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OAS Secretary General Applauds Advances in Women's Rights in the Region, but Warns of Challenges Ahead

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The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, today highlighted the progress made in women's rights in the Hemisphere during the last half century, noting that it is important to move from theory to practice to achieve greater changes, during the First Meeting of the Group of Experts on Indicators of the Exercise of Women’s Rights in Mexico City.

The Secretary General of the OAS highlighted that, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Latin America and the Caribbean is the region in the developing world that has achieved the greatest progress in the formal recognition of the rights of women. In this regard, he said the seventies and nineties marked turning points in the path of the construction of citizenship for women, especially the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 and its Optional Protocol; and the Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (1994), among other instruments. "These conventions have been the guides for new generations of constitutions, laws, policies and plans for equality that have made possible significant progress in reducing gender inequalities between women and men," he said.

Nevertheless, the OAS leader said despite these advances, "there still remains an undeniable gap between current legislation and the reality of the exercise of the rights of the majority of women in the region." "There are still various kinds of obstacles to the full realization of their economic, social, cultural, political, sexual and reproductive rights, that are a challenge and also an outstanding debt for democracy and the rule of law," he added.

Secretary General Insulza praised the importance of having tools such as indicators of rights that enable the measurement in a more consistent and comprehensive manner of the exercise of the rights of women. In this regard, he recalled that the OAS General Assembly in 2011, held in El Salvador, the progress indicators of the Protocol of San Salvador were defined, whose first round of reports will be presented in the first half of 2014.

The Secretary General stressed the importance of political will and the technical capacity of states to transform these instruments into tools of everyday use in the formulation of public policies. "And this is probably the largest challenge in these processes, because they also involve changes in an institutional culture that is not focused on people and their human rights," he said.

The First Meeting of the Group of Experts on Indicators of the Exercise of Women’s Rights was held within the framework of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, celebrated on November 25, and was attended by the Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) of the OAS, Carmen Moreno.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Reference: FNE-13596