European Convention on Womens Rights - Essay Example

European Convention on Women's Rights The rights of women have not been effectively protected by the European Convention on Human Rights Name: _______________ Tutor Name: ___________________ Dated: May 1, 2007-05-02 European equal opportunity policies have been part and parcel of EC modernising action. On one hand, they have contributed to create new employment opportunities for women, while on the other hand; they have contributed to increasing gender inequalities in terms of profession or race isolation, wage differential and social benefits. Mill, being a feminist critique while arguing on the problem of inequality states that women's wages must be regulated under any circumstances. Ball (2001) while highlighting Mill's argument states the main reason for such inequality is the choice of limited occupations chosen for women and women have only grant access to them. This further leads to women's dependency on men and particularly in circumstances where women are expected to perform in-house responsibilities as well like domestic work and children rearing. (Ball, 2001) Ranging from gender politics to sexual trafficking, European Convention (EC) action has weakened women's social rights more seriously than men's by emphasising upon the issue 'gender inequality'. No doubt EC has taken measures to reduce gender inequality and has diminished gender differences in various aspects of paid, unpaid and employed labour but this is also true that EC has only viewed one side of the picture. The other side EC does not want to view which states that women must be categorised for the household services she performs in the name of duties. With the weakening of welfare systems and restriction of the social rights of citizens to the working population, the gender hierarchy has implicitly embedded in the very notion of worker weighs more and more heavily on the social citizenship of women, especially of those from the weakest social strata. This is evident from the fact that U.N also runs in parallel with the EC when it comes to women's rights. In this context Newspaper article written by Archibald (June 5, 2000) mentions Mrs. Aguirre statement as "the attempted expansion of U.N. women's rights initiatives in the sexual realm has 'angered' women from less-developed countries, where religious faith is strong". (Archibald, June 5, 2000) Whatever is the religious faith and what ever be the nation, EC must understand that women's rights must be measured according to their limitations. I would also like to present her (Mrs. Aguirre) viewpoint in a feminist critical way in which she said that "Parenting and motherhood should not be taken as issues that discriminate men from women". (Archibald, June 5 2000) Now was she trying to convince that the women must not call their voice upon inequality and discrimination Mallik while focusing on women inequality stated a critical question in Magazine article UN Chronicle (Sept 2006) that why is it that despite being on the crossroads of women inequality, the Government is not appointing a woman for the General Assembly (Mallik, Sept, 2006) Similarly, European Court of Justice refused in giving decision in support of migrant women thereby rejecting the idea that children look after could be considered as 'work'. (Ackers, 2004) It seems the EU Convention has tried to keep itself aloof from the matters of resolving the issues of inequality. According to Rubbery (1999) "In the context of the European Union's social policy, equal opportunity is synonymous with material equality. That means the promotion of equal opportunities refer to a process aimed at eliminating inequalities which further justifies that inequality refer to promoting equality between women and men" (Rubery, 1999, p. 7). That simply implies to the fact that working women are no longer taken into account by the EC who are engaged in double duties, i.e., child rearing and employment. While diminishing women's social rights, Let us take a look at the European Convention so far policies. No doubt the EU has always tried to reshape its policies to promote women equality and participation in various decision making contexts since 1990s. The 1996 Recommendation on the balanced participation of women and men in the decision-making process in fact was only the then latest in a whole series of nonbinding acts by which the Community mobilised and oriented female public opinion, especially in the countries of Southern Europe. "On one hand where such acts of EC were non-binding as they focussed on the promotion of women's equal participation in electoral candidacy, on the other hand EC decisions also promoted their equal participation in elected assemblies and governing bodies, as well as in all decision-making positions in civil society". (Rossilli, 2000, p. 10) Thus, the 1996 EU campaign was the start of several distinct and contradictory issues. In other words it was the start of accepting the failure to protect women's rights. The 1996 campaign promoted women in electoral lists, thereby correcting the confusions on the basis of electoral inequalities. This was done by exercising political rights and evident deficits in democracy, which concerned not only women but also men. The recommendation for equal numbers of women and men in elected assemblies referred to a notion of representation of women as a presumed interest group, which in fact women were not. On the other hand, the promotion of women in decision-making positions in civil society only concerned the effectiveness of the principle of nondiscrimination within the professions concerned. The European Convention was happy, at least it gained some importance to prove. According to Braden (1996) "Women even as political candidates were confronted to many challenges created by public and media but ignored on a legal platform. Women as leaders are described and trivialized