Credit: UNESCAP/UN Women
More than 700 representatives from governments, inter-governmental organizations, UN bodies and civil society in Asia and the Pacific began meeting today to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment with the keynote speaker highlighting the urgency of eliminating violence against women and girls.
The “Asian and Pacific Conference on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: Beijing+20 Review” is being convened in Bangkok, Thailand by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), in cooperation with UN Women, from 17 to 20 November.
In her keynote address at the opening of the conference, Her Majesty Ashi Sangay Choden Wangchuk, the Queen Mother of Bhutan, highlighted the urgency of eliminating violence against women and girls.
The “eradication of violence from the lives of women and girls, along with peace, democracy and sustainable development in the region, will become possible when women and girls are valued, when their ability to fully and freely exercise their human rights is wholly supported, when there is equality in the exercise of power and when decisions are made to fully resource comprehensive and evidenced-based interventions,” she said.
For the first time, two of the influential UN human rights expert committees have worked together to develop guidelines for States aimed at preventing and eliminating harmful practices primarily affecting women and girls.
Campaigning over many years against the most common of these practices, female genital mutilation, child and/or forced marriage, polygamy, as well as crimes committed in the name of so-called honor crimes has not led to their elimination.
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination again Women (CEDAW) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) believe that these harmful practices may actually be spreading to regions and countries where they have not been documented before, partly due to migration, and they consider that social media may also be a contributing factor.
Acknowledging their common concerns about these abuses, the Committees have developed a joint General Recommendation, which details the human rights contravened by these practices and recommends measures, both social and legal, that are available to States, which are parties to the Conventions, for their eradication.
Violeta Neubauer, the Vice-Chair of CEDAW, and Hiranthe Wijemanne, the Vice-Chair of the CRC, welcomed the joint adoption of the General Recommendation and offered their views on the issue.
Public toilet in the shanty town of Ciudad Pachacutec, Ventanilla District, El Callao Province, Peru. Photo: World Bank/Monica Tijero
With one out of three women worldwide lacking access to safe toilets, it is a moral imperative to end open defecation to ensure women and girls are not at risk of assault and rape simply because they lack a sanitation facility, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged today on World Toilet Day.
In his message for the Day, commemorated annually on 19 November – with this year’s theme Equality, Dignity and the Link Between Gender-Based Violence and Sanitation – Mr. Ban said that addressing the sanitation challenge requires a global partnership and called on Member States to “spare no effort to bring equality, dignity and safety” to women and girls around the world.
But although it is the poor who overwhelmingly do not have toilets, everyone suffers from the contaminating effects of open defecation, so everyone should have a sense of urgency about addressing this problem.
Diane was trafficked to Paris from her home country, Burkina Faso, and held in domestic servitude by an affluent family from Africa. For two years she endured terrible conditions: she was forced to work 19 hours a day, only allowed out of the apartment to take the family’s children to school, offered leftovers to eat and was threatened, insulted and debased by her employer.
Eventually, Diane plucked up the courage to run away and shortly after came into contact with the French NGO, Committee Against Modern Slavery (Comité contre l’Esclavage Moderne). The Committee integrated Diane into a social assistance programme to help her recover from the trauma.
Yearly, the UN Slavery Fund supports the Committee and several dozens of other organizations worldwide that offer refuge and specialized rehabilitation assistance to victims of modern slavery.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that approximately 53 million people, mainly women and children, are employed as domestic workers and of those, 30 percent, or nearly 16 million, have no access to legal protection. These figures are likely to be an underestimation, the ILO says, because domestic workers are hidden from the public view and are usually not counted in labour surveys.
Maria was 20-years-old and pregnant with her second child when she left her abusive boyfriend. Attempts at reconciliation had failed when one day he came to visit her at her mother’s house in the town where she had grown up in Romania. He took her to a field where two cars were parked. The men in the cars handed 1,500 euros to her ex-boyfriend, then grabbed Maria and took her to a house where she was kept prisoner, and repeatedly raped and battered over many months.
She was then traded again: “The people who bought me sold me again for 1,000 euros and a car.”
Maria’s new captors were on the way to Italy with her when they were stopped by traffic police. Maria managed to alert them and was rescued. The police referred her to the Association for the Development of Alternative Practices for Education and Reintegration (ADPARE), a Romanian NGO that assists victims of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced labour.
The UN Slavery Fund supports a number of NGOs, including ADPARE, which rescue and assist victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation and offer specialized support in the reconstruction of their lives.
