Recently, America saw a section of women fighting for the right to go topless like men, terming it as an area of gender equality that is yet to be considered at the national level. A few weeks ago, France—citing incompatibility with its Constitutional principle of gender equality—revoked a 200-year-old law that had made it illegal for Parisian women to don pants.
While the debate goes on across the globe as to what constitutes gender equality, the urgent need for it gained major momentum when the world’s most populous democracy—India—witnessed nation-wide agitations against the heinous gang rape of a 23-year-old girl, a physiotherapy student, in Delhi in December 2012.
Two months prior to that, in the neighboring Pakistan, a 15-year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, an education activist, was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen. (A Taliban ‘spokesman’ had reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack. Miraculously, Yousafzai is recovering, and has now become the youngest nominee in history for the Nobel Peace Prize).
Following these two incidents, there were massive protests that cut across gender and geographical barriers thanks to the vast reach of media and social networks. These protests are now seen as the turning point in the fight for gender equality and justice as well as women’s empowerment the world over.
The anger raging over violence against women has found an echo in the top echelons of power in the developed world too, as it reportedly evoked comments from influential leaders including the then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Even as India’s President Pranab Mukherjee signed into law an ordinance prescribing death as the maximum punishment for rape leading to death of the victim, and the day-to-day trial of the five men accused in the Delhi gang rape case continues in a special fast-track court, calls for speedy justice in such cases are being heard from all corners of the world.
It is during these trying times that people and governments desperately look for the way forward to legally right the wrongs. The report by an inter-governmental body, the International Development Law Organization (IDLO)—titled Accessing Justice: Models, Strategies and Best Practices on Women’s Empowerment—could not have been more timely.
The Director-General of IDLO, Irene Khan—who incidentally is the first woman to hold this post—told Diplomatic Courier that the common thread connecting all countries is the realization that legal, social, and economic empowerment of women has become absolutely essential in today’s world.
While there are many definitions of ‘gender equality’, Khan says the term means women not only getting equal rights but also equal access to justice, and adds that equal protection of men and women is fundamental to justice. “Time and again we have seen that women do not get equal protection of the law,” she says.
The IDLO report includes case studies on topics ranging from violence against women in Afghanistan, to trafficking of girls in India; land practices experienced by divorced and widowed women in Mozambique, Rwanda, and Tanzania; problems in the legal empowerment of unwed mothers in Morocco; gender inequality in Namibia; dispute resolution training in Papua New Guinea; and, land ownership issues for women in the Solomon Islands.
It found that “in many countries, women face structural and cultural barriers that prevent them from accessing justice.” Significantly, it also observes that “Even where women can access the formal justice sector, the outcomes of the process often fall far short of those envisaged by international standards, particularly with regard to property rights, inheritance, divorce and child custody, and spousal abuse.”
Changing the status quo is a struggle as the report found that, “attempts by individual women to challenge discriminatory norms may result at best in accusations that such women are acting against local culture or have become ‘westernized’. At worse, such attempts can lead to outright ostracism and physical harm.”
In the report’s foreword, Khan—reflecting her numerous years of experience in gender justice and women’s empowerment issues—writes: “No measure taken in isolation—whether it is a law banning gender discrimination, or the nomination of women leaders in a customary justice system—will in and of itself bring about change, as long as the political, social and economic factors that feed injustice and gender discrimination are left unaddressed.”
According to the report, the lesson learned from the case studies is that, while legal empowerment strategies can be utilized successfully to enhance women’s access to justice in formal and informal systems, they are most effective only when implemented in an approach that is a combination of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up (through local partners including from civil society) and also when they are designed to address women’s access to justice in a context-specific manner.
“There is no single medicine for all cases. The challenge is in designing context-specific strategies. What may work in Namibia may not work in Afghanistan,” says Khan.
The report also recommends engaging “with informal justice systems, despite the challenges of program design,” especially as four out of five cases in developing countries are solved by informal courts.
The report also suggests partnering with non-legal service providers, especially those working in the fields of “women’s economic empowerment and income generation, protection from violence and food security.”
