WEEP Participants Introduce Themselves:
Regrets: Maha Abu-Dayyeh Shamas (Palestine), Sunila Abeseekerye (sp? Sri Lanka), Mariama Williams (Caribbean), Catherine Albertyn (South Africa), Lauren Baldwin-Ragaven (South Africa).
Sarah Zaidi: is originally from Pakistan, and has been living in New York City for the last 6 years. She is a founder of the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, and is its Research Director. Her background is in public health, and she has a Ph.D in reproductive rights from the Harvard School of Public Health. As her work developed, she realized that there was no talk of human rights in the public health sector, nor in the development field.
Sarah spoke about the economic and social rights advocacy process. Gathering data is difficult, as is interpreting. She realized over a couple of years that most of her work was with women, but that socio-economic problems were not acknowledged to be gender issues. She met with Leilani Farha and they agreed that they would have to combat the gender-neutral perspective existing in the field. Sarah feels positive that this will happen. She thinks women’s equality is not well understood by the human rights movement. Women’s inequality is not only about discrimination. To bring women, who are 50% of the population, to the level of men will take a lot of struggle. The problems are so entrenched that it will take a lot of thinking, including reorganizing the women’s movement, to deal with the fact that what affects women most is poverty. Sarah had not thought too much about the law, and has learnt about that as part of organizing this consultation with Shelagh Day. She has not focused on women’s legal or research analysis specifically, although she has been working with women. Her expectation of this consultation is to learn more.
Karrisha Pillay: is from Cape Town, South Africa. Karrisha has worked at the Socio-Economic Rights Project at the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape for the last four years. She is also a trustee of the Women’s Legal Centre. Her work is to ensure that the economic and social rights in the South African Constitution are translated into reality. The Project does this through research, advocacy, lobbying, and education. Karisha’s passion is health rights. She has done research in this area, most recently on the right to health, and how South African standards compare to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ General Comment on this topic. Karrisha spoke about other projects she is involved in, including: the issue of multi-linguilism in the health care system and how it impacts on quality of service; the constitutional implications of making AIDS a notifiable disease; dual loyalties within the health sector in the context of the health profession’s history of dual loyalties and human rights abuses under apartheid; the government’s health transformation policy and the hard issues that have arisen in terms of gender; work with the Women’s Legal Centre on the equality legislation; work for the Commission on Gender Equality, particularly with regard to economic and social rights. Karrisha believes that one of the biggest barriers is the failure to analyze economic and social rights from a gender perspective. Particularly with health rights, there has been a failure to look at the implications of gender-neutral perspectives for women. Karrisha supports the goals of this meeting and thinks there is a need to rethink in order to secure substantive rights for women. She thinks a General Comment on Women is an important instrument to do this.
Gwen Brodsky: is from Vancouver, Canada. She is an equality rights lawyer. When Canada’s constitutional equality rights guarantee came into force in 1985, Gwen was a relatively new lawyer, and the opportunities afforded by the constitutional equality rights to enter the courts to speak for women, and for the most disadvantaged groups in the society, have shaped her work since that time. The constitution offered the ability to use the courts as a forum to challenge injustices in the law and unjust behavior by government, to use the law in a critical way, and to have a public, political environment to address issues of disadvantage. Gwen has worked with community-based organizations to design interventions in key cases. Interventions seem to provide the best opportunity to comment on how government should behave in particular circumstances, regardless of established understandings of the law or current social assumptions. Gwen also works with anti-poverty groups. There is no mechanism in Canada apart from domestic law to enforce social, cultural, economic inequalities. However, Gwen is interested in using CEDAW and a General Comment on Women as tools for interpreting domestic law, and as levers for advancing women through changing political and legal discourse.
The legal system in Canada is not conditions-focused. So Canadian women need tools to convince law makers and politicians to speak to the conditions of disempowered groups. Gwen also spoke about her work with gay and lesbian rights groups, where formal equality arguments can still be successful since gays and lesbians seek to be treated the same as heterosexuals. Gwen expressed worry about rights work because of different understandings of the meaning of equality; we need a global rhetoric so women everywhere can speak to decision makers, and provide a common refrain about what women expect in terms of their rights.
