Engender representatives* joined with women from NGOs across the UK in Geneva earlier this month, to take part in the examination of the UK by the CEDAW Committee, and continue our work to identify critical inequalities for women in Scotland. We are pleased that the issues we lobbied around, including occupational segregation in Scotland, and women’s access to justice when they have experienced violence or discrimination, form part of the concluding observations published on Friday.
Every five or so years, this women’s rights committee of the UN examines the UK Government and identifies critical areas where the state should take action to deliver substantive equality for women. These calls for actions are called ‘concluding observations’, and the UK state, as a signatory to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has a clear mandate to deliver on these.
Ensuring Scotland’s visibility in this process has always been a challenge. The UK is the signatory to CEDAW, and accountability for realising women’s rights in Scotland is not always clear. Engender hosted a visit from CEDAW Committee member Professor Niklas Bruun in March. At a number of events, including a conference co-hosted by the EHRC civil society members, MSPs, Scottish Government officials, and Engender board members and staffers discussed the challenges of realising women’s rights and devolution.
This challenge is explicitly recognised by the committee as its first area of concern, in which it calls on the UK to “encourage its parliaments, in line with their procedures and where appropriate, to take the necessary steps with regard to the implementation of the present concluding observations between now and the next reporting process.”
Other policy areas identified by Engender members and sister organisations are also addressed in the concluding observations. The UK Government is asked to ensure that its review of the public sector equality duty enhances the gender equality component. It is urged to mitigate the impact of austerity measures on women and services, and to assess its Spending Reviews in a process that only just falls short of gender budgeting, almost in line with Scottish Women’s Budget Group calls. It is asked to assess the impact of legal aid reforms on the protection of women’s rights, which Scottish Women’s Aid has campaigned around, and to ensure access to the courts and tribunals. Zero Tolerance and others have recently highlighted the gendered impacts of tribunal fees. It calls for implementation of the Carloway Review, including the removal of corroboration, as Rape Crisis Scotland has supported. The Committee identified concerns with the gendered segregation in the modern apprenticeship programme, as Close the Gap and many other organisations have worked around, and calls for co-ordinated measures to encourage girls’ participation in STEM subjects and apprenticeships.
There are also a number of specific recommendations that relate to traveller women, asylum-seeking women, women with insecure immigration status, disabled women and women experiencing poor mental health, black and minority ethnic women, and women with experience of the criminal justice system.
Engender will now work with sister organisations in Scotland and the UK to support the realisation of the concluding observations.
*Engender acknowledges the support of Close the Gap in participating in this meeting.
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