housing, Ms Raquel Rolnik; SR on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Mr. Frank La Rue; SR on human rights defenders, Ms. Margaret Sekaggya; SR on the independence of judges and lawyers, Ms. Gabriela Knaul, SR on migrants, Mr. Jorge A. Bustamante; SR on trafficking in persons, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo; SR on Palestinian territories, Mr. Richard Falk; Working Group on people of African descent; Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
END
“Special procedures” is the general name given to the mechanisms established by the Commission on Human Rights and assumed by the Human Rights Council to address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Currently, there are 31 thematic and 8 country mandates.
Learn more about the mandate and work of Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/special/index.htm
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cedaw.htm