POLITICS-AFRICA: Gender Dinosaurs At AU Conference

By Farah Khan Reprint | | Print |

MAPUTO, Jul 10 2003 (IPS) - -Womens rights in Africa took several leaps forward when the African Union’s executive council insisted that equal gender representation to its governing structure would not be diluted.

It also passed a far-reaching draft agreement on women’s human rights at a meeting in Maputo this week.

Diplomats gathered in the Mozambican capital revealed that a male lobby had attempted to change an agreement reached at the inaugural African Union meeting in South Africa which provides that five of the 10 positions for African Union commissioners would be reserved for women. They failed and the gender quota will stand, meaning the African Union will have more female commissioners than its European sister. “When we move, we move,” said an African deputy minister.

At the same time, the largely male gathering also passed the far-reaching, though awkwardly named, “Draft protocol to the African Charter on human and peoples rights relating to the rights of women.” This vital addition to the armoury of rights conventions on the continent will outlaw female genital mutilation and enshrine women’s equal rights if it is ratified by the AU.

But with several countries objecting to clauses in the draft agreement, the jury’s out on whether the AU possesses enough political will to make it more than a paper agreement.

Delegates said the gender parity debate was among the more stormy in a relatively quiet week of deliberations of the third session of the executive council of the AU – a meeting of foreign ministers from across the continent.

The commissioner positions are vital – the commission will be the nerve centre of the young African Union and will be the body that will make the union fly or sink. “This is a world first,” said an official from Southern African about the gender parity, adding that, “the gender quota stood” against efforts to torpedo it.

“There was no challenge to the principle [of gender parity],” said the African deputy minister, but the process was challenged.” The AU sought to achieve both gender parity and regional representavity with the election of the commissioners, a task that another diplomat called “impossible”.”

“The meeting had to choose between regional and gender representavity and gender won,” he said, adding that South Africa’s foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma who is the outgoing chairperson of the AU council had pushed hard to keep to the principle.

Commissioners seeking election this week have been put forward by their regions and countries and many more male delegates had been put forward than women.They will be chosen through a points system, which is based on previously held positions including senior political and civil service jobs. Zuma said that women were generally not well-represented in senior public posts and should not be punished by the points system.

Sources said that Zuma delayed her plane trip back to South Africa on Tuesday night where she was to meet United States president George W Bush early the following morning in order to complete negotiations on the women’s rights agreement and to ensure the AU commission would be significantly controlled by women.

The draft changes to the African rights charter, agreed to before her plane took off for Pretoria, are wide-ranging and touch on all the thorny gender issues impacting on women in Africa. Most significantly, it seeks to get member states to outlaw both female genital mutilation and forced marriages, as well as shore up women’s inheritance and property rights. It also seeks to advance the most thorny set of rights of all – reproductive rights which include abortion and contraception.

Africa’s gender dinosaurs emerged as Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Burundi and Rwanda which all registered reservations to the draft agreement. Tunisia and Sudan both objected to an 18-year minimum marriageable age; Egypt, Libya and Sudan also oppose separation, divorce and marriage annulment by judicial order because Muslim men are allowed, by Sharia Law, to end their marriages verbally and unilaterally.

Sudan – a serial objector to the changes – together with Burundi and Senegal also objected to women’s rights to “control their fertility”; “the right to decide whether to have children, the number of children and the spacing of children” and the right to choose their own methods of contraception.

Libya, Rwanda and Senegal objected to the draft agreement’s authorisation of “medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape and incest” and even to abortion where a foetus may endanger the mental and physical health of a mother.

It has taken eight years for the gender amendments to the African Charter on Human and Peoples rights to get to even a draft agreement because its key advances are so contested.

“This protocol will fill a vacuum in the African Charter in respect to the rights of women,” concludes the draft agreement. Like all other protocols of the African Union, this one also needs to be ratified by 15 countries before Friday so it can stand as a policy of the fledgling union. (ENDS/IPS/AF/AU/IP/FK/SM/03)

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