Asked if gaining financial independence as well as control and ownership of property are the panacea for all the problems that women face, Khan says it is best when awareness of legal and economic rights go hand-in-hand. “Even those women who earn see their husbands taking it away by force or culture coercing them to give these earnings to their families,” she says.
On the limiting factors for women’s rights, the IDLO report notes that an appalling 86 of the 112 countries scored in the 2012 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Social Institutions and Gender Index, had discriminatory laws or practices regarding property and inheritance.
The IDLO Accessing Justice 2013 report is part of a series, the next of which will focus on how technology is making a difference in empowering women to access justice. “For instance, Argentinean women, when faced with threats to their safety, are using mobile applications that help in sending emergency text messages. Mobile technology, which has been used by women to access banking and health services, is now being modified for helping them access justice,” Khan says.
The findings of the next IDLO report, if focused on technology, should be interesting as in many cases it is seen that technology accelerates economic progress both for women and men.
At a time, when the world is making frantic efforts to generate employment and boost economic growth, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland articulated the advantages of the gender inclusion agenda succinctly. Pointing to a recent study, Lagarde said it estimated that just by raising women’s employment rates to the level of men, GDP of many countries would show a significant jump—by 5 percent in the U.S., 9 percent in Japan, 10 percent in South Africa, 27 percent in India, and 34 percent in Egypt.
“When women do better, economies do better…we must tear down all obstacles in the path of women, even the subconscious obstacles of the mind,” Lagarde said, exhorting policymakers and leaders to lend more support to women.
Global bodies have begun to rank countries on how they treat their women. The United Nations Development Programme has a Gender Inequality Index, while the World Economic Forum publishes the Global Gender Gap Report, just to name a few. Enlightened investors—mindful of the best corporate governance practices—are watching these rankings closely before putting their money in countries. When better business sense prevails, it will just be a matter of time before gender equality becomes a reality.
UN Photo by Martine Perret.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's March/April 2013 print edition.
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Welcome Work in Progress
March 23, 2013
Recently, America saw a section of women fighting for the right to go topless like men, terming it as an area of gender equality that is yet to be considered at the national level. A few weeks ago, France—citing incompatibility with its Constitutional principle of gender equality—revoked a 200-year-old law that had made it illegal for Parisian women to don pants.
While the debate goes on across the globe as to what constitutes gender equality, the urgent need for it gained major momentum when the world’s most populous democracy—India—witnessed nation-wide agitations against the heinous gang rape of a 23-year-old girl, a physiotherapy student, in Delhi in December 2012.
Two months prior to that, in the neighboring Pakistan, a 15-year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, an education activist, was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen. (A Taliban ‘spokesman’ had reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack. Miraculously, Yousafzai is recovering, and has now become the youngest nominee in history for the Nobel Peace Prize).
Following these two incidents, there were massive protests that cut across gender and geographical barriers thanks to the vast reach of media and social networks. These protests are now seen as the turning point in the fight for gender equality and justice as well as women’s empowerment the world over.
The anger raging over violence against women has found an echo in the top echelons of power in the developed world too, as it reportedly evoked comments from influential leaders including the then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Even as India’s President Pranab Mukherjee signed into law an ordinance prescribing death as the maximum punishment for rape leading to death of the victim, and the day-to-day trial of the five men accused in the Delhi gang rape case continues in a special fast-track court, calls for speedy justice in such cases are being heard from all corners of the world.
It is during these trying times that people and governments desperately look for the way forward to legally right the wrongs. The report by an inter-governmental body, the International Development Law Organization (IDLO)—titled Accessing Justice: Models, Strategies and Best Practices on Women’s Empowerment—could not have been more timely.
The Director-General of IDLO, Irene Khan—who incidentally is the first woman to hold this post—told Diplomatic Courier that the common thread connecting all countries is the realization that legal, social, and economic empowerment of women has become absolutely essential in today’s world.
