In each of the thematic chapters that follow, we present a series of recommendations for responsible governments and the wider international community—including donor countries, the United Nations and other intergovernmental bodies—to end impunity and to prevent future abuse. More generally, the challenge to the women's rights and human rights movements, and to governments that support the goal of gender equality, is to insist that women's human rights be continually integrated into all official programs, legislation, and discourse related to human rights.
Governments should review national legislation and practices in order to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex and adopt necessary legislation for promoting and protecting women's right to be free from sex discrimination in all spheres. This requires governments to amend criminal, civil, family, and labor laws that discriminate on the basis of sex, including pregnancy and maternity. Governments further should eliminate gender bias in the administration of justice and particularly discriminatory laws and practices that contribute to the wrongful incarceration of women. All victims of discrimination on the basis of sex should be afforded an appropriate forum to challenge the practice and obtain an effective remedy.
As a matter of urgency, governments should protect women's human rights and fundamental freedoms regardless of whether such abuses are attributed to tradition or custom. In countries where customary and/or religious law co-exist with statutory law, governments should ensure that each legal regime is in full compliance with international human rights norms, with particular attention to matters of family and personal status law.
Governments should also implement existing laws and policies that protect women from and guarantee them remedies for gender-based violence. States must guarantee women equal protection of the law through rigorous enforcement of criminal laws prohibiting violence against women, and reform legislation and practices that mischaracterize domestic violence, marital rape and wife-murder as private matters or crimes of honor, and thus allow perpetrators to receive lenient treatment or to go unpunished altogether. Governments should exercise their obligations to investigate and prosecute alleged instances of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including rape, that occur within their territories and to exercise jurisdiction over torturers who enter their territories.
Governments should promote the universal ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Governments should further withdraw all reservations to these treaties that undermine their object and purpose.
Finally, governments should integrate considerations of women's human rights into bilateral and multilateral foreign policy. To this end, governments should systematically use all available leverage to combat violations of women's rights, including bilateral, diplomatic, trade, and military relations; their voice and vote at international and regional financial institutions; and the stigma of public condemnation of abusive governments.
The international community should also do more to promote and protect women's human rights. Member states of the U.N. should adopt and ratify a protocol to CEDAW that would allow women whose domestic legal systems have failed them to submit complaints directly to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The committee's current inability to consider individual communications or complaints against states severely limits its effectiveness in promoting the rights embodied in CEDAW. Further, countries that are parties to CEDAW should include information in their periodic reports on efforts to combat all forms of abuse identified in this report.
The international community further should integrate women's human rights into the system-wide activities of the United Nations' treaty-based and non-treaty-based bodies on human rights. Member states should seek to ensure that existing thematic and country-specific special rapporteurs, working groups, and special representatives consistently address violations of women's human rights that fall within their mandates. In this regard, the international community should ensure adequate support for the work of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and renew her mandate beyond the first term of three years.
United Nations agencies, particularly the U.N. Development Program and the U. N. Population Fund, donor governments, and regional and multilateral development banks should seek to ensure that population programs and policies that they support include safeguards for the protection of basic civil and political rights. International financial institutions, such as the World Bank, as well as donor governments should extend the concept of "good governance" to include a firm commitment to the protection of human rights.
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