International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific

Past Phases of our Work on CEDAW and Women's Human Rights

Phases of Work from 1993-2007

IWRAW Asia Pacific has worked steadily since 1993 for the progressive implementation of CEDAW.

Phase I: 1993 - 1996
Phase II: 1997-2002
Phase III: 2003-2005
Phase IV: 2006-2007

To view these activities and projects chronologically, carried out by year from 2003-2008 click here.

Phase I: 1993-1996

In the first phase (1993-1996), consistent with the aim of building women’s capacity for change, IWRAW Asia Pacific worked toward strengthening national women’s groups and alliances in Asia that could sustain treaty-related work in their countries. The role of IWRAW Asia Pacific was catalytic and supportive, and achieved the following:

Created conceptual clarity

The most significant contribution that IWRAW Asia Pacific made in this regard was to create clarity of concepts pertaining to women’s rights and equality, and to inspire women’s groups in the region to coordinate their advocacy within a rights framework. In the interests of strengthening women’s advocacy, the programme has also focused on creating a clear understanding of the concepts of substantive equality, discrimination, State obligation and the expanded concept of women’s rights as human rights, principles on which the strength of the CEDAW Convention rests.

Built capacity

Implementing the CEDAW Convention according to its principles requires a change in attitudes and approaches. Hence, the programme has also focused on developing methodologies and frameworks for analysing the various sites of discrimination, for developing holistic measures for achieving the de facto equality of women and for training women’s rights advocates both within and outside of court procedures.

Conducted regional and international advocacy

The rights focus of IWRAW Asia Pacific led to its involvement in NGO preparation for and participation in the 1995 Beijing Conference. IWRAW Asia Pacific also took part in the International Conference on Population and Development in 1993 and focused on raising awareness on the link between the CEDAW Convention and reproductive rights.

Phase II: 1997-2002

In its second phase, IWRAW Asia Pacific continued to work toward its long-term goal of bringing about the domestic application of international human rights norms for women. However, the organisation sharpened its approaches for greater impact and effectiveness by developing not only conceptual clarity from a feminist human rights perspective but also methodologies for identifying discrimination against women and State obligations under the CEDAW Convention in varying and evolving contexts. In this phase, IWRAW Asia Pacific continued to place strong focus on national-level capacity building through social investigation visits, national-level training, issue-based technical assistance, etc. The successes of Phase II have been as follows:

Developed a monitoring tool

IWRAW Asia Pacific has developed tools for monitoring the fulfilment of State obligations and for related advocacy at the national and international level. This monitoring framework is a consensus document emerging from the understanding and needs of the groups working on different issues within their countries. The framework and guidelines provide help to identify intended and unintended discrimination, their contributory factors and effects on women and to assess State obligations. It also helps to understand the cycle of discrimination against women and the interrelatedness of rights. IWRAW Asia Pacific is in the process of converting this framework into a user-friendly tool.

Established CEDAW monitoring networks

IWRAW Asia Pacific established CEDAW monitoring networks in 12 countries and built their capacity to use the monitoring framework to identify discrimination and to engage in advocacy – both at the national and international levels – to bring about policy and institutional reform. This was all part of the project known as “Facilitating the Fulfillment of State Obligations to Women’s Equality”.

Developed a training module

Based on its experiences in capacity building, IWRAW Asia Pacific has developed a five module training package. The aim of this is to strengthen the domestic application of human rights norms in relation to women’s rights. The training focuses on the CEDAW Convention and facilitates an understanding of the Convention both substantively and procedurally. The training:

creates clarity with regard to the concepts of substantive equality, the principle of non-discrimination and State obligation;

Promotes a rights approach to women’s advancement as well as the need for the development of a theoretical framework of human rights law that is reflective of the gender-based violations suffered by women;

Presents the premise that rights guaranteed by international treaties have to be actively claimed by women and that this requires the mobilisation of different constituencies and sustained advocacy with the State;

Emphasises the importance of engaging with the law as an instrument for claiming rights and develops skills in the application of the CEDAW Convention in differing contexts; and

Raises awareness of the need for synergy between local and international advocacy and provides an introduction to the UN human rights system, the reporting procedures of the CEDAW Convention, women’s role in these procedures and the significance of the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW Convention.

