United Nations Human Rights Committee

Since March 1994, Equality Now has been working to bring human rights violations against women to the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The Human Rights Committee was established through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty for the protection of human rights that has been signed and ratified by 149 countries. Under the Covenant, states parties (governments that have ratified the Covenant) are required to report to the Human Rights Committee on their compliance with its provisions. Many of these provisions encompass the human rights of women, including the fundamental right to equality under the law and equal protection of the law. Working with women’s rights groups in countries under review by the Committee, Equality Now has brought issues relating to women’s rights to the attention of the Committee in its consideration of reports (available in PDF format) from the following countries: Yemen, United States, Russia, United Kingdom, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Zambia, Peru, Brazil, Lebanon, Colombia, India, Senegal, Lithuania, Sudan, Uruguay, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Israel, Algeria, Tanzania, Japan, Armenia, Libya, Lesotho, Cambodia, Chile, Poland, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Morocco, Cameroon, and Mongolia.

In 2001, Equality Now shifted the focus of its work with the UN Human Rights Committee. In prior years, Equality Now regularly submitted information on countries that had reported to the Committee on their compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and subsequently scheduled for review by the Committee, including the countries listed above. In 2000, however, the Human Rights Committee adopted new guidelines enabling it also to review countries that have failed to submit reports to the Committee as required by the Covenant, which in the past resulted in the fact that these countries never participated in the review process of the Committee. In many cases the reports of such countries are more than a decade overdue. Equality Now is supporting the implementations of these new guidelines, and after several sessions of a dialogue with the Committee regarding their application, the Committee agreed to take up one such country per session.

In July 2001, Justice P.N. Bhagwati, the Chair of the Human Rights Committee, wrote to Equality Now expressing the Committee’s appreciation for Equality Now’s support and offer of assistance and announcing that it had scheduled two non-reporting countries, The Gambia and Suriname, for sequential consideration during its forthcoming sessions. Equality Now submitted information on both The Gambia and Suriname to the Human Rights Committee, and subsequently Mali, another non-reporting country. The lists of questions presented by the Committee to the governments of these countries included reference to concerns raised by Equality Now in its submissions to the Committee.

Equality Now is also working to facilitate greater integration of the Human Rights Committee’s work with the activism of women’s rights organizations at the national level. This initiative is designed to ensure that information from these organizations goes directly to the Committee when it considers the countries in which they are based, and that the work of the Committee in turn is of greater use to the work of these organizations within their countries.

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