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MARCH 8, the first International Women's Day in the 21st century, has come and gone. Still, we find women around the world suffering from discrimination and violence. U.S. lags in support of
bill of rights for womenAmnesty International reports that women in Afghanistan who live under the Taliban are not allowed to work, go to school outside their homes or appear in public unless covered from head to toe.
Hundreds of women in Algeria have been raped and killed during the civil war. In Sudan, women and children continue to be sold into slavery.
Girls in Southeast Asia are sold into prostitution by their desperately poor families, and more than 2 million women around the world are genitally mutilated each year.
Meanwhile, in the United States, violence against women is epidemic.
As a state legislator, I joined with more than 300 of my colleagues in state legislatures and signed the Center for Women Policy Studies' Contract with Women of the USA.
With my signature, I pledged to support the contract's 12 principles of women's equality and empowerment based on the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Platform for Action (approved by 189 nations, including the U.S.). Key to implementing the platform for action in the United States and abroad is the ratification of the U.N. Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
CEDAW is an international bill of rights for women. The United States actively participated in drafting CEDAW and the U.N. General Assembly adopted it in 1979. Last year, Hawaii's Legislature passed a resolution (part of the majority package) encouraging the ratification of CEDAW.
By doing so, we became one of 10 state legislatures to publicly support ratification. By signing CEDAW, countries resolve to eliminate discrimination against women in all its forms and in all aspects of society, and to ensure the full development and advancement of women so that they may participate on an equal basis with men.
Although the United States was one of the first countries to sign CEDAW, our U.S. Senate has failed to ratify the treaty. CEDAW has languished in the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who refuses to hold hearings on CEDAW or move it to the Senate floor for a vote.
OUR failure to ratify CEDAW puts American diplomats at a disadvantage in discussing human rights abuses with other countries. How can we continue to hold other countries to the universal standards defined in this international treaty if we refuse to ratify it ourselves?
Further, until we ratify CEDAW, the United States is ineligible to appoint members to the International Committee of Experts, which oversees its implementation in the countries that have adopted it. Any U.S. efforts to advance the status of women throughout the world are weakened by our failure to ratify CEDAW.
We must take a global stand against discrimination and for women's human rights. Our senators and our representatives to Washington have assured me they support the ratification of CEDAW. Please join me in urging our senators, Dan Inouye and Dan Akaka, to bring CEDAW to a vote and ratify it resoundingly before adjournment of the 106th Congress.
Marilyn B. Lee, a Democrat, represents the
38th House District (Waipio, Mililani).