8 March 2001
THE WORLD COURT OF WOMEN AGAINST WAR, FOR PEACE CAPE TOWN, 7 MARCH 2001
That the World Court of women against War, for Peace should hold a Roundtable on Violence against Women is as it should be. As we speak, women, the world over, are enduring poverty and torture, and suffering violence in one form or another. A war is being waged on women on many fronts and all too often their burden goes unchronicled and their heroism remains unsung. The word "war" is, of course, considered emotive. It may well cause those unfamiliar with the true nature and extent of the world's violence against women to regard us as overreacting and we are even accused of unnecessary dramatisation. But the fact is that a war of violence is being waged against women that is both horrific in nature and global in extent.
Late last year, I was in Italy when the news broke of twelve Nigerian women who had been lured there on the promise of work and accommodation. It was a classical trap. Upon their arrival in that country, syndicate bosses stole their passports and set them to work, for no money, in a sex-for-pay operation. They had effectively been enslaved, deprived of all their rights as human beings and relegated to the ranks of work animals.
What struck me at the time was a comment by one of the prosecutors handling the case. He said that criminal syndicates have discovered a new and lucrative niche in the market - trade in human beings and even human body parts. The trend is a world-wide phenomenon and its victims are mainly the poor and vulnerable, particularly women and children. The perpetrators are a new breed of greedy and unscrupulous power brokers who, rather than paying a living wage to employees, lure foreign workers to their sweatshops and enslave them - sometimes until they die or are simply too old to work.
Their relentless campaign to wring the maximum out of these poor people is so pronounced that the workstations in some of the sweatshops are conveniently located next to the cots in which the exhausted workers are expected to sleep!
The inhumanity of this trade speaks to the very core of violence perpetrated against women and children. Violence against women and children is a response to the power imbalance of the perpetrator over the vanquished. We see the results of its practice the world over - in the increase feminisation of poverty and the devastation of family and community life as innocents succumb to the hostility of organised and unrelenting aggression; the litany of suffering goes on, and on.
The war on women and children is waged on many fronts - from the landless African women who struggle to eke out a living in rural areas across our continent; to lesbian bashings in the inner city; to pay and pregnancy discrimination in workplaces across the globe.
Why? Why does this happen? Why, after everything we have been though we have witnessed over past half century unprecedented developments on the human rights terrain? We have set in place legal frameworks and international instruments designed to protect the world's poor and vulnerable from discrimination. We have establish protocols and treaties to restore dignity, social justice, freedom and equality to the entire human race. Why does it not work? Why is that man still striking this women? Why is the grandmother still coerced into a ritualistic mutilation that has wounded her own life ... her entire life? Why is that child still unloved?
The answer lies, suffering, in the gap between ideals and reality. Between legislation and action. Between having rights and taking them. Between having rights and empowering people to claim them. Between conferences and what happens when we all go home - to be faced with the grim and sometimes quite overwhelming reality that discrimination and violence against women does pay. And it often pays very well.
Our response must be to devise alternatives to give substantive effect to human rights in all the experiences that affect women and men across all walks of life. We have to make sure that discrimination does not pay. This calls for a paradigm shift in the way that we make rights real. Our new approach must be inclusive and holistic. It has to change the way men and women think, behave and act out their lives individually and collectively. We are all responsible together. We will never win the war against the crime syndicates unless we devalue their profits by decreasing demand for their products. We will never win the war unless we are as organised as they are, and unless we face their inhumanity with its opposite. The only rational response is collective solidarity.
The delegates gathered here for this week in Cape Town to participate in the World Court of Women are ideally placed to give leadership to a campaign that recognises that this is a real and sadly worsening war that we are fighting - a campaign that has at its heart a resolve to find and implement new ways forward. Ways that work. A campaign that is unafraid to leave behind tired modes of thinking. This is an emergency.
Since 1994, in South Africa we have worked hard to create the paradigm shifts we need. Our history of colonial domination, patriarchy, segregation and apartheid burdens us with an almost unbearable legacy of racism, inequality and poverty. Our inheritance is so distorted, we have had to develop a plethora and legal and other mechanisms even to begin to restore justice, provide redress and establish a culture and ethic of human rights consciousness and practice.
Our transformation process began in 1994. Our greatest milestone was the promulgation of our precious Constitution in 1996, which includes our world renowned Bill of Rights.
At the heart of our debate on violence against women, lies, of course, the issue of inequality. Section 9 of our Constitution describes the right to equality; the right I like to call our mother right, and it gives powerful impetus to women's empowerment across the spectrum of our society.
I will not attempt to catalogue the long list of rights-based legislation we have introduced since 1994. You can find all the information you require on our website www.gov.za - South Africa's main government website. Suffice now to say that the new legislation focuses on, amongst other issues, violence against women, including rape, battery and HIV/Aids. It addresses transformation in family law and workplace discrimination. New laws have replaced the previously patriarchal rules of evidence, particularly as they pertain the rape; we have set in place progressive health and reproductive rights frameworks and the rights to termination of pregnancy on demand have been secured.