Improved capacity of women’s groups in Asia and their participation in regional and international advocacy

a. From Global to Local:

National groups were facilitated to build their own capacity by enabling them to participate in regional and international level advocacy (e.g. at the CEDAW reviews of State party reports through a project called “From Global to Local”, and the drafting of the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW Convention). This move highlights the fact that the domestic and international levels are interlinked and complement each other. (See Box 4). The project has enabled participating groups to move from advocacy at the national level to providing input and influencing international processes.

A further accomplishment arising from IWRAW Asia Pacific’s involvement in advocacy with the CEDAW Committee is the credibility and the confidence that the organisation enjoys with this treaty body. IWRAW Asia Pacific’s processes are viewed as an important source of information for the CEDAW Committee’s consideration of States parties reports. Also, in the absence of an established procedure for sending shadow reports to the members of this Committee, IWRAW Asia Pacific has been requested by the Committee to be the channel through which these reports can be collected and forwarded to them in a timely manner.

b. Further International Advocacy:

Drafting of the Optional Protocol:

IWRAW Asia Pacific contributed to the drafting of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW and facilitated the participation of a small team of Asian women in this process over a period of three years. Starting from 2000, IWRAW Asia Pacific was endorsed by women’s groups participating in the advocacy for the drafting of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, to spearhead a global campaign on the ratification and use of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW. IWRAW Asia Pacific therefore launched this campaign in 2000 and called it “Our Rights are Not Optional”.

Expanded constituencies

During this period, IWRAW Asia Pacific expanded its constituencies to build the capacities of governments and government institutions. This has taken place in the following countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Iraq, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Thailand. Increasingly IWRAW Asia Pacific is also engaging in the training of lawyers to sharpen their skills in litigating on behalf of women enabling them to claim equality rights and challenging discrimination. This is especially essential since domestic remedies have to be exhausted if cases are to be filed to the CEDAW Committee using the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW Convention.

Influenced laws and policies

The collaborative projects that IWRAW Asia Pacific initiated with women’s groups in various countries have contributed to several legislative and policy changes in countries such as India, Malaysia, Nepal and Pakistan.

Expanded geographical coverage

IWRAW Asia Pacific started as a small regional organisation carrying out its work in four South Asian countries. It has now expanded within the Asia Pacific region to cover more than twelve countries and to coordinate international advocacy programmes. In the area of international advocacy, IWRAW Asia Pacific coordinates an international programme which is the From Global To Local mentioned previously and plans to carry out a global campaign on the ratification and use of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW. Through these global programmes, IWRAW Asia Pacific has expanded its coverage of influence to over 100 countries.

Phase III: 2003-2005

In this phase IWRAW Asia Pacific saw the need to carve a new role for ourselves and our national partners to maximise our collective potential to trigger changes in law and policy. We worked on enhancing the capability of women’s groups to introduce a rights-based perspective in the demands they are making of the State and to combine national level activism with international activism.

The role of IWRAW Asia Pacific was one of being facilitators or intermediaries of the inclusion of women’s realities in international standard setting and in turn demanding the universality of norms at the national level. In this regard, IWRAW Asia Pacific entered a new stage of work that requires using the existing knowledge base as a starting point to develop a new set of activities and tools to strengthen women’s rights-based activism. This required a better understanding of the kinds of partnerships/collaborative projects we seek to establish with human rights organisations, international institutions and governments; the various ways we should respond to technical assistance requests from women’s groups in other regions; and the roles our constituencies play in our programmes – as activists or experts who develop new knowledge, as trainers, etc.

Therefore our objectives in Phase III were to:

Facilitate the claiming of rights by women
Sharpen understanding of equality and non discrimination and build greater capacity for their applicability;
Enhance the knowledge base and skills for application of CEDAW principles in varied and emerging contexts; and
Facilitate the participation of women in human rights standard-setting.

