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National and Regional Women's Human Rights Strategies

An Overview

In 2008-2010 IWRAW Asia Pacific will be focusing on implementing specific regional strategies located in national realities in South and South-East Asia and building regional strategies for other regions primarily Pacific and Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In taking this work forward IWRAW Asia Pacific will focus on:

• Building Capacity to understand and apply normative standards. This will be done through trainings and skills building on the Convention, engagement with its procedures, as well as well as on tools developed by IWRAW Asia Pacific for implementation of the Convention (Rights-Based Approach Framework, Monitoring Framework and Application Framework).
  
  
• Framing and implementation of national and regional strategies to ensure implementation of the Convention for the realisation of women’s human rights. This will be done through facilitating national an cross-national meetings and consultations between organisations working with the Conventions such as around implementation of the Concluding Comments, sharing best practices, building laws, polices and programmes, challenging common obstacles using the CEDAW framework etc.
  
  
• Supporting institutionalisation of these processes to ensure sustainability. This will be done through technical assistance to regional processes that would support national implementation of strategies for implementation of the CEDAW conventions (such as South Asia Task Force for the Advancement of CEDAW (SATAC) and similar processes in South-East Asia).

National

IWRAW Asia Pacific’s role at the national level will include:

• Support national organisations as they develop and carry out women’s human rights implementation strategies to monitor governments on implementation of human rights standards
  
  
• Provide capacity building, especially national trainings of trainers and capacity building on the application of CEDAW and other international instruments on specific issues, as and when necessary
  
  
• Link national level NGOs with international events and processes
  
  
• Work with NGOs to develop and use indicators of State action
  
  
• Disseminate information as and when necessary to help NGOs best carry out their work at the national level
  

Regional

IWRAW Asia Pacific’s role at the regional level includes:

• Conduct regional trainings of trainers to develop strong resource persons that can share their knowledge in their countries and across countries
  
  
• Promote regional collaboration on common issues and campaigns, and provide arguments, rationale and frameworks to take advocacy around those issues further
  

• Facilitate exchange of expertise between national level activists and NGOs from different countries
  
  
• Assist with regional work on ratification and use of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW
  
  
• Share information about current issues, ideas, strategies, etc. (such as how to link CEDAW work with work on other HR treaties)

It is recognised that the process for engagement will be different in each sub-region as they are at different places in their CEDAW and women’s human rights work and relationships between IWRAW Asia Pacific and the national organisations are in different phases. The following sections lay out the plans for engagement in the different regions.