Sharita Samuel: is from Durban, South Africa. Sharita works at the Legal Resources Centre. Her main hope for the Consultation was to address the isolation within which she works. She has not before had the opportunity to meet her South African colleagues in person. The LRC is an independent public interest law firm, which sees litigation as a means to seek justice. Post-1990, this NGO has moved its emphasis to economic and social rights. Sharita works in the Women’s Rights Project, which is one of the Centre’s eleven projects. The NGO has a national focus, encompassing a range of rights. Sharita said the battle is organizational, domestic, national, and international. One needs a strong forum within which to work effectively. Our society does not recognize that this kind of work needs a core to be sustainable. Her work has focused on the government transfers of resources to women because of poverty, in the form of pensions, welfare grants, land, housing, and services. If litigation results in an effective shift of these essential resources to women, it will be important. The other important aspect is a shift of power in who controls these resources from the current power-holders to women. Sharita made reference to the Ross case, which shifted control over housing to women to enable them to protect themselves and their homes.
It is vital to make it possible for people to access legal representation in order to ensure their effectiveness in any dispute. The right to participate in the decision-making process is also important. People need to become stakeholders. The role of the LRC is to ensure that once law has been changed, the enforcement of law takes place. New law needs to be converted into practice. A serious obstacle is the non-compliance with laws that have been passed. A dilemma she faces, working at the grassroots level, is how to ensure that someone does ensure that government departments and government bodies put laws into practice.
Jessie Mbwambo: is from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. She teaches at the University of Dar Es Salaam, and is a psychiatrist. Her interest is in public health. She volunteers at a counseling and testing project. Until last year her involvement in women’s rights was non-existent. She did not see gender as part of the arena of public health. Then she did work on HIV and violence. She realized that women who were exposed to partner violence were twice as likely to become HIV+, and that women under thirty were ten times more at risk of screening HIV+. The project began to try and understand what violence against women meant in women’s lives. They looked at narrative information to decide what intervention strategies were needed. They also had to deal with resource limitations. They found that customary law tended to override statutory and religious law in Tanzania. They also found that women’s economic ability was affected by access to opportunities like education, which puts women in situations where they are at risk of infection. There are also social factors. Being part of a patriarchal system affects women differently at different levels. If men have a final say in all decisions, women do not stand a chance. Jessie discussed the applicability of international laws that are ratified by her country. Even if governments ratify laws, how do women access and benefit from them? Jessie started dialoguing with other organizations responsible for women’s empowerment, legal organizations, and others. These other organizations found the work Jessie’s project had done useful and it has lead to further projects. Jessie wants to dialogue at the consultation, and to look at developing strategies to first, ask more questions, and second, to intervene, taking into account the complexity of issues that violate women’s rights.
Vineeta Gupta: is from India. She is a medical doctor and currently a student of law. She has been a community activist for fourteen years. Through her work she has learnt that political rights are of little use to people who have no economic or social rights. She realized this while doing a study on comparative conditions on urban and rural slums. Vineeta has worked on an educational project on the right of the female child to be born, and on the right to freedom of religion, which is an important issue in Punjab. In the last ten years she has seen a sharp increase in infanticide, and believes that this phenomenon is linked to globalisation. As cash value overrides other values, girl children are not seen as a good investment. She wants to identify the policy and social priorities that permit infanticide, and its increase. Vineeta spoke about women’s lack of access to decision-making processes, and lack of access to justice. She said that even if women do have access to justice, they face gender bias at all levels. Getting a judgment implemented is also a struggle. Corruption in the legal system is an issue. Vineeta has experienced empowerment through collaborative working, and that is what she is hoping for at this consultation - the sharing of experiences, learning, and support.
