International Women's Day 2021 (and every day)

[Jo Kaybryn]

'No Room for Misinterpretation'

The jurisprudence of the CEDAW committee seem to be the least well known and the least referenced, compared to all of the other committees for the various human rights conventions. I'm determined to change this! 

I'm preparing to write some articles which emphasize some key findings and judgements that the committee has made over the years. And where relevant highlight some of its failings.

While I was analysing the cases from the committee, I came across 2 really important rulings that I think should be known much wider. The two cases deal with different situations but both involve women affected by violence, and the completely inadequate response of the justice system to accommodate them. In the first case, Jallow v Bulgaria, CEDAW demands that States must provide proper access to services and the legal system by providing information in other languages and translation/interpretation especially for women who are migrants and affected by domestic violence. In the second case, RPB v Philippines, the State failed to provide proper access to the justice system for a very young women who used sign language and was a survivor of violence.

It struck me that these two important pieces of information, are actually available in only a few languages!. I work across languages every day, and many of the organisations I work with are very organised and prepared when it comes to working in multilingual contexts. Yet these incredibly important statements by the CEDAW committee are known by so few people.

So we're crowdsourcing the translation of two simple sentences - into as many languages as possible! We've received over 30 contributions so far and we'll continue to collect up as many translations as possible to disseminate them widely.

You can find out more here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:67648614152714...

And the document we're collating the translations into is here

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349139937_No_room_for_misi...

[Rituu B Nanda]

Appreciation for this great initiative. Thanks for sharing