Address by Dr. Anamah Tan, President of the International Council of Women, at the National Council of Women of New Zealand’s launch of its Alternative Shadow Report to CEDAW, at NCWNZ’s Conference 2006, Invercargill, New Zealand, 30th September 2006.

Distinguished Participants,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Colleagues and Friends.

On behalf of the Board Members of the International Council of Women, I congratulate the National Council of Women of New Zealand and all the NGOs that contributed to the 2006 Alternative Shadow Reportto the CEDAW Committee.

ICW is extremely proud to have a national affiliate that is pro-active in the CEDAW mechanism. With your alternative report, you have fulfilled an extremely important role in helping to enforce women’s legal rights to equality through your monitoring and recommendations.

NGO shadow reports are considered seriously by all the CEDAW experts during the constructive review of the State parties. They are also a critical source of input for the CEDAW pre-sessional working groups, when they convene to draft the list of issues and questions for State parties to respond to before the review session.

We, women NGOs, have a duty to be alert to our Governments’ actions. We have a duty to spur or complement state efforts to achieve the goals of CEDAW, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the Outcome Document of the 23rd Special Session of the General Assembly, and the Millennium Development Goals. These are just a few key examples.

Besides our role as monitoring agents, we are also gap-fillers. We address the urgent needs of women when the state is unable, for some reason, to act yet. And in all that we do, we are advocates for the human right to gender equality.

Indeed, the grassroots work of women’s organisations, such as the NCWNZ’s, is indispensable for protecting and advancing the human rights of women.

Take the issue of violence against women, for example, and I refer to the Report of the Secretary-General on his in-depth study on all forms of violence against women. It will be discussed in October during the 61st session of the UN General Assembly. The Report acknowledges unreservedly that, “[T]he issue of violence against women came to prominence because of the grassroots work of women’s organisations and movements around the world.”[1]

In another section of the Report, it is stated: “Women’s movements and human rights organisations have a crucial role to play in initiatives to address violence against women, in particular to translate international standards into reality at the local level.”[2]

These affirmations were made in the context of our fight to eradicate violence against women. But, really, they apply with equal force to all women’s rights issues, and this was acknowledged in the earlier Outcome Document of the 23rd Special Session of the UN General Assembly.

Distinguished Participants,

We shall continue to bring measurable, concrete results to the women and girls in the communities for whom we were organised to serve in the first place. Let us have this for the record: there is nothing esoteric about women’s rights – it is all about how women have to live their lives every single day doing their everyday tasks with as much dignity and as equal a human being as their male counterparts, as is possible.

As NCW NZ is launching theAlternative Shadow Report today, I feel it is appropriate to speak on the new modalities that CEDAW experts started to use at the 36th session this last August. I shall touch on (i) the parallel chamber method for reviewing State reports, and (ii) the new Harmonised Guidelines for Reporting. I shall speak on the parallel chamber first.

(i) Parallel Chamber

Why the parallel chamber? To clear the backlog of reports.

During the 36th session in August 2006 at the UN Headquarters in New York, 15 country reports were reviewed – virtually twice the usual eight reviewed per session.

The CEDAW Committee used the parallel chamber method of review for the first time to handle this double volume. The 23 experts were divided into two chambers. Each chamber dealt with seven country reports, but all the concluding comments were done in plenary by all the CEDAW experts present. Cape Verde was the exception.The CEDAW Committee as a whole convened for the dialogue session with Cape Verdeas it was presenting its initial report, which it combined with its overdue periodic reports, right up to the sixth one.

This parallel chamber review method worked well, and will be used again at the 37th CEDAW session in January next year.

(ii) New Harmonised Guidelines for Reporting

Now, allow me to give you a rundown on the new reporting guidelines for treaty bodies, which was adopted during the Human Rights Treaty Bodies’ Fifth Inter-Committee Meeting (ICM) in June 2006, in Geneva.

The new harmonised reporting guidelines require State parties to submit two documents: 1) the Common Core Document, and the 2) Treaty-Specific Document.

The idea of a Core Document, which aims to reduce some repetition, is not new - it was introduced in 1991.

However, with the new guidelines, a whole lot more information is explicitly required of State parties to be included in the Core Document. There is a very detailed list of items or issues that must be addressed by State parties. Information in the Common Core Document must be kept current. If a State party considers it unnecessary to update the Core Document when submitting the Treaty-Specific Document, then this must be stated explicitly.

We, NGOs, would do good to keep track on whether all the listed items areindeed addressed by our Governments in their reports to the CEDAW monitoring committee. I know IWRAW has put this new reporting guidelines on its website. So, you can check it out after this event, if you have not already.

Once again, in my capacity as a CEDAW Committee Member and the President of the International Council of Women, I thank you, NCW NZ, for your continual diligence to come up with very timely alternative shadow reports in collaboration with other NGOs. Speaking in my capacity as ICW President, it is my fervent hope that ICW’s national affiliates will track development targets diligently and put up shadow reports for their own countries. In this way, ICW will be more efficient in monitoring the advancement of women and closing the gap between the local, national and international arena.

Thank you.

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[1]Report of the Secretary-General on his in-depth study on all forms of violence against women, A/61/122/Add.1, para 23, p.13.

[2] Ibid, para 63, p.24.