TRES/007/10/2013 – Rights of Women in Africa
We, the participants of the NGO Forum preceding the 54th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and the 28th African Human Rights Book Fair held from 18th – 20th October, 2013 in Banjul, The Gambia
Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa;
Recalling international human rights law and in particular the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women;
Reaffirming commitments made by African governments to support women’s equal access to productive resources, under the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals;
Calls on the African Commission to:
- Recognizing the 10th anniversary of the Protocol, call for countries to ratify the Protocol in 2013/2014.
- Call for the use regional economic communities for example ECOWAS, EAC to use the African Union Maputo Protocol (Protocol) as a framework in drafting policies; making and implementing its decisions to ensure that women’s rights are respected at all levels and hold governments accountable for lack of implementation. For example, when ECOWAS is creating policies on Agriculture within the region, it should involve women and resource women in agriculture;
- Encourage popularization of the Protocol at 3 levels: regional level among Member States to remind them of their commitments; among national organizations to advocate for its ratification, domestication and implementation; and among communities levelto create support and demand from the public;
- Advocate for domestication and implementation at the national level. The Protocol should be the basis for laws and policies on women’s rights and also for State and Non-State actors to utilize to advance the rights of women in country. Civil society should work with the ACHPR to push for general comments as a strategy to provide guidelines for States on the implementation of the various articles of the Protocol;
- Encourage organizations with the capacity for legal representation should use the law and the courts to women’s rights by giving free legal services; public interest litigation and expansive interpretation of the rights of women as part of indivisibility of human rights and push for progressive jurisprudence on women’s rights;
- Promote the need for a multi-sectoral approach by governments to ensure the Protocol is implemented at all levels of government. CSOs in partnership with the Special Rapporteur on women’s rights need to sensitize Member States on areas of the Protocol that are misunderstood and thus serve as a barrier to ratification, popularization and domestication. These include provisions on marriage, land, inheritance, sexual and reproductive health and the right to safe abortion;
- Encourage circulation of decisions made at the regional level widely in States including in the communities so that ordinary women are aware of them and start demanding for their rights;
- Ensure the AU and the ACHPR stress the need for States to report on the Protocol as they report on the Charter. The ACHPR should continue disseminating the State reporting guidelines so that Countries comply with their treaty obligations to indicate what progress they’ve made to domesticate and implement the Protocol;
- Encourage disaggregated data for all targets and indicators according to girls and women with disabilities, as well as age, in order to ensure that girls and women with disabilities are being included in efforts to achieve goals and targets under the work done under the ACHPR and the NGO forum;
- Ensure the constant involvement of local or rural women and empowering women to sustain themselves and not always rely on funding to attend meetings or workshops;
- Encourage use regional mechanisms such as the commission to question decisions at the national level that roll back gains provided in the Protocol, for example in Kenya the advisory opinion that affirmative action measures to promote women political participation should be realized progressively;
- Implement and enforce advocacy for the transformation of customary and traditional religious practices that negatively affect women’s rights to land and property;
- Ensure governments have budgetary allocations in accordance with Article 4 of the Protocol to enable fast-tracking the realization of economic, cultural and social rights in Member States.
Done in Banjul, The Gambia on 20th October, 2013
