The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women: Article 4(m) and Article 4(n)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/08/17
Article 4
States should condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination. States should pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating violence against women and, to this end, should:
( m ) Include, in submitting reports as required under relevant human rights instruments of the United Nations, information pertaining to violence against women and measures taken to implement the present Declaration;
( n ) Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines to assist in the implementation of the principles set forth in the present Declaration;
The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women or the Declaration from 1993 stipulates something echoing even in the modern period, in our generation. The right or not of a woman to be free from violence.
The stipulations here speak to the right of women to be free from Violence Against Women, but the statements also remark on some of the precise methodologies and provisions around it. As Article 4(m) describes, the inclusion of reportage is an important component of the elimination of VAW.
As noted in the prior articles, the gathering of data and the production of statistics for transparent and honest communication with the public help with the efforts to eliminate VAW. One big issue comes in two forms. It comes from a lack of respect for the truth.
One manifestation is in the denial fo the widespread occurrence of VAW around the world as justification for doing nothing about it. Imagine a kitten, or a cat sometimes, going half under the bed with their but and tail jettisoning out because they did not want to be hidden.
The truth comes out, eventually, as we find out with the Roman Catholic Church sexual abuse cases. Another manifestation is the admittance of VAW but then the unwillingness to catalog and document aspects within the society of it.
Because then, you do not have to do anything about it. Take the stark case of climate change, many in the Republican Party in the United States of America deny its reality; while those who accept it, they think human influence is negligible or should be ignored because we cannot do anything about global warming anyway.
This can be the mentality: denial or resignation in disregard or dismissal of the truth. VAW has gone through the same process. Our issue with VAW in these subsections is the reportage of VAW to the wider public. The ways in which to deal with it.
The manner in which to report it. The methodology within the Declaration is the submission of reports, as a requirement of the instruments of the United Nations regarding human rights. That means data about VAW then some measures initiated by the nation or the State.
The inclusion of the data and the implementations is not the most that can be done for the reduction of VAW, but the wheels are more in motion with these inclusions. Now, the next article subsection is an interesting one.
Article 4(n) states the need to encourage the development of measures for helping with making the ethical theory into practical reality. The setting about of guidelines – this, this, and this – to implement the rights of women in the real world.
Anyone who has ever run a team simply cannot state what needs to be done and then expect the projects to be completed by the following Monday. It takes kindness, compassion, cooperation, and teamwork to get tasks and overall project goal markers accomplished.
In a similar manner, the process of having international rights documents took a long time and continue to be churned out or adapted in strict accordance with the changing dynamics and needs of the modern world.
In particular, we can see the need to provide assistance to implement complex ethical stipulations found in the Declaration, the CEDAW, and other international human rights documents listed as an addendum to this article – and several others in this series.
The help for the implementation can be considered, in a sense, guards in a bowling lane while playing with newcomers to the sport of bowling. Those who want to bowl but not feel the sense of utter failure off the bat can then begin to work with the guardrails to help with the early work in developing the form for proper bowling, standard bowling technique involved in a throw or toss of the bowling ball.
The guidelines are not specified within Article 4(n); however, the fundamental provisions do give a sense in which the respect for the individual rights of women can be realized. As in any complicated situation, a Swiss Army Knife approach – as my mentor, Professor Sven van de Wetering, states – in order to effectively deal with the issues of at present and to arise into the future.
It is in this sense the problems around VAW and its concomitant solutions come in polycausal or multicausal chains with many unexpected emergences as things progress over time, especially in a world of several billion people, modern technology, newer communications methodologies, and the means by which to empower even a small coterie of people to make powerful change – positive or negative.
Women’s rights amounts to nothing more than the realization of equality of women with men. There are powerful movement working, as you read this, to dial the clock backwards and reduce women’s rights and create less equal societies for some purported higher purpose or empirically unidentifiable cause rather than consensus reached among the world’s leading representatives of nation-states for an example.
Our work now will provide a bulwark for the future generations to be able to protect their lives and livelihoods and any wins now should not be taken for granted as these can be taken away at the drop of a hat, in the midst of whipped up hysteria to draw citizens into a frenzy to find an identifiable scapegoat group. These have been, in the past, mostly women followed by members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Our civilization rests on delicate assertions and trendlines of progress. The work to give some semblance of guidelines to assist with the implementations of the equality of women with men through rights gives the basis for equality of the sexes or, in the terminology of the Sustainable Development Goals, the realization of “Gender Equality.”
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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