Enforcing Rights and Correcting Wrongs - Asia-Pacific Regional ...

ather than prosecution of offenders, stipulate forgiveness
clauses, or omit certain perpetrators should be repealed.
Review harmful customary practices. Use constitutional
means with primacy to formal laws where possible to
address harmful customs. Specific laws can also be made
to eliminate practices that curtail women’s freedoms and
opportunities in the region.
Uphold equality within personal laws. Go beyond the
public sphere to review gender-inequitable personal laws
that influence rights and duties of women in domestic
sphere. Narrowly defined gender roles within marriage,
limited maintenance rights, unequal access to marital
property and unjust inheritance practices need to be
prioritised.
Strengthen enforcement mechanisms. Ensure dedicated
personnel capacity where possible, including a larger
share of female personnel, and organize obligatory gender
training for all law enforcement agents – judges, lawyers,
magistrates, mediators dispensing justice at community
levels, and police officials. This requires adequate human
and financial resources. Do not take the ability for genderanalysis
for granted. With training, both men and women
officials can be change agents for gender equality.
6.2 Change attitudes
Countering pre-conceived notions on gender stereotypes
is critical, especially in patriarchal societies. New ways
of thinking that give legitimacy and acceptance to the
equal value and dignity of all human beings needs
to be promoted. Well-designed advocacy and social
mobilization campaigns can raise public awareness and
get people to recognize the value of thinking in new ways.
Entry points that can be leveraged are inside judicial
systems, across the political spectrum, and in society.
Inside the judicial systems. Pre-service legal education with
required gender sensitization can be supplemented by
in-service gender-training of law enforcement officers
– police, judges and others. Focus on legal inequalities
that disadvantage women, a better understanding of
legal neutrality and equality, and the potential for a
6. Redressing Gender Barriers: Enforcing Rights And Correcting Wrongs
strongly positive role of judicial interpretation can make
a difference.
Across the political spectrum. The legislature has a role
through drafting and passage of laws. Political leaders
make police, magisterial and judicial appointments and
also allocate budgets to courts, prisons, police and legal
aid initiatives to assist the poor. Being responsive to voter
from constituencies can also pay political dividends. These
can be useful entry points.
In society. Social mobilization has been used to serve
several aims. It can be used to create and reinforce ideas
of equality and to persuade people of ways it can enrich
quality of lives. Educate people through campaigns on
legal facts and provide guidance on better using legal
institutions. Places where social norms are consolidated
and transmitted such as schools, the media, religious
organizations and community groups make key entry
points.
6.3 Establish ongoing assessments
Ongoing reviews of laws and institutions of justice should
be put in place to ensure systematic assessments aimed at
revealing inequalities as well as other limitations. These
assessments can feed into efforts to close gender disparities.
International legal instruments on gender equality and
national legal reforms are useful assessment tools.
International legal instruments. International instruments
such as CEDAW, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for
Action, the ILO’s Migrant Workers Convention, and the
UN MDGs are useful global norms on gender equality.
Countries can and have used CEDAW to reform their
civil and criminal laws. The effectiveness of legislative and
judicial reforms at the national level can benefit from
international standards.
National reforms. Not just legislative change, but
progressive judicial precedents too can be useful
correctives in support of historically disadvantaged
groups. Judicial precedents can take much less time–one
has only to convince the judge, as against the much longer
and less certain process of legislative change.
29