Julieta Rossi: is from Argentina. She works for the Centre of Legal and Social Studies (CELS). Her organization is an NGO, which has been running since 1979, and was founded by parents of people who disappeared under the 76-83 dictatorship. Since democracy, the organization has adapted to try to intervene in current human rights violations. Civil and political rights were the initial focus. Five years ago, an economic, social and cultural rights programme was created. Julieta has been working at CELS for three years. Advocacy is the organization’s biggest area of work, and it litigates in domestic and international courts. It tries to use alternative mechanisms, and works with disadvantaged groups like migrants and indigenous people. The project does not work specifically with women, which is a lack within the programme and in the work in general within all other human rights NGOs in Argentina. There is no dialogue between human rights NGOs and women’s rights NGOs. Julieta said her expectations of the consultation are huge. She does not know enough about women’s social and economic rights. She has to work with very limited resources, and it is difficult to broaden her areas of work, but she wants to learn how to incorporate a gender perspective into her work. An obstacle to enforcing rights is the fact that it is not even widely understood that people have rights.
Patricia Feeney: is from Oxford, U.K. She worked with Amnesty International. She then moved into the development field. She now works for Oxfam in the policy department. Oxfam was one of the first organizations to adopt a rights approach, but implementation is more complicated. Now Oxfam is getting more involved in policy and advocacy work. Patricia is working on a strategy for a massive trade campaign. She wants to learn from the consultation how to push a women’s rights agenda into this campaign.
Leilani Farha: is from Toronto, Canada. She is a housing rights lawyer. She started in 1993 as a student in a small NGO in Toronto. She works with predominantly low-income women facing discrimination in housing. Sometimes the organization assists women to file human rights complaints under provincial human rights legislation. Leilani also works for the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, an international NGO based in Geneva. She is the Women’s Housing Rights Programme Coordinator, which programme she formed in 1998. Leilani also does research, most recently on the impact of forced evictions on women, who are the group most affected by forced removals. She is doing research validating the links between the right to housing and the rights to property, land, and inheritance. These links have not been made at UN level. Leilani said there are obstacles at every turn. Within her own organization, she wanted to make women’s rights integral instead of having a separate programme. She also faces obstacles within the UN, the NGO sector and women’s rights organizations. Leilani referred to Sharita’s comments, and said she also feels she works in isolation. She wants to hear about others’ work, and to develop new strategies.
Sandy Liebenberg: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She was a lawyer in a human rights department of a law firm during the apartheid regime. During this time she developed links with the community in the area in which she worked (Uppington), and she did development work in the township there. She was involved in challenging forced removals using the law. She also did labour work for COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions). She then did an MA in international human rights law, and changed her focus to contribute to policy development and to develop a human rights culture in South Africa. She was a legal advisor to the African National Congress, and in this capacity worked on the inclusion of social and economic rights in the Bill of Rights. During this process she found that both the Left and the Right challenged the inclusion of these rights. Sandy recounted that it was imperative to convince the ANC that economic and social rights had to come in as countervailing rights to protect the poor and disadvantaged. Sandy formed the Social and Economic Rights Project at UWC with Karrisha, which has been running for four years. As well as the work outlined by Karrisha, Sandy mentioned work on trying to integrate gender into housing rights. Sandy said one obstacle is trying to make economic and social rights meaningful within the context of a conservative macro-economic policy. Sandy wants to be inspired by the consultation as to how to take the struggle forward.
Michelle O’Sullivan: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently the director of the Women’s Legal Centre. Her interest in women and the law developed at university, where she noticed that many of the law courses did not address gender. She began looking at the concept of the “reasonable man.” She joined the Law Race and Gender Project at the University of Cape Town, where she looked at race and gender stereotyping and how that played out in decision-making by the judiciary. Michelle did her legal training at the Legal Resources Centre, focusing on land and housing. During this time, and together with other women lawyer colleagues, Michelle developed a sense that there was a gap within human rights organizations to address often very complex and difficult women’s legal issues. The idea for the WLC came out of that. Funding was secured just over two years ago. Michelle has also been involved with the Reproductive Rights Alliance, working on the passing of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, and on building a reproductive rights framework. The WLC can focus on gender equality exclusively and can bring together advocacy and litigation. In South Africa it is possible to impact on the development of laws and policy, but implementation is the real challenge. Obstacles include the development of women lawyers; the fact is that courts are not necessarily getting it right in terms of interpretation, and judicial training is needed. We also need more information on economic and social rights. There have been almost no equality cases brought to the Constitutional Court by black women so far.
