Question

Critically discuss 16 days of activism against women and children abuse provide pros and cons

Answer 1

Explanation:

**CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY**

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you to AWAVA, a national alliance that is leading the work on addressing violence against women in Australia - for convening this challenging and thought provoking panel at this year’s CSW.

While we have a Declaration on the elimination of violence against women, the CEDAW Committee’s authoritative General Recommendation 19 on violence against women, and some strong regional Conventions on violence against women, most notably the European and Inter-American Conventions[1] – it is curious that there is no international Convention on eliminating violence against women and girls.

In 2012, When Rashida Manjoo, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women stated, ‘[i]t is time to adopt a comprehensive international convention on violence against women at the UN level’[2] – it brought to the forefront a debate on the need for a specific legally binding instrument on violence against women.

So I am very pleased that the Special Rapporteur could be with us here today as we continue the discussion she started last year.

In light of this debate I thought it might be useful to go through what I consider are some of the pros and cons of having a specific convention on the elimination of violence against women.

The first reason for calling for a convention, would be that despite violence against women and girls being one of the most heinous of human rights violations, it is not explicitly identified as a human rights violation in the CEDAW Convention. We have started seeing it being referred to in some of the subsequent conventions, namely the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities[3] and it was referred to in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples[4].