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UN committee adopts "groundbreaking" guidelines on civil and political rights

31 March -- The United Nations Human Rights Committee, which completed today its three-week session in New York, has taken a "groundbreaking" step towards fulfilling the UN's goal of mainstreaming gender perspective in all supervisory organs, according to the panel's Chairperson.

Cecilia Medina Quiroga of Chile made this assessment during her press conference Thursday on the Committee's adoption of new guidelines - in the form of a "general comment" - on article 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose implementation the Committee had been established to monitor.

According to Ms. Medina, the new guidelines, which request that States take a gender-conscious approach to the rights guaranteed in the Covenant, represent a "major, major contribution to the idea that human rights belong to every human being."

"What we have done is to read the rights in the Covenant with the perspective of gender to see how the rights could be violated if the victim is a woman," Ms. Medina said. She added that the Committee's reading had resulted in a new list of violations that had not been considered before.

As an example, Ms. Medina gave the Human Rights Committee's reading of Article 9, which she described as "the deprivation of the freedom à to leave a certain place" and said the Committee had found that countries whose norms prevent women from leaving their homes without their husband's permission were in violation of Article 9.

In her address to the Committee, the Secretary-General's Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, Ms. Angela King, welcomed the general comment, noting that the attention to the human rights of women had grown remarkably in recent years.

"Our work has to become increasingly sophisticated as we move into new areas, and as we try to find ways for translating into practice what we are clarifying conceptually," she said, adding that the new guidelines on article 3 would help strengthen that practice.