While there are many definitions of ‘gender equality’, Khan says the term means women not only getting equal rights but also equal access to justice, and adds that equal protection of men and women is fundamental to justice. “Time and again we have seen that women do not get equal protection of the law,” she says.
The IDLO report includes case studies on topics ranging from violence against women in Afghanistan, to trafficking of girls in India; land practices experienced by divorced and widowed women in Mozambique, Rwanda, and Tanzania; problems in the legal empowerment of unwed mothers in Morocco; gender inequality in Namibia; dispute resolution training in Papua New Guinea; and, land ownership issues for women in the Solomon Islands.
It found that “in many countries, women face structural and cultural barriers that prevent them from accessing justice.” Significantly, it also observes that “Even where women can access the formal justice sector, the outcomes of the process often fall far short of those envisaged by international standards, particularly with regard to property rights, inheritance, divorce and child custody, and spousal abuse.”
Changing the status quo is a struggle as the report found that, “attempts by individual women to challenge discriminatory norms may result at best in accusations that such women are acting against local culture or have become ‘westernized’. At worse, such attempts can lead to outright ostracism and physical harm.”
In the report’s foreword, Khan—reflecting her numerous years of experience in gender justice and women’s empowerment issues—writes: “No measure taken in isolation—whether it is a law banning gender discrimination, or the nomination of women leaders in a customary justice system—will in and of itself bring about change, as long as the political, social and economic factors that feed injustice and gender discrimination are left unaddressed.”
According to the report, the lesson learned from the case studies is that, while legal empowerment strategies can be utilized successfully to enhance women’s access to justice in formal and informal systems, they are most effective only when implemented in an approach that is a combination of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up (through local partners including from civil society) and also when they are designed to address women’s access to justice in a context-specific manner.
“There is no single medicine for all cases. The challenge is in designing context-specific strategies. What may work in Namibia may not work in Afghanistan,” says Khan.
The report also recommends engaging “with informal justice systems, despite the challenges of program design,” especially as four out of five cases in developing countries are solved by informal courts.
The report also suggests partnering with non-legal service providers, especially those working in the fields of “women’s economic empowerment and income generation, protection from violence and food security.”
Asked if gaining financial independence as well as control and ownership of property are the panacea for all the problems that women face, Khan says it is best when awareness of legal and economic rights go hand-in-hand. “Even those women who earn see their husbands taking it away by force or culture coercing them to give these earnings to their families,” she says.
On the limiting factors for women’s rights, the IDLO report notes that an appalling 86 of the 112 countries scored in the 2012 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Social Institutions and Gender Index, had discriminatory laws or practices regarding property and inheritance.
The IDLO Accessing Justice 2013 report is part of a series, the next of which will focus on how technology is making a difference in empowering women to access justice. “For instance, Argentinean women, when faced with threats to their safety, are using mobile applications that help in sending emergency text messages. Mobile technology, which has been used by women to access banking and health services, is now being modified for helping them access justice,” Khan says.
The findings of the next IDLO report, if focused on technology, should be interesting as in many cases it is seen that technology accelerates economic progress both for women and men.
At a time, when the world is making frantic efforts to generate employment and boost economic growth, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland articulated the advantages of the gender inclusion agenda succinctly. Pointing to a recent study, Lagarde said it estimated that just by raising women’s employment rates to the level of men, GDP of many countries would show a significant jump—by 5 percent in the U.S., 9 percent in Japan, 10 percent in South Africa, 27 percent in India, and 34 percent in Egypt.
“When women do better, economies do better…we must tear down all obstacles in the path of women, even the subconscious obstacles of the mind,” Lagarde said, exhorting policymakers and leaders to lend more support to women.
Global bodies have begun to rank countries on how they treat their women. The United Nations Development Programme has a Gender Inequality Index, while the World Economic Forum publishes the Global Gender Gap Report, just to name a few. Enlightened investors—mindful of the best corporate governance practices—are watching these rankings closely before putting their money in countries. When better business sense prevails, it will just be a matter of time before gender equality becomes a reality.
UN Photo by Martine Perret.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's March/April 2013 print edition.