by the media's use of gender-specific terms" (Braden, 1996). Braden further stated that "although male political candidates do encounter image problems in their campaigns, they generally have more latitude in how they dress and behave because the public is conditioned to accept men as leaders". (Braden, 1996). However Kahn (1994) also noted that gender-stereotyped newspaper coverage which reduces a woman candidate's perceived viability can sometimes be used to a women candidate's advantage; for example, by emphasizing warmth and honesty. Such positive stereotypes may actually create a favorable electoral environment for women candidates, Kahn (1994) argued. (Kahn, 1994) During the Intergovernmental Conference, which led to the Amsterdam Treaty, the women European parliamentarians, members of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), and the European Women's Lobby (EWL) concentrated their efforts on placing gender at the centre of the construction of European citizenship and democracy. (Rossilli, 2000, p. 59) Their goal was to establish within the Treaty a notion of European citizenship that would be able to overcome weaknesses and defects in women's experience of national citizenship. The results were disappointing. No success rewarded their principal demands, and particularly their attempt to revitalise positive action policies, which was their main concern (EWL, 1997). Therefore, their demands awaited the next round of institutional reforms. The feminist critique of the antidiscriminatory approach, which includes women into citizenship on the basis of their assimilation with other discriminated social or racial groups, created the basis for a new approach to women's rights. A radically new paradigm was formulated in the 1990s by the experts of the Council of Europe. According to this paradigm, the Treaty was sure to guarantee a specific and autonomous fundamental right to equality of women. This guarantee made it possible to overcome the limitations of the merely anti discriminatory approach founded on the assumption of a universal, sex-neutral subject of the social contract. The modification of Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty, which prohibits sex discrimination along with other types of discrimination, could better serve the cause of making the principle of equality more effective and correcting of gender inequalities but this never happened. Indeed, positive action policies were inherently limited, at least because they were constrained between the prohibition of sex discrimination and the harmful consequences for women of too broad and general derogations to formal equality. They were limited in a period when the resources or jobs for women were scarce. Above all they were intrinsically inadequate to counteract the causes that produce and reproduce sex/gender difference as a handicap for women. "The guarantee of women's fundamental reproductive rights and full reproductive freedom lies at the basis of the renegotiation of their citizenship. These lay the firm foundation for the enjoyment of their right to self determination as individuals, and are essential to the recognition of women as fully autonomous citizens. Hence, the catalogue of fundamental rights guaranteed by the EU was expected to incorporate the reproductive rights of women". (Rossilli, 2000, p. 68) EU equality instruments ban discrimination on the basis of any paid work between the rights of men and women. Luckhaus (2000) presents such example of such discrimination by highlighting a rule adopted by EU which restricts the access to acquire benefits to earnings above a particular level or restricts working of men and women more than a specified number of hours a week. In this situation, the rule is the same but holds different effects as adversely it affects women more than men due to the reason the women are bound to perform the domestic responsibilities which the EU does not take into account. (Luckhaus, 2000) Similarly EU rule does not discriminate wages on the basis of married or unmarried women despite of the clear responsibilities a married woman perform. A study of the application of the principle of equal pay for work of equal value was to be undertaken, and actions were envisaged in three areas, namely sexual harassment, the protection of pregnancy and maternity, and childcare. It is interesting that all three of these actions are ones that raise issues about the domestic roles and sexuality of women. "The EU Convention no doubt defined more clearly the list of various participants who participated actively with an aim to reshape the situation of today's women better than what it was yesterday but among various other roles the Community role was seen as facilitative rather than directive and used the terms like 'complementarity' and 'subsidiarity' for defending the rights of women in various arenas". (Rossilli, 2000, p. 50) On the other hand, what is the use of introducing new sections for improving the status of women in society, particularly employment equal opportunities, which still unable to visualise the concept that women are confronted to many challenges as they have household responsibilities ahead of them for which they are accountable to their husbands and families. In another innovative move, EU committed to made improvement in the involvement of women in the political decision-making process in parliament, in government, and in institutions but again what is the use when EU is unable to take into account several other women rights' issues. The results of the various strategies to promote sexual equality have in most cases been extremely disappointing. Every time there was an endeavour to stifle their effects in a particular sector, the structural mechanisms that produce discrimination are redeployed so as to perpetuate the reproduction of an asymmetrical division between the sexes. On the symbolic level, policies of