Saturday, January 26, 2008 Group pushes Magna Carta for Women
NEARLY 27 years after ratifying an international pact against gender discrimination, the Philippines still needs to do more to protect women, women’s rights advocates said.
In a forum in Cebu yesterday, they announced a nationwide signature campaign to rally support for the proposed Magna Carta for Women, which failed to survive the 12th and 13th Congress.
A special committee in charge of monitoring compliance reported in August last year that the Philippines lacks a law that clearly defines gender discrimination, long despite being a signatory of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
“Since its ratification and despite the many existing laws such as anti-trafficking of women, anti-harassment and others, we women still suffer from discrimination,” said Cebu Regional Trial Court (RTC) Judge Sylvia Paderanga, chairperson of the Lihok Pilipina Foundation, Inc.
The Philippines was among the signatories when the United Nations adopted the CEDAW on July 17, 1980. The Philippine Senate ratified it on Aug. 5, 1981.
One of the provisions in the proposed Magna Carta pushes for the recruitment and training of women in the police force, medico-legal and legal services—“and such other services availed of by women who are victims of gender-based crime”—until the women make up half of these sectors’ workforce.
“This is a gender equality law and we want your signatures in support of it. This law consolidates all laws concerning women’s rights and lays down the full context of CEDAW,” said Elizabeth Yang, national coordinator of Pilipina.
Lawyer Gettie Sandoval, a member of the Pilipina-National Capital Region chapter, said there are laws that continue to discriminate against women. She cited, among others, the definition of infidelity, the treatment of sex workers as petty criminals in the anti-vagrancy provision of the Revised Penal Code and laws that permit the marriage of girls under the age of 18.
A version of the Magna Carta filed in the Senate last December by Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. provides that within five years of the law’s enactment, women should occupy 50 percent of all “third-level positions” in the government.
Another provision says that the state “shall not force women, especially indigenous peoples, to abandon their lands… or relocate them in special centers for military purposes.”
That bill also asks that women be given at least 33 percent of all seats in the development councils, from the barangay to the regional levels. (AIV)
