WOMEN AND ESCR - November 2011

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Capacity Building

In the last term, the Women and ESCR working group has contributed substantively to a focus on women's economic and social rights in several women's rights trainings. As a result of its participation in the Women and ESCR group workshop in Malaysia last year, CLADEM organized a regional training in Latin America on women's ESCR and the working group served as resource persons and speakers in the event. In addition, the International Women's Human Rights Training Institute organized by the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation, Network of East-West Women and Center for Reproductive Rights, for young women lawyers from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, has invited the Women and ESCR group to participate and present on women's ESCR and substantive equality during the Institute.

Additionally, The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has partnered with the Women and ESCR group to organize an expert meeting on Women and ESCR in Geneva on October 27th with members of the new Working Group on Discrimination Against Women in Law and Practice within the Human Rights Council, members of the CEDAW and ESCR Committees, civil society and UN staff. The goal of the Women and ESCR groups collaboration in this meeting is to highlight the importance of promoting coherence in international law as it relates to women's ESCR across mechanisms to improve clarity for both advocates and States and to underscore the need to understand the intersectional, indivisible and interdependent nature of women's ESCR through the lens of substantive equality.


Making Linkages

The Women and ESCR group has also participated with the Aid Effectiveness Agenda (civil society initiative calling for more accountability and transparency within aid processes and institutions) in the lead-up to a November meeting in Busan, Korea to support women's voices and to call for the integration of human rights obligations. The group was also successful in securing a workshop space during AWID's next international Forum in April 2012 in Istanbul, focused on Challenging Economic Power: Women's Economic and Social Rights, which will aim to be a capacity-building and strategy session on using the human rights framework to demand accountability and social change.

Please contact Rebecca Brown if you are interested in finding out more about this Working Group and how to get involved at rbrown [at] escr-net.org.