Internationally, the right to equality has become the primary vehicle for rewriting the relationship between women and the state.
As a keen international player, South Africa has actively participated in the discourse on globalisation and its impact on developing economies and poor communities in the so-called Third World. This discourse, if it is to have any meaning, has to be framed in a womenist context and specifically couched upon the right to equality. Here at home, for example, the implementation of national policy and its implications for women, the demands for equal pay and the exposure of widespread unpaid labour, have recently revealed a strong trend towards the feminisation of poverty. This must inevitably lead to a more progressive exploration of the socio-economic rights enshrined in our Constitution - rights that gain stature through the right to equality.
The strength of our Constitution and our developing body of law is premised on the conscious recognition that all our justifiable human rights are linked and interdependent. This principle is also explicitly endorsed in a number of human rights declarations and resolutions, adopted by the international community. Our own woen's charter, and international instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action, carve essential benchmarks to measure the individual performances of participating countries.
The fundamental belief that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated is the genesis of our internationally acclaimed National Action Plan for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. This programme, which is driven by my office, seeks to develop practical measures to make the rights and freedoms embodied in the Constitution a recognisable part of each citizen's everyday reality.
The programme keeps me mindful of the challenges we face, day by day. The legacy of apartheid looms large over our fledging democracy and we hope that this campaign, based on a strong interactive approach, will raise the level of rights' awareness in the public sector.
A clear gasp of the indivisibility of all our human rights is fundamental to overcoming apartheid's legacy of poverty and social injustice. It is essential, therefore, that this fundamental belief must be clearly visible in the development of policy and in its implementation.
As the bloodline that bolsters our body of human rights law, the right to equality relies upon the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 (the Act) as the key instrument to making good on our aspirations for substantive equality, dignity and freedom. The passage of the Act, last year, was a legislative landmark. Our greatest challenge remains the creation of a well-resourced institutional framework, to promote and facilitate effective and efficient implementation. This is an ambitious, but indispensable, piece of legislation.
The Equality Act is formulated and structured to give full effect to section 9 of the Constitution. The Preamble to the Act creates a bold vision of a South Africa free from social and economic inequalities, especially those inequalities and discriminatory acts that are systemic in nature and spawned by the triple curse of colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy. The Act was designed in the knowledge that these systemic inequalities remain deeply embedded in our social structures, practices and attitudes and that, left unattended, they have the potential continuously to undermine the legitimate aspirations of our constitutional democracy.
The Equality and Employment Equity Act are our most concrete measures for institutionalising dynamic change. As I have said, the framework of our equality legislation is ambitious and far-reaching. It applies vertically between citizens and the State and horizontally by binding all persons. The recognised 'prohibited grounds' are: race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief culture, language and birth.
The gender-based grounds prohibiting unfair discrimination are extensive, with nine broadly enumerated grounds, which include:
And to revert to my earlier theme of giving substance to our legislation and devising new ways to make rights real, women have a special role to play. We need to introduce new ways of giving effect to this wonderful legislation. We need to become active role-players in changing current realities, by giving time to human rights based NGOs and community based initiatives to advance affirmative systemic policy changes that contribute to the removal of entrenched patterns of inequity.
A brief scrutiny of the daily newspapers provides evidence of a litany of human rights abuses, especially in our rural areas. These acts bear testimony to the barbarism of racism and the power of domination and they have enormous implications for us as South Africans, in terms of our right to dignity. Women simply have to act to change this bleak landscape.
But, while I talk of South Africa, the war is, of course, global. And so we have to act. We must act. We have no alternative but to act. We have to make a difference. We must bring about a visible and experiential paradigm shift. To quote from the UN Development Report 2000: "It is time to move from the rhetoric of universal commitment to the reality of universal achievement."
It is time also, actively to involve our brothers in this struggle. They cannot remain on the sidelines mouthing platitudes to the tragedy that is playing out before us. And so I pose the question in the words of Farid Esack who says: "Where are the men and issues of male sexuality, fatherhood and masculinity? How do we begin to engage men to teach them that their own freedom is dependent on that of women - that when you have your feet on someone else's neck, then you yourself are not able to move and get on with the business of living and loving."
Women are on the frontline, both by choice as soldiers ... and, tragically, as victims of circumstance. Discrimination and violence on the grounds of race, sex and gender is widespread. Women need to provide a bulwark against such practices and ensure that the perpetrators are brought to book. In South Africa, we are working hard and beginning to change things for the better. But we are just beginning and the road ahead promises many harsh challenges. For courage and to conclude, here are the words of Ghana's Abena Busia - from her poem 'Liberation':
We are all mothers And we have that fire within us, of powerful women whose spirits are so angry we can laugh beauty into life and still make you taste the salt tears of our knowledge -
I thank you.
Issued by: Ministry for Justice and Constitutional Development