Using CEDAW in the UK

CEDAW is the UN Women’s Bill of Rights. CEDAW stands for ‘the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women’ and 186 countries have ratified it worldwide.

During February the Women’s Resource Centre worked with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and Rights of Women to present four events exploring ways CEDAW can be used in the UK. We held events in Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle and women came from across the UK.

Workshops were run by Rights of Women and the British Institute of Human Rights as well as by WRC and members of the CEDAW Working Group. The workshops included an introduction to using CEDAW and other human rights standards in work on violence against women, information on other international women’s rights instruments and international mechanisms in general, and how CEDAW and other tools can be used to lobby and make change locally.

The EHRC also talked about the Optional Protocol – a legal way an individual woman can bring her case directly to the UN if she has been discriminated against.

Every four years the UK Government have to submit a report about the steps they have taken to achieve real, substantive equality for women. Their next report to the UN CEDAW Committee will be published this summer.

Women's and human rights organisations and campaign-groups can submit shadow reports to have their voices heard by the UN. These events were a valuable opportunity to consult with regional women’s groups and offer them support to feedback into the next shadow report.

The women who attended offered important insights into the challenges facing the women’s sector and the women they support and they provided powerful case studies from their work. It was wonderful to meet so many women and we really enjoyed the training, but don’t just take it from us, see what the women who attended said about the events!

Putting CEDAW into action: Global South/North exchange

Yesterday, around 60 people turned out for our WRC/ WOMANKIND Worldwide event on putting the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) into action.

The main attendees were from women’s organisations around England, including: Rise, Women @ the Well, Brighton Women’s Centre, Women’s Networking Hub, Sparkhill Asian Women’s Association, Her Centre, SERICC, FORWARD, The Fawcett Society, the Daphne Project, Sandwell Rape and Sexual Violence Support Service, WILPF, Women's National Commission and more.

Other attendees included human rights groups: British Institute of Human Rights, UNA-UK, Oxfam, UNIFEM UK… and even a delegate from the Metropolitan Police!

Speakers were women from front line (Rape Crisis, South Africa) and second tier (Institute for the Defense of Women’s Rights, Peru) women’s orgs from Nepal, Ghana, Peru, South Africa and Zimbabwe. These women have been using CEDAW to mobilise women locally and lobby their own governments for changes in women’s lives around sexual and reproductive rights, violence against women, sexuality, social and economic rights, political representation, and much more.

The participants extracted learning from these experiences for application in the UK – with a focus on making CEDAW relevant to women and actually being able to use it here. We looked at opportunities and challenges, and ideas for individual organisations, WRC, other partners and the government to take forward.

Key messages include:

• There is a hunger to learn more about CEDAW
• CEDAW is the framework within which all our work sits, in that it is soley concerned with women and has as its core equality, non-discrimination and obligation for state parties to eliminate discrimination against women
• Women’s organisations and government officials need training and information on CEDAW, especially in the regions (i.e. outside London)
• We need to think about some test cases, especially for future use of the Optional Protocol
• This needs to be properly funded work, both at an individual organisation level (e.g. orgs to include a budget line in each funding application for lobbying) and at a second tier level (i.e. coordination of shadow reports)
• The process of writing shadow reports needs to be truly democratised to allow for the widest range of input from diverse women and their orgs
• It is so important to mobilise, work and lobby together
• It is good that we have started NOW in preparation for 2012.
  

It was a very inspiring and humbling event – there is a LOT that we can learn from our sisters in the Global South. Maria Ysabel from Peru closed her speech by saying “we are here because your fight is my fight, and my fight is yours”.

A gendered perspective on climate change

We have all been hearing a lot about climate change recently – for some this may mean reducing our carbon footprint by pledging to recycle more or not fly, for others this is such a huge issue that we may feel powerless or be waiting for the government to make changes first. This is seen as an issue that affects us all but does it affect some of us more than others?

Globally, women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to our different social roles and status. In the UK and other developed countries, increasing costs for energy, transport, healthcare and nutrition are likely to affect women more than men. In developing countries, women are already suffering disproportionately more as a consequence of climate change.

Unfortunately many campaigns around climate change do not take this into account and ignore the fact that their campaign actions may also disproportionately affect women. For example asking us to recycle more, turn down our thermostat, buy organic produce and wash at 30 degrees are all actions which women, the majority of the time, will be responsible for.

There is a rich history of women being involved in environmental activism and luckily there are various women’s organisations that are still raising these issues and working on climate change. From the Women’s Environmental Network and the Women’s Institute’s work with their members, to Wise Women, to the Climate Rush, who recreate great Suffragette actions with a new agenda; as well as all the women’s organisations that have environmental policies and are working sustainably as part of their work with and for women.

There is also a new campaign which aims to have cut UK emissions by 10% in 2010. The 10:10 campaign is just beginning but there is a chance for women’s organisations to get involved and profile their environmental work. Contact harriet@1010uk.org for more information.

Climate change is an issue that will effect us all but we must make sure that gender is not an afterthought to this movement and that women are not shouldering the burden of responsibility – Take action now, this is only the beginning!