ARGENTINA:
Women Have a New Tool against Discrimination
Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, (IPS) - The Argentine Congress has ratified the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), after a tug-of-war between the forces of feminist organisations and the Catholic Church that has lasted for years.

>From now on, individuals or groups may bring complaints against the Argentine State for violations of their rights under the Convention, including "any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex (...) in the political, economic, social cultural, civil or any other field," before the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, provided that all domestic legal avenues have been exhausted.

"This is very important because the Protocol helps to enforce the rights protected by the Convention," Soledad García Muñoz, head of the CEDAW-Argentina Project at the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, told IPS.

"Argentina was the only country in the MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market, which also includes Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) trade bloc, and one of very few in South America, that had not ratified the Protocol," said García Muñoz, who worked shoulder to shoulder with women's organisations to overcome resistance to approving the international convention.

The Chamber of Deputies ratified the Protocol last Thursday by 116 votes to 30. The Senate had already approved it two weeks earlier. It must now be signed by President Néstor Kirchner.

Congress acted just a few days before the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which is commemorated on Nov. 25.

Activists at the Foundation for Studies and Research on Women (FEIM), the Women in Equality Foundation (MEI) and Women in Action, are very pleased. They have been campaigning for the ratification for at least seven years.

By ratifying the Protocol, Argentina has authorised the Committee to send a delegation to investigate allegations of "grave and systematic" violations of rights under the Convention. If the accusations are confirmed, the delegation may recommend that the State adopt corrective measures.

The Convention itself only required the State to present regular reports on the situation of women. Women's groups would then present their own "counter-reports" which often described a very different scenario to that of the official version.

CEDAW was approved in 1979 by the U.N. General Assembly, and has now been ratified by 185 countries.

But on its own, the Convention "lacks teeth," according to women activists, because it has no means of legally enforcing investigations into violations of women's rights.

Hence the importance of the Optional Protocol, which the international community adopted in 1999, and which has been ratified so far by 83 countries, not counting Argentina.

A proposal to ratify the Protocol was first sent to Congress in 2001, where it remained dormant due to pressure from the Catholic Church.

Bishops maintained that the Protocol opens the way to decriminalising abortion. Many legislators opposed ratification based on that argument, and even admitted to receiving requests in writing from senior clergy to vote against it.

Members of Congress have also claimed that giving the Committee the right to visit and make recommendations was tantamount to accepting foreign interference in the country's internal affairs, rather than a tool to cooperate in the protection of women's rights.

But women's organisations and lawmakers who were prepared to support ratification were unimpressed by such arguments. Before casting her vote in favour, Senator Marita Perceval, of the opposition Radical Civic Union party, said that the Protocol "does not create rights," but rather improves the protection of rights already safeguarded by law.

"A fierce campaign was waged against the Protocol, based on spurious myths, but we hope that its opponents will eventually realise that this is a human rights treaty that is good for women, but also for society as a whole," García Muñoz remarked. So far, the Committee's work has not given rise to many legal precedents. It has only received four complaints, just one of which -- a case of domestic violence in Hungary -- received a positive response.

In two other complaints, one from Germany and one from Turkey, the Committee ruled that domestic legal avenues had not been exhausted, and in the fourth case, from the Netherlands, they found that no breach of the Convention had been committed.

As for investigations of grave and systematic violations of women's rights, the Committee intervened in the case of the spate of killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, and made a series of recommendations to the government of that country, which had ratified the Optional Protocol.

In Argentina, which has a history of being accused in international courts of human rights violations, an issue which might give the Committee cause to intervene is the increase in human trafficking, particularly of women and children for the purposes of sexual exploitation, García Muñoz said.