positive action in favour of disadvantaged or discriminated groups, in which women are included, frequently hold stigmatising effects. Therefore Hansen (1999) emphasises that there should be effective monitoring on the EU strategies which are undertaken in order to provide opportunities for women and states that suitable indicators must be used in order to determine the effectiveness of EU Conventions' promises. (Hansen, 1999) No doubt, the EU debated on 'equal opportunities' for women and devised equal treatment in the European Convention which regard the following objectives: access to the labour market equal pay for work of equal value, the regulation of atypical jobs, social security, fair distribution of private responsibilities between men and women, and health and safety. Undoubtedly, the focus of their policy remains employment, but those aspects pertaining to the family role and the sexual identity of women are also considered. In each area, there are precise and articulated proposals, ranging from improving the quality of the labour force to revaluing women's work, from the request for social services to the support of individual rights in social security and taxation. Women's access to social security benefits, in many European social protection systems, depends partly on rights pertaining to their marital status. However, the principle of individualisation of rights is still disputed. Although the Committee itself considers that this principle increases women's independence, it also recognises that it must be placed in a broader context, accompanied by measures aimed at improving job opportunities for women. Measures to lighten the family workload and to encourage men to share family responsibilities are, therefore, essential. A German magazine found that most women were harassed by colleagues and that very few women complained even when they had lost their jobs as a result of the harassment. Similarly, a series of small-scale studies in the UK in the early 1980s, undertaken by an employment agency and some trade union branches, found more than half the women included in the surveys reporting harassment, rising to 96 percent of women working in traditionally male areas of work. In 1983, the British Trades Union Congress published its first guidelines on "Sexual Harassment at Work" (TUC, 1983) and around the same time the two Equal Opportunities Commissions (in Britain and Northern Ireland) began to publicise the issue. In Ireland, too, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) took an early lead. In 1984 the ICTU annual conference made the elimination of sexual harassment a major union priority, adopting guidelines, including measures that unions could take to prevent harassment. The first large-scale national survey by a Member State was commissioned by the Belgian government in 1984. It was found that sexual harassment was widespread and had a serious impact on working women, that the perpetrators of the harassment were most often fellow workers and that single, divorced, and separated women and women under thirty were the most frequently harassed groups. "In the same year, a European Commission reported on women in paid employment revealed that 11 percent of the women experienced intense form of abuse and harassment, which could be described as sexual blackmail". (Rossilli, 2000, p. 181) At an informal meeting of the Council of Ministers in March 1986 under the Dutch Presidency, the Council asked the European Commission to initiate research into sexual harassment, and Michael Rubenstein was contracted to undertake this work (Rubenstein, 1988). In June of that year, the European Parliament (EP) considered a report initiated by its Women's Rights Committee on all aspects of violence against women, the report revealed shocking facts that exposed the systematic links between male violence and the imbalance of power between men and women, those were the weak points which uncovered gender inequalities in the labour market. (EP, 1986). The EP after realising what went wrong immediately reacted to the report and passed a full fledged Resolution on violence against women in every possible dimension, covering sexual violence in the private and public sphere sphere, sexual harassment, women from minority groups and women refugees. The section on sexual harassment called on the European Commission to investigate the economic and social costs of sexual harassment not only at work, but at other public places, to assess the extent to which national labour and antidiscrimination laws provided adequate protection against sexual harassment and to propose a new Directive, if existing legislation were found to be inadequate. A sexual harassment Directive that was acceptable to all Member States might not have been worth the paper it was written on; claiming that sexual harassment was in effect covered by one of the more powerful Directives, passed in a political and economic climate more favourable to women's rights and could be regarded as the best possible strategy available. "An alternative approach would have been to treat sexual harassment as a health and safety issue, so that it could have been adopted under Article 118a, using qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers". (Rossilli, 2000, p. 65) This strategy was subsequently used to by-pass UK opposition in relation to the pregnant workers Directive in 1992 and the working time Directive in 1993, much to the fury of the UK Conservative government. It is possible that there would have been insufficient support from the eleven Member States (excluding the UK) for a definition of sexual harassment in terms of health and safety; in any event, this strategy was not attempted. All the Member States have responded to the EU legislation and Code of Practice to a greater or lesser degree, but there are still numerous gaps in national laws and an absence of effective procedures