Pumla Mncayi: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She works for the Black Sash. Pumla spoke about her position in her family, as the middle child and the only girl, and reflected on her name, which means, “to rest”: her mother thought once she had a daughter she could rest. Pumla spoke about her background in the rural Eastern Cape. She graduated from Fort Hare University as a social worker, the same university as Mandela and many other African leaders. Pumla spoke about the cultural difficulties associated with being a woman, and how girls are predominantly groomed for marriage. Pumla has always been interested in human rights and gender work. She spoke about the Black Sash, which was established in 1955. Pumla described the organization’s beginnings with white middle class women under apartheid, and told how the organization got its name from the black sashes these women would wear while they protested. Pumla said the Black Sash has developed from a voluntary organization into a national NGO, with six major projects. The black Sash’s aim is to enable all - with emphasis on the needs of women - to recognize and exercise their human rights, particularly their social and economic rights, and to create a society which has effective laws and delivery systems including comprehensive social security provision for the most vulnerable. Pumla’s expectation from the consultancy is to get more information to help in her work on the ground.
Joy Ngkwme: is from Lagos, Nigeria. Joy works for the Social and Economic Rights Action Centre. She spoke about her organization’s three major programmes: Monitoring and Advocacy of human rights abuses; the Community Action Programme; and the Legal Action Programme. Joy’s project, the Women’s Empowerment Project, works to educate, sensitizes and empowers women to end all forms of violence against women. Every project is designed to include a gender-specific aspect. Joy spoke about her work in collaboration with Leilani Farha on forced removals and their impact on women. Obstacles to women’s empowerment are traditional cultural norms. These norms stand as barriers to women in employment opportunities and job advancement opportunities, as well as in many other ways. There are legal obstacles to litigating economic and social rights in Nigeria, which are not recognized in the constitution. Joy expects to learn other strategies to enforce economic and social rights in Nigeria from this consultation.
Saras Jagwanth: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She teaches administrative and constitutional law at the University of Cape Town. She is interested in equality as a legal concept and the extent to which our equality provision can work for the benefit of disadvantaged groups. This cannot be taken for granted. Saras works in the Law, Race and Gender Unit, and is involved in a programme of judicial education. This is social context training mainly for magistrates, which tries to sensitize magistrates to issues of race and gender, as well as other issues. The programme uses a number of different strategies to do this. The Magistrates’ Court is the forum where cases from members of disadvantaged groups are most often heard. The question of how much jurisdiction Magistrates Courts have to enforce the Bill of Rights is unclear, but they are bound to uphold the Bill of Rights. Consequently, magistrates tend to see issues of equality as human rights that are inapplicable. This underlines the importance of who has access to the High and Constitutional Courts. Saras wants to look at how the equality provision can be applied to all cases involving disadvantaged groups, and to try and brainstorm with magistrates about how to use the equality provision in ‘ordinary’ cases.
Lucie Lamarche: is from Montreal, Quebec. She teaches international social and human rights law as well as national social law at the Universite du Quebec. She worked in government-funded legal aid clinics as a new lawyer. Social law is not new, and it is important to recognize this from a methodological perspective, although we may need to revisit what is in social law. We need to end the separation between economic and social rights on the one hand, and women’s rights on the other. Lucie is doing research on the role of the state in implementing social security.
Simone Pingel: is from Heidelberg, Germany. She works for FIAN. She is also studying political science and anthropology. Her Masters thesis is on Ghana, and the consequences of gold mining and concomitant evictions of communities by trans-national corporations.
