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Study Finds Treaty Under-used and Unknown
The International Women's Rights Project (IWRP) at York University's Centre for Feminist Research conducted the study based on original research and will release it at the Permanent Mission of Canada to the UN in New York, Friday, June 16. The pilot study concludes that the treaty is under-utilized in every country and virtually unknown in some of them, particularly Canada. But it notes a growing awareness among women's groups who participated in the study of how they can use the CEDAW convention to pressure their governments to abide by international treaty commitments.
"This study demonstrates that you can monitor the impact of human rights treaties on a qualitative basis independent of governments and the UN system," says IWRP Director Marilou McPhedran. "It is evidence of the paradigm shift away from armchair diplomacy at the UN towards implementing the rights we have on paper." The CEDAW Committee of the UN currently monitors the progress of implementation of the treaty through country reports that governments have promised to submit periodically. In the past decade, women's NGOs have started to bring to the monitoring committee their own "shadow reports" to ensure that a perspective other than governments' is heard.
McPhedran says the grassroots impact study offers a more systematic method of assessing implementation of the human rights treaties, "so we can determine whether allocation of resources in the UN system might be better spent at the grassroots level". In their introduction to the final report of the study, two noted international experts on CEDAW, Prof. Andrew Byrnes of Hong Kong and Dr. Jane Connors of the UN, state: "The standards of the Convention have been interpreted and applied to the scenes where the violations are occurring. The results of this study will be transmitted to the front lines and, we hope, will assist in forming the basis of powerful arguments for transferring resources to the field."
The study comes at a time of increasing pressure for reform of the UN bureaucracy and calls to declare a "decade of implementation" to move human rights from de jure (by right) to de facto (actual) guarantees. Grassroots impact studies on all the major UN treaties on Human Rights are being conducted through York University under the direction of Prof. Anne Bayefsky, an advisor to the CEDAW study. This work is in collaboration with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
"As we see ourselves more as world citizens and try to adjust to a world without borders, where governments have less power and wealth than transnational corporations, our resources have to be able to operate outside traditional national boundaries," says McPhedran. The CEDAW study notes that as women around the world become convinced of the legitimacy of their rights, demands arise for national and international mechanisms through which they can claim these rights. "Since the CEDAW Convention is the principal legal instrument addressing women's rights and equality, it takes on even more significance," the report states.
The CEDAW study looks at implementation of the Convention in 10 countries representative of the five regions of the globe and with a diversity of geography, legal structure, and stages of economic development. The countries are: Canada, Germany, Japan, Nepal, Netherlands, Panama, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and Ukraine. The study aimed to supplement NGO-derived information with independent, original research as a basis for comparative analysis of the treaty's usefulness in member countries. In the process, it sought ways to make more effective use of the Convention and make these strategies more widely known among the network of grassroots participants in each country. "The women whose work is reflected in this study are bringing about change. Their experience and needs form the basis of the link between the local to the global and the global to the local," the report states. "In doing so, women are transforming the Convention into a truly living instrument through being active in this work."
The study was funded principally by the Ford Foundation, with additional support from the Canadian International Development Agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the United Nations funding agency for women UNIFEM, and a range of NGOs and private individuals and foundations. An international Advisory Committee of experts was established to guide the study, and the author of each country report was chosen on the basis of their academic credentials, links to the grassroots, and knowledge of the CEDAW treaty.
The study will be released at the Canadian Mission in a luncheon meeting in-camera with the CEDAW Committee, now in its 23rd session. The meeting will be chaired by Ford Foundation Program Officer for Human Rights and International Cooperation, Barbara Sullivan, with presentations by authors of three of the country papers in the study -- Turkey, Germany and Canada.
For further information, please contact:
Marilou McPhedran
Susan Bigelow
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