Rockbites: UN gives women new recourse against discrimination

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December 2000 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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UN gives women new recourse against discrimination
28 December 2000

On 22 December the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women became international law. The new Protocol lets individual women bring complaints of discrimination and human rights violations, as defined in the Convention, before the United Nations for investigation and resolution. Such complaints can now lead to full scale investigation of systematic human rights abuses.
The fine print says complaints from individual women may be made only after national remedies have been exhausted, and only if the complainant is a citizen of a participating nation. With these restrictions, the Protocol nonetheless becomes the very first internationally recognized means of recourse for millions of women against a wide range of human rights abuses.
The United States of America has not only failed to take a leadership role in the Protocol, but lagging 63 other countries has not even now signed it. Signature indicates non-legally binding endorsement. Full, legally binding adoption is called ratification—as of last week 13 countries have ratified the Optional Protocol:

Austria
Bangladesh
Bolivia
Denmark
France
Ireland
Italy
Mali
Namibia
New Zealand
Senegal
Slovakia
Thailand
The USA’s abstention from the Optional Protocol follows a pattern it has established with other international human rights conventions including the Convention On The Rights Of The Child (CRC). Along with the eastern African nation of Somalia, which recently emerged from a dictatorship and a two decade civil war but has not yet established democracy, the USA is the only UN member that has not ratified the CRC. | Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women | | Optional Protocol | | Convention of the Rights of the Child | | email the US president | | top of page |

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