Lulama Nongogo: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She is an attorney at the Women’s Legal Centre. She began working as a lawyer in a commercial law firm, where she hoped to make a contribution to the community as part of her work. She found this impossible to do within a structure of fee targets and no community responsibility. Lulama began working at the WLC in April, and she has been able to do the work she really wants to do. She works in customary and religious law, and as such worked with the implementation of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act. She has also been involved in educating women about their rights in this regard. Lulama spoke about the male primogeniture inheritance system in customary law. Initially this inheritance came with a duty of support of women. With codification, this duty has fallen away. The WLC also works with inheritance cases, as well as cases about access to housing, and maintenance. Lulama spoke about the burden of care for the family that is on women, and how this keeps women poor. Lulama’s expectation of the consultation is the sharing of information. She is fairly new to the NGO field, and she wants to learn from others, especially around socio-economic rights.
Connie September: is from Cape Town, South Africa. She is an African National Congress Member of Parliament in the National Assembly. She was the first woman Vice President of the COSATU federation in 1993. Her background is in the clothing industry. She reluctantly left the labour movement last year to join Parliament. She served on two committees, Trade and Industry; and Public Service and Administration. She is focussing on Trade and Industry, as this is her field of knowledge. South Africa currently has no industrial policy. Despite much international respect and recognition, Connie feels that South Africa is not succeeding in addressing the needs of poor black people, in particular in the women-dominated industries in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Public service and administration is the heart of delivery of government to the people. South Africa has problems in this regard because of having a new government with an old administration. Litigation and legal work is all very well, but without government administration there can never be adequate delivery. South Africa has great legislation and a great Constitution, but the people do not yet feel the difference. The law is not being enjoyed by the people. Connie wants this meeting to make an attempt towards speaking with one, global voice.
Joy Butts: is from Philadelphia, U.S.A. She works in the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. Joy outlined the social situation in Kensington, which is a neighbourhood of Philadelphia: There is a welfare economy, which is due to end, and a drug economy. There is a very large homeless population. Six women who wanted to work on the issues that affect them formed the Union. Their mission is to end poverty, as we know it. Joy spoke about the lie of American prosperity. She said they have to use an economic human rights framework, as they have no other recourse. They combat a media blackout on news about poor people with public awareness campaigns, such as Joy’s television show, which seeks to explain economic human rights in an accessible way and to describe violations of these rights. Joy uses these campaigns to educate and raise the visibility and the voices of the poor. Joy spoke about the need for the poor to head their own campaigns, to be their own leaders. They deal with all the problems of poverty as in other countries, but in a country that is supposed to be the richest in the world. In her show, Joy showcases how laws are in conflict with economic and social rights. Gender is important, but poverty is the overriding issue.
Elize Delport: is from Braamfontein, South Africa. She is a member of the Commission on Gender Equality. The Commission is currently rethinking the focus of its work, and its processes in order to be sure that they are using their resources most effectively for disadvantaged women in South Africa.
Subhashini Sahgal Ali: is from Kanpur, India. She belongs to the All India Democratic Women’s Association. She is also a member of the Communist Party. The Association is a voluntary organization. The Association holds fundraising campaigns for specific needs as they arise. Implementation is a major issue for the organization - how do poor women gain access to justice without a powerful organization to fight for them? Because they cannot, the organization is trying to grow. Apart from patriarchal prejudice, class prejudice is also a major issue. They see this in court judgments. With globalisation, even the pretense of the state’s minimum responsibility to the poor has fallen away. Urban land is valuable, and the poor are seen as an obstacle. Religious fundamentalism and caste are also problems for the women’s movement. Political parties use religious ideologies and issues of caste to gain votes. This reinforces these identities, which are oppressive to women.
Di Otto: is from Melbourne, Australia. She teaches law at Melbourne University, and she is the Co-Convener of the Women’s Rights Action Network. She is the author of many articles on women’s human rights. Her concern is with pinning down economic and social rights. Australia has inherited the British legal system, which has no concept of human rights protection. The “Gentlemen’s agreements” system still exists in Australia. Di wants to know what it means when governments implement social, economic, and cultural rights through non-justiciable methods.
