PRESS CONFERENCE ON DISCRIMINATORY LAWS AGAINST WOMEN

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE ON DISCRIMINATORY LAWS AGAINST WOMEN

At a Headquarters press conference this morning, Equality Now, an organization that promotes the political, economic and social rights of women around the world, asked how much progress had been made in implementing the measures adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995) and how committed governments were to carrying out the promises they had made. Monique Widyono, Co-Director of the organization, said they had launched a report last July highlighting a representative sampling of laws that discriminated against women in 45 countries and there were many more countries with similar laws.

“For the past year, we have been engaged in a worldwide campaign calling on governments to change these laws, which are fundamentally inconsistent with the basic human right to equality”, she said. “Five years ago at Beijing, governments reaffirmed the right to equality and made a specific commitment in paragraph 232(d) of the Platform for Action to revoke all laws which discriminate on the basis of sex. Discriminatory laws are just the tip of the iceberg of discrimination against women, which takes so many forms. If governments can’t even change these laws, our question is, is there real commitment to equality or are these conference just about rhetoric”? she asked.

She admitted that some laws had been changed since the Beijing Conference and Equality Now welcomed that progress. She also noted with some satisfaction that the Governments of Peru and Costa Rica had amended their laws, which previously allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims, and that the Government of Venezuela had recently adopted a new Constitution that allowed women to pass on citizenship to their foreign-born husbands -– a right previously reserved for men.

“Unfortunately, many other countries still have similar laws in force”, she said. “There are many countries in which the law exonerates men who murder their own daughters, sisters and wives in so-called ‘honour killings’. There are many countries in which the law requires ‘wife obedience.’”

Ms. Widyono then introduced the following five women: Dr. Fatima al Adawi, involved with the campaign for women’s suffrage in Kuwait; Meaza Ashenafi, Executive Director of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association; Sapana Pradhan-Malla, founder and Director of the Forum for Women Law and Development in Nepal; Susana Chiarotti, Regional Coordinator for the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights; and Jean Kamau, founder and Executive Director of FIDA – Kenya (Organization of Women Lawyers).

In highlighting the plight of women in Kuwait, Dr. al Adawi said that five years after Beijing, Kuwaiti women still did not have the

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vote, despite the fact they had been campaigning since the late 1960s. There had been some progress in 1999, when the Amir decreed that women should have full political rights, but that was rejected by Parliament. However, as a result of that decree, a group of women had brought a lawsuit against the government claiming that the election laws, which deny women their political rights, were unconstitutional. The case was heard for the first time on 8 March -- International Women’s Day.

“Unfortunately society in Kuwait is going backwards as far as political rights for women are concerned”, she continued. “We feel that women were better off in the sixties, seventies and eighties, although they have made progress in education and employment. Women make up 70 per cent of university graduates and 51.2 per cent of the population, but are still a long way away from holding managerial level jobs, because they are not a position to change legislation.”

Meaza Ashenafi told correspondents that many of Ethiopia’s civil and criminal laws enshrined provisions that hindered equality for women in private life and denied them participation at the public level. The Ethiopian family law, penal law, pension law and nationality law all contained direct and indirect discriminatory features.

“The Family Law, which was enacted in 1960, designates the husband as the sole administrator of the matrimonial property and provider of guidance to the children, while the Penal Law legitimizes the marriage of abducted and raped girls to the culprits”, she said. “The Nationality law discriminates against Ethiopian women who marry foreigners by forcing them to abandon their Ethiopian nationality and acquire that of their husbands, while a foreigner who marries an Ethiopian man is automatically conferred Ethiopian citizenship.”

Ms Ashenafi added, however, that there had been some progress since 1995 when a new constitution was ratified. That provided a legal framework for the repeal of all discriminatory laws and practices. The Constitution also incorporated all international human rights conventions to be part of domestic law. Ethiopian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and public agencies had also succeeded in bringing the issue of women’s rights to national forums, but there was still much to be done.

Sapana Pradhan-Malla told correspondents that Nepalese women not only faced social and cultural bias, but were also discriminated against by State laws in every aspect of their lives, especially in terms of their inheritance rights. In order for a woman to inherit her family’s property she had to be at least 35 years old and unmarried. If she married after that, she had to return all her inheritance, whereas a son did not have to meet any of those conditions.

She said that the government argument that the law existed because women could inherit property from their husbands was flawed, because there were also conditions attached to that inheritance. A woman could only inherit property from her husband if she was 35 years

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old and had been married for 15 years, but then the husband could take a second wife without her consent.

“This situation does not only violate the human rights of women, but also has a negative impact on their overall development”, she continued. ”Their health is often affected. Nepal is one of the few countries where the life expectancy of women is lower than that of men and maternal mortality is the highest in the world. Women are not considered as a family member and the State does not recognize their independent existence. Women cannot confer citizenship rights to her children or her spouse whereas a man can.”

Although Nepal had committed itself to providing equal inheritance rights to women at Beijing, she said, it had not done so. A recent Parliamentary bill that recognized women as heirs also stated that they lost that right once they married. She appealed to correspondents to raise the issue of women’s rights in their respective media.

Susana Chiarotti said that Equality Now’s campaign denouncing discriminatory laws at the global level had symbolic and practical goals and did not imply that discrimination in laws was the only problem, but was simply an example of the difficulties faced in achieving equality for women.

She added that in Latin America and the Caribbean, laws that discriminated against women existed in every country. Some of the most outrageous examples were the laws that provided an exemption from penalty for perpetrators of indecent assault, abduction or statutory rape if they offer to marry their victims. Such laws existed in Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela. Those laws have their roots in religious norms dating from 1,200 B.C. A raped girl was then considered damaged goods and the person who had done the damage was allowed to keep the girl.

She said there had been some progress, however. Peru, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile had abolished similar laws last year. She appealed to the rest to follow their example, as such crimes could not be discouraged by offering perpetrators the option of jail or marriage.

Jean Kamau said that since Beijing, the Kenyan Government had done very little to implement the provisions of the Platform for Action, but there had been a few amendments to their Constitution starting in 1997 which removed sex as a basis for discrimination and gave women access to decision-making in Parliament through nomination. However, the Government was still reluctant to improve citizenship rights for women and to amend any customary laws which discriminated against women.

She added that there were two draft laws on equality and affirmative action that had already been approved by Parliament, but a bill still had to be brought by the Attorney General. Women were still

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concerned that the issue of customary law provisions could hamper their efforts.

Also during the press conference, performance artist Sarah Jones gave a short version of a one-woman show illustrating the impact of discriminatory laws on women’s lives.

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