The Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 18th December 1979 and entered into force on 3rd September 1981. CEDAW is the most comprehensive agreement on the basic women rights and is the only international instrument that protects and promotes women's right and addresses women's right within the political, social, civil, economic and cultural life.  By May 2009, 186 countries have ratified and acceded to CEDAW.

 

Courtesy of wikipedia.org

 

Afghanistan has signed this convention on 14th August 1980.  By signing this convention Afghanistan made a preliminary and general endorsement of the convention and agreed to undertake a careful examination of the treaty to determine her position towards this convention. But unfortunately due three decades of conflict in the country, Afghanistan wan not able to ratify and implement it. Afghanistan acceded to the convention on 5th March 2003 without any reservation. A country may file reservations against the convention when they file their papers of accession or ratification, but Afghanistan did not submit any paper and this means that Afghanistan has agreed to be legally bound by all of the terms of the convention. Afghanistan is legally in force from 4th April 2003. The government is obliged to implement the convention and promote human rights of women as women were the first victim of war since 1979 till now.

As the government has the obligation to report the CEDAW to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and at same time civil society of that country also has obligation to write Shadow Report and send to the UN Committee after the government report has been submitted. The government of Afghanistan has not submitted any report yet. The motivation for gathering the civil society organizations to work on CEDAW has been started when HAWCA along with four other civil society organizations (AIHRC, AWSDC, AWJA and Medica Mondiale Afghanistan) were invited to a conference in New Delhi, India, by IWRAW Asia Pacific . As no report and shadow report has been submitted yet to the UN Committee, this delegation of five women activist made a plan in India that by going back to the country, they will start working on CEDAW reporting. On arrival to Afghanistan we invited a number of women-headed organizations representatives and updated them about the trip and the action plan that we had made in India. Considering all the criteria we selected 10 women organizations to make a committee to start its work toward writing the shadow report. HAWCA took the lead and became secretariat for the committee activities. The committee has been named CIC (CEDAW Initiative Committee) by HAWCA. Within one year this committee organized two technical workshops, first in Kabul and the second one in India in which around 25 organizations were invited to get the basic knowledge of CEDAW and mechanism of reporting.

The current activities of the committee is to recognize the most active women organizations from 8 zones of the country and involve those who are willing to be part of this process. The next step will be to make different working committee to follow different activities that CIC has planned within their provinces and according to the capacity of their organization. Survey and data collection from different survey’s report that already had done by some organization and identifying the key problem that women are suffering around the country is on the top of the activities.