Helena Hofbauer: is from Mexico. She comes from a different context to most at the consultation. Her background is in democratization. She has been working in the democratization process in Mexico since 1996, in two human rights organizations there. Unlike elsewhere, the human rights movement in Mexico is not mainly focused on litigation, but on activism. There are not many human rights lawyers. However, Helena was involved in suing the President of Mexico for denying access to information. This was a big breakthrough in the concept of citizens enforcing their own rights, which is crucial for the democratization process. Through her MA, she came to understand democratization in the wider context of gender. She is interested in how to deliver services and rights that make democracy meaningful. Democracy is not only the right to vote, but also ways to participate. She created a think tank centre for research and analysis. This institute is linked to the democratization movement in Mexico. Helena’s current focus is budget analysis. She is convinced it is a powerful tool - it speaks the language of the powerful back to them. The big challenge is to link social and economic rights to budget analysis, and integrate them consistently and comprehensively. Budget analysis and human rights can strengthen each other and share strategies, methodologies, and frameworks. This has been difficult work. Helena is hoping to develop ideas to link them, and to develop measures to assess whether a state is in fact complying with human rights requirements.
Shelagh Day: is from Vancouver, Canada. She began work in the human rights field in the early 70s when anti-discrimination legislation was new in Canada. She has worked since then for Human Rights Commissions and women’s organizations as a human rights advocate. She was a founder and the first President of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund which, like the Women’s Legal Centre in South Africa, was established to bring forward constitutional and human rights cases and interventions on behalf of women. She has also been a Vice President of Canada’s largest women’s organization, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Shelagh is engaged in research, writing and advocacy. Her current concern is to develop the capacity of human rights guarantees to address women’s poverty and economic inequality. She has written a book on social program restructuring in Canada and its harmful effects on women, arguing that this deliberate policy of government must be seen as an overt violation of women’s human rights. She is the publisher of the Canadian Human Rights Reporter, which is the law reporter of record in the on anti-discrimination law in Canada.
An exciting aspect of the equality rights movement in Canada, which was given new life by the advent of constitutional equality rights guarantees, is sense of ownership that disadvantaged group feel about rights. This has come about because these groups recognized when the equality guarantee came into force that disadvantaged people would never be able to use their constitutional rights unless resources were specifically designated to allow them to do so. As a result of strategic lobbying, the equality rights community was successful in establishing a Court Challenges Program, which provides funds for test case litigation for disadvantaged groups. This has drawn equality rights groups from different sectors together, and facilitated their working together. As a result, a different way of doing litigation has developed in Canada - participatory litigation. This has been very effective in ensuring that litigation is not the sole purview of lawyers; rather litigation becomes a means of ensuring that the voices of disadvantaged groups are heard in courts.
Shelagh is now also involved in work at the international level. She is concerned with thinking about how rights can be attached to macro-economic policies.
Sarah Manthatu: is from Pretoria, South Africa. She is in charge of the National Gender Programme for the Department of Land Affairs. Sarah joined the department in 1996, but came from the HIV movement. She is a social worker by training. Land policy is nationally driven, but the department is looking at how local governments can manage their areas once people have their land back. The gender unit is involved in ensuring that structures are in place to assist women. The unit also has to ensure that the structures meet the requirements of national and international instruments. Sarah wanted an integrated, not a separate, gender policy, to avoid marginalisation. Cultural issues especially in rural areas relate to land. It is difficult to have women’s issues taken seriously within the land redistribution process. Sarah believes women have to have an independent right to land. There are problems with information dissemination and accessing remote communities. Resources are still scarce, and there is an urban versus rural budget bias. This complicates how women access and benefit from land. There are problems with attitudes amongst law reform implementers. Women’s empowerment is not seen as a priority. Rather, pressures to deliver on the overall programme take precedence.
Shereen Mills: is from South Africa and is a lawyer and researcher. Shereen works at the Gender Research Project (GRP) where she started as a Research Officer in March 1998. Over the past eight years, the GRP has engaged in applied research, advocacy, education and strategic litigation on gender, law and human rights. It seeks to promote gender equality and social justice for women and men, with a particular focus on disadvantaged women. The GRP specializes in legal and socio-legal research in a number of areas of law and human rights. Shereen’s research at the Project has mainly been on issues of violence against women. She is currently involved in research, advocacy, and litigation on intimate femicide and abused women who kill. She has also been involved in research and advocacy around employment equity for women, and gender equality.