Signatories
and States parties
After being
adopted by the UN General Assembly on 6 October 1999, the Optional
Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (OP-CEDAW) entered into force on
the 22 December 2000.
What is
the significance of signing and ratifying the Optional Protocol
to CEDAW (OP-CEDAW)?
Governments
which ratify the OP-CEDAW recognise the competence of the Committee
on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to:
a) Consider
petitions from individual women or groups of women who have
exhausted all national remedies through a communications
procedure;
b)
Conduct inquiries into grave or systematic violations of the CEDAW
Convention through an inquiry procedure.
The OP-CEDAW
is significant for a number of reasons. Its two procedures reaffirm
existing remedies available under other international human rights
instruments, such as the first Optional Protocol to the Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention against Torture and
Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
The OP-CEDAW also advances the development of international human
rights law, and incorporates practice developed by international
monitoring mechanisms over the last 30 years. It recognises that
women continue to face specific challenges in seeking redress
for their grievances under general human rights mechanisms.
The adoption
of an Optional Protocol to provide a right to petition was one
of the commitments made by States at both the 1993 Vienna Conference
on Human Rights and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women.
Its entry into force represents a major step towards the realisation
of the objectives set out in the Beijing Platform for Action (Beijing
PFA).
Click here
for a list of Signatories and/or States parties to the OP-CEDAW.
This
page was last updated on June15, 2003
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Asia Pacific is an independent, non-profit, NGO in Special consultative
status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.”
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