This was done through our two key interrelated strategies: Enhancing the realisation of rights and Building capacity for change. The first consolidates existing work and develops fresh approaches to advocacy. It includes varied levels of national and international advocacy and focuses on using the understanding of discrimination to create fresh standards and jurisprudence at the national and international level and improvements in law and policy. The second develops new ways of building capacity for advocacy through the development of national capacity for training, and the generation, dissemination and application of new ideas and knowledge to enhance the application of human rights standards.

The consolidation of existing work and/or the taking of existing work to a different level

1. At the national level:

Through selective engagement with national-level organisations in terms of direct national-level implementation. Engagement must now focus on the need to provide more tools, help develop national-level resource persons and provide any other technical assistance as may be necessary. However, with countries that are keen to work with the CEDAW Convention but have little local expertise or are countries in which we have not done much work (e.g. East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Maldives, Sri Lanka) more involvement in terms of national-level organising work may be necessary; and

Bring programme partners together regionally, to develop better understanding of selected themes relating to human rights advocacy, share experiences and to refine advocacy methods (Follow-up to the Facilitating the Fulfilment of State Obligation Project).

2. Focused more strategically on facilitating the implementation of Concluding Observations of CEDAW and other treaty bodies.

3. Developed a more rigorous understanding of the principle of equality and non-discrimination in ways that:

Can be absorbed into all levels of government action;

Will demonstrate the nature of positive obligations on States to allocate resources to contribute to crafting effective policies, programmes, remedies and action aimed at victims of discrimination (including indirect and intersectional discrimination);
Will further the understanding of requirements of effective domestic remedies – judicial, quasi-judicial or other alternatives;
Will address “non-justiciability” arguments related to substantive rights claims and economic, social and cultural rights claims and identify how to deal with courts’ concerns about intruding on the legislative domain, particularly in resource allocation;
Will further the understanding of interdependence and indivisibility of rights and discrimination;
Encompass advances considered in the work of all human rights treaty bodies;
Promote an understanding of all elements of Article 1 for the purposes of litigation;
Create skills for the use of international law in domestic advocacy, enhancing the domestic application of international human rights standards; and
Build capacity for the use of all other mechanisms for the elimination of discrimination against women.

4. Implement a more strategic information dissemination programme in collaboration with national level partners and help national level partners consolidate their CEDAW related work by facilitating the setting up of national level resource centres (could become CEDAW centres).

5. Expanded target groups for building capacity to include more government officials and lawyers.

The development of newer dimensions of work

1. Built capacity for advocacy that is knowledge-based to include:

Identification of ways to create the conditions for treaty incorporation and for treaty application even if not incorporated;
Better understanding of the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights;
An understanding of the impact of trade liberalisation on development and women’s rights and ways of reducing tension between States commitment to trade agreement and obligation to fulfil rights for people; and
The identification of State Obligation in the context of federalism and decentralisation.

2. Developed IWRAW Asia Pacific’s capability to provide technical assistance to governments on CEDAW implementation in the areas of report writing, review of draft laws, proposals for law reform, assessment of compliance of legal system with CEDAW requirements, development of national plan of action, development of framework for applying CEDAW principles into various contexts, identification of criteria for data requirements, development of monitoring indicators etc.

3. Focused on economic, social and cultural rights: health, reproductive and sexual rights and housing.

4. Built capacity for litigation strategies as means of strengthening domestic implementation of the CEDAW Convention and through the use of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.

5. Enhanced areas of international advocacy to:

Integrate perspectives of equality and non discrimination into work of other treaty bodies by expanding the From Global to Local project to other treaty bodies;
Work with Special Rapporteurs on housing and health;
Participate in standard-setting at the international level by contributing to the drafting of General Recommendations to CEDAW and CESCR;
Collaborate with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Follow-Up Unit in the implementation of the Concluding Observations;
Participate in the treaty reform process.

