Bridging the Gap: gender-responsive budgeting and CEDAW compliance in the country reporting process

It is most encouraging to see veiconle against women and the need for stronger laws as one of the seven priority focus areas of UN Women connected together in the same breath. This connection is essential if women/girls are to forge their life on the human right road to equality. It is easily imagined the painful difficulties of gendered oppression the women of the mid and late 40s endured, the hours of exhaustive efforts needed for them to reverse the Declaration on the ‘Rights of Men’ – men meaning male gender/sex only – to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its statement that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity”. Although these women are invisible to me today, I do know they existed and very frequently speak of my gratitude for their achievements. They made gendered equality statements appear on paper, in a Declaration that stands for all to see and to refer to as an evaluate tool. It reminds us of where we have come from and where we need to go. My gratitude is coated with respectfulness not only because the articles of the Declarations act as evaluations tools to measure our global community’s socio-cultural and relational developmental progressions or lack thereof, but the Declaration and its contents are deeply intimate. Why? Because the Declaration and its contents acted as a guide for me since I was a young girl. Because the Declaration helped me realize that many of the oppressive issues my mother, as a divorced woman of the 50s, encountered were related to her gender/sex therefore were patriarchal conditioned gendered discrimination and unjust. She was without equality in Canada and without legal protection from life-threatening domestic veiconle. Although there are some laws now these are inadequate and are still based in patriarchal fundamentalism. As the UN Women’s statement reads, laws need to be implemented, but also provide protection and prevention. This is true for women in all nations.Laws must provide for women’s equality to have the lived experience of what it means to be born free and have dignity. This is still not so for women and girls around this globe. It is not true for the women who entrust me with their testimonials of horror of acts of torture they endured in the so-called private sphere, inflicted by a spouse, parents, like-minded family members and others such as exploiters and pedophiles. They, as yet, have been unable to find their rightful place on the human rights agenda. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration states that “no on shall be subjected to torture”, but, I suggest, there has and continues to be a patriarchal divide that has drifted down from the ‘Rights of Men” whereby laws on the naming and prevention of torture have generally been considered to belong to the so-called male public sphere; whereas, acts of veiconle against women that constitute torture are commonly misnamed and therefore invisibilized socially and frequently in law. If women are to know the meaning of equality, freedom and dignity every article of the Declaration must be applicable to each and every woman no matter who she is. Women ourselves need to claim our rights-based ownership to each and every article of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. For women who are unable to do so we must do so for them because human rights are women’s rights and belong to all women – equally. Respectfully,Jeanne Sarson,International relations Committee, CFUWCanada