消除对妇女歧视委员会召开第六十一届会议（部分翻译）

消除对妇女歧视委员会

2015年7月6日

消除对妇女歧视委员会第六十一届会议今天上午开幕，会上听取了人权高专办人权条约司焦点小组科科长詹姆斯·希南（James Heenan）的声明，并通过了本届会议的议程和工作方案。

希南先生表示，可持续发展目标背景下的人权社群的两大重要问题是问责框架和指标，并强调称委员会在本届会议上将与联合国妇女署共同探讨如何将其专业知识应用于指标的构建，尤其是有关实现性别平等和为妇女和女童赋权的第五项目标方面。在哥斯达黎加召开的第二十七届年度会议上，条约机构主席签署了一系列反对威胁或报复的指南，同意并协调了协商和制订一般性建议的进程，并发布了一份有关可持续发展目标进程中的人权问题的声明。希南先生对委员会前成员杜布拉夫卡·西蒙诺维奇被任命为暴力侵害妇女、其原因和后果问题特别报告员以及委员会专家艾谢·费里德·阿卡尔被选举为负责监督欧洲理事会伊斯坦布尔公约的打击暴力侵害妇女和家庭暴力行动专家组创始成员表示欢迎。

委员会主席林阳子对南苏丹加入公约和任择议定书表示欢迎，这使得两份文书的缔约国数量分别增至189个和106个。接受对公约第20条第1段关于委员会会议时间问题修订的缔约国数量仍为69个。自上届会议开幕以来，共有6个国家提交了定期报告，分别是：不丹、加拿大、斯里兰卡、泰国、萨尔瓦多和约旦，亚美尼亚、孟加拉国和马里重新提交了因字数超过限制而被退回的报告。四个国家要求在简化报告程序下提交下份定期报告。

委员会听取了有关跟进报告状态和第六十一届会议会前工作组的报告，还听取了关于委员会专家在闭会期间活动的最新报告。

委员会将于今天下午3点再次召开会议，届时将与非政府组织和国家人权机构就塞内加尔、甘比亚和越南问题举行非正式公开会议，这些国家的报告将于本周接受委员会审议。

Opening Statement

JAMES HEENAN, Chief of the Groups in Focus Section, Human Rights Treaties Division, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in his opening remarks said that the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had regularly sounded the call for the post-2015 development framework to be anchored in internationally agreed norms and standards. The Sustainable Development Goals would be adopted in the September Summit, and two key issues for the human rights community were the framework for accountability, termed “follow-up and review” in the Zero Draft Outcome Document, and indicators. At the international level, it was proposed that follow-up and review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals would be entrusted to the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development under the Economic and Social Council, and many were realizing that the information gathered and analysed by human rights mechanisms, including treaty bodies, was a tremendous asset that should be exploited. The preliminary list of indicators which would measure progress towards the targets and goals would be released in November 2015. Indicators would provide crucial means of ensuring that human rights were at the heart of the post-2015 architecture by ensuring that information collected exposed the reality on the ground of people’s enjoyment of their human rights. At this session, the Committee, together with United Nations Women, would explore how to feed its expertise into the construction of indicators, particularly around Goal 5 on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

Turning to the twenty-seventh annual meeting of Chairpersons which had just concluded in Costa Rica, Mr. Heenan said that Chairpersons had endorsed a set of guidelines against intimidation or reprisals, agreed and aligned processes for the consultation and elaboration of general recommendations, and issued a statement on human rights in the Sustainable Development Goals process. In terms of relevant development from across the United Nations system since the last session, Mr. Heenan said that the General Assembly had adopted a resolution 69/293, declaring 19 June as the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, while the Human Rights Council had adopted a resolution on Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate all Forms of Violence against Women: Domestic Violence, a resolution on prevention and elimination of children, early and forced marriage, and a resolution on protection of the family and elimination of discrimination against women. The Council had further appointed former Committee member Dubravka Simonovic as Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, while Committee Expert Ayse Feride Acar had been elected as a founding member of the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) monitoring the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention.

Committee Experts said that the Committee should debate several of the points raised by Mr. Heenan, including the recent successes in the United Nations system and the outcomes of the Chairpersons meeting in Costa Rica, which related to the work of the Committee. Another Expert took up the issue of indicators and statistics to measure progress in human rights and asked whether there were enough national statistics to build on, cautioning that new internationally-devised sets of indicators might pose an additional burden on governments.

Responding, Mr. Heenan said that the work on human rights indicators would hopefully be a subset of development indicators, and stressed that this was all still work in progress. From the perspective of the human rights community, many of the chronic human rights challenges were hidden, and this called for building capacity to collect indicators and statistics.

Adoption of the Agenda and Organization of Work and the Report of the Chairperson

The Committee adopted the provisional agenda and organization of work for the sixty-first session.

YOKO HAYASHI, Chairperson of the Committee, presenting her report on activities undertaken since the last session, noted with satisfaction that South Sudan had acceded to the Convention and the Optional Protocol, bringing the number of States parties to both instruments up to 189 and 106, respectively. The number of States parties having accepted the amendment to article 20, paragraph 1 on the Convention concerning the meeting time of the Committee remained at 69. Six States had submitted their periodic reports since the beginning of the last session: Bhutan, Canada, Sri Lanka, Thailand, El Salvador, and Jordan, while Armenia, Bangladesh and Mali re-submitted reports which had been returned to them because they had exceeded word limit. Four States had requested to submit their next periodic reports under the simplified reporting procedure. The Chairperson had participated in March 2015 in a a High-Level Thematic Panel of the President of the General Assembly on “Advancing gender equality and empowerment of women and girls for a transformative post-2015 development agenda”, where she had made a presentation on girl’s education. Also in March, Ms. Hayashi had participated in the opening of the fifty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women, and had delivered a statement emphasizing the importance of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women as a legal framework for the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, as well as of the post-2015 development agenda.

Pre-session Working Group Report and Follow-up

PATRUCIA SHULZ, Committee Expert, briefed the Committee on the pre-session working group and said that it had prepared lists of issues with regard to reports of Bolivia, Croatia, Gambia, Namibia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Spain, and Viet Nam. The lists of issues and questions, which had focused on themes covered by the Convention, had been transmitted to the States parties concerned.

XIAOQIAO ZOU, Committee Expert and the Reporter on Follow-up, briefed the Committee on the status of follow-up reports received from States parties in reply to the Committee’s concluding observations, and said that she had met with representatives of Tunisia and Zimbabwe. Follow-up letters had been sent to the Bahamas, Bulgaria, Jordan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. First and second reminders had been sent to a number of countries. The Committee had received delayed follow-up reports from Chile, Cyprus, Kuwait, Malta, Mexico, and Turkmenistan. Hungary had sent its report on time, while the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia presented its report ahead of time.

Committee Experts provided an update on their activities during the intersessional period.

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