6. Provide technical assistance to women’s groups in other regions.

Phase IV: 2006-2007

Previous phases of IWRAW Asia Pacific’s work have included work focussed on strengthening national women’s groups and alliances in Asia who could carry out and sustain work relating to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), with IWRAW Asia Pacific providing the conceptual and analytical frameworks (tools and concepts) with which they are able to better articulate their perspectives and claim rights at the national level and ensuring that they have the necessary skills and space to engage at the level of normative formation of human rights issues e.g. at the UN. The programme recently saw the closing of its fourth phase of implementation in the period 2006-2007. This phase has been mainly about sustaining our uniqueness and relevance in relation to the developments around the UN reform process and linking national level groups to these processes.

As such, this recent phase, especially in the beginning, was deeply impacted by the developments in international human rights system towards institution building and reforms. The organisation was faced with the challenge of contributing to the development of mechanisms such as the Optional Protocol (OP) to International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and to the work of UN reform including the reform of the Treaty Bodies, the Human Rights Council and the development of the new Gender Equality Architecture. These continue to be key focus areas of our work in international advocacy even into the next phase.

At the national level, the implementation of strategies underwent some changes based on needs identified during the programme implementation with feedback and needs assessment of and by national partners. In the latter part of Phase 4, we also continued to prioritise work with national partners to ensure that ground level activism benefited from the synergies of international processes and mechanisms which meant that we looked to re-institutionalise the partnerships with national groups via the two key strategies with a focus on the South Asia and South East Asia regions, while we also worked to conceptualise a strategy for working with groups in the other geographic regions such as the Pacific and Central Asia, with which we have had sporadic interaction but no concrete implementation strategy or outlined partnership methodology. This meant targeting our capacity building activities towards development of stronger national/regional networks in South East Asia and South East Asia.

Below is a brief description of the areas of focus of this period and our accomplishments therein:

Continue to build conceptual clarity on the CEDAW Convention and its framework, and develop analytical tools and frameworks in on order to enhance the expertise and skills of women in relation to the technical aspects of CEDAW implementation.

Convening an expert group meeting to develop conceptual clarity on the issue of state obligation under the Convention. The outcome document cum advocacy brief consisted of a comprehensive set of guidelines and elements on State Obligation in relation to CEDAW and has been forwarded to the CEDAW Committee for their work on drafting the General Recommendation on Article (2).
Preliminary analysis of globalisation, trade and deregulation in relation to responsibility and accountability under international human rights law of State and non-State actors in order to reinforce the claiming of women’s human rights at all levels. This would apply in particular to trade and financial institutions, regional trading blocs and multi-national corporations.
Convening a writer’s workshop on the demonstrated uses of the CEDAW Convention and the OPCEDAW to advocate for women’s human rights at the national level (Bellagio Meeting) which brought in 17 case study writers from different parts of the world. This project looked to develop a resource (book) that would capture existing knowledge on the innovative ways that activists and NGOs have been able to use the Convention in lobbying and advocacy through law reform, litigation or institutional reform to address the violation of women’s human rights.

Development of two Occasional Papers on Addressing Rape as a Violation of Women’s Human Rights and Exploring the Potential of the UN Treaty Body System in Addressing Sexuality Rights.

Targeting and prioritising our engagement with national partners in the South Asia and South East Asia regions through capacity building activities and working towards development of stronger national/regional networks in South Asia and South East Asia.

This included activities like:

Expanded the pool of trainers by implementing a regional training of trainers for Asia Pacific
Supporting the development of national litigation strategies towards the use of the OP to CEDAW.
Developed a tool for the application of CEDAW in laws, policies and programmes and in specific contexts.
Building the capacity of the regional NGOs in the region to use the CEDAW framework in their own organisational work.
Facilitation of the Regional Campaigns on the use of Optional Protocol.
Supporting the convening of regional networks in South and South-East Asia towards strengthening and re-visiting women’s human rights implementation strategies.

Contributing to international standards setting in the area of economic, social and cultural rights.

Continued to facilitate the participation and contribution of an advocacy team of women from Asia at the Open-Ended Working group meetings on the drafting of the Optional protocol to ICESCR to ensure the inclusion of women’s human rights perspectives.

Facilitated the contribution of information on women’s rights human situations to the Universal Periodic Review process