for implementing them. Much still remains to be done before the curse of sexual harassment is lifted from EU workplaces. In some countries, the legislation that has been passed is fundamentally flawed; in many countries, some of the key players are either indifferent or hostile to the idea of such legislation and in all countries there are procedural difficulties in ensuring access to justice in practice. Almost all the cases in most Member States are, in fact, unfair dismissal cases. Sometimes it is the woman who claims compensation, either because she was dismissed after complaining of sexual harassment or because she constructively dismissed herself when the work situation became intolerable. Sometimes, it is the man who claims unfair dismissal, having been sacked because of his conduct. In the Netherlands, for example, sexual harassment cases invariably centre on requests for termination of the labour contract. If it is the employer seeking the termination of the man's contract, the central issue for the court becomes the implications for the man of acceding to that request. If it is the woman seeking the termination, the employer is held responsible for the harassment, and the woman receives compensation. (Gardiner, 2003, p. 118) "In two separate cases heard in 1993, the employer's request for the termination was refused by the courts on the grounds that the employers had not made sufficient efforts to discuss the men's conduct with them, so they were told to seek a resolution that did not involve dismissal". (Senden, 1995) According to a report presented by Prechal and Sanden (1996) "In Luxembourg, a woman made a complaint of sexual harassment using the civil code; the court did not award the compensation requested on the grounds that she had provided insufficient proof". (Prechal and Senden, 1996). On the negative side, although the courts have accepted that it is the harassment itself that constitutes the discrimination, very few complainants are still working for the same employer by the time the case is heard. Victimisation of the woman, even after she has left the company, remains a serious problem, and there is a strong possibility that she will find herself cross-examined about her own moral attitudes, mode of dress, and sexual character. In terms of widening the scope of intervention, since its Resolution on Violence against Women, the European Parliament has continued to debate such issues as sexual and domestic violence, prostitution and trafficking. Girls and women who are trafficked in are put into environments in which people of their racial or ethnic group are considered inferior and are thus subjected to additional discrimination. According to Elman (1996) "Not only do these girls and women have vastly less social and economic power than others in the unfamiliar world in which they find themselves, but their purpose in being there is to provide sexual gratification to members of the dominant gender of the dominant country by submitting to these men's racist and sexist stereotypes and fantasies. In other words, sexual trafficking puts already extremely vulnerable girls and women into the most powerless and dependent situation imaginable". (Elman, 1996, p. 84) Thus it is clear that the time for making good and effective debates is gone, now is the time to take action, thereby converting failure to protect women's rights into success. References & Bibliography Ackers Louise, (2004) "Citizenship, Migration and the Valuation of Care in the European Union" In: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Volume: 30. Issue: 2. p: 373 Archibald George, (June 5, 2000) "Sexual Rights' Battle Looms" In: The Washington Times. p: 1 Ball Jennifer, (2001) "J. S. Mill on Wages and Women: A Feminist Critique" In: Review of Social Economy. Volume: 59. Issue: 4. p: 509+ Braden M. (1996). "Women politicians and the media" In: Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press Elman R. Amy, (1996) Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge: Berghahn Books: Providence, RI. EP (European Parliament). (1986). Report drawn up on behalf of the Committee on Women's Rights on Violence Against Women. A2-44/86. Luxembourg EWL, (1997). Amendments of the European Women's Lobby to the consolidated draft treaty text, 6 June. Brussels: EWL Gardiner James, (2003) Sex Equality in Netherlands: Routledge. London Hansen Johan, (1999) "Assessing Equal Opportunities in the European Union" In: International Labour Review. Volume: 138. Issue: 4. p : 351 Kahn K. F. (1994). "Does gender make a difference An experimental examination of sex stereotypes and press patterns in statewide campaigns" In: American Journal of Political Science, 38, 162-195 Luckhaus Linda, (2000) "Equal Treatment, Social Protection and Income Security for Women" In: International Labour Review. Volume: 139. Issue: 2. p: 149 Mallik Avy, (Sept- Nov 2006) "Women Presidents of the General Assembly: An Uneven Past" In: UN Chronicle. Volume: 43. Issue: 3. Page Number: 6 Prechal Sacha and Linda Senden. (1996). Monitoring Implementation and Application of Community Law. 1994-1995: General Report of the Network of Experts on the Implementation of the Equality Directives. CEC V/1015/96-EN. Brussels Rossilli Mariagrazia, (2000) Gender Policies in the European Union: Peter Lang.: New York. Rubery, Jill. (1999). "Gender mainstreaming in European employment policy". Report by the European Commission's Group of Experts on Gender and Employment. Brussels, European Commission Rubenstein, Michael. (1988). The Dignity of Women at Work. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities Senden, Linda. (1995). Monitoring Implementation and Application of Community Equality Law. 1993-1994: General Report of the Network of Experts on the Implementation of the Equality Directives. CEC V5728/95-EN. Brussels TUC (Trades Union Congress) (1983). Sexual harassment at Work. London: TUC Read More