Still not there: Discrimination against women not decreasing: research

ISLAMABAD: Islamabad. Pakistan had ratified a convention more than 15 years ago to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women but is still failing to comply to them. This was stated in a paper titled, ‘Women’s Participation in the Upcoming 2013 Elections: Pakistan’s International Law Commitments under the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Again Women (CEDAW’)”.

The paper was jointly produced by Democracy Reporting International (DRI) and Aurat Foundation and was launched on Thursday at the National Press Club.

It states that to-date the electoral roll shows a significant shortfall in the number of women registered as voters as reportedly 11 million fewer women registered as voters than men.

“Without women’s equal participation, the representative legitimacy of democratic processes and structures risk are being left subject to question.”

It recommends the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) to strengthen their efforts to register women voters through greater outreach and use of female staff and by making it mandatory to have photographs on computerised national identity cards (CNICs).

Meanwhile talking to The Express Tribune, Farkhanda Aurangzeb who is  manager legislative watch programme at Aurat Foundation expressed concern over gender discrimination by the ECP in terms of recruiting female staff at its secretariat and not formulating any policy on gender for the up-coming elections.

She claimed that currently there are only 21 females working at ECP secretariat and not even a single female is part of its commission.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2013.