The Sydney Morning Herald
PM backed 'flawed' UN pact
Date: 05/09/2000
By MARK RILEY, in New York, and MARK METHERELL
United Nations officials have vented their anger at the Federal
Government's refusal to sign a protocol on women's rights by revealing that
Australia played a central role in drafting the provisions it now says are
deeply flawed.
Documents provided to the Herald in New York show that Australia strongly
supported the protocol during its drafting and lobbied to expand the rights
of non-government organisations (NGOs) to appear before the UN committee
overseeing discrimination against women.
UN officials released the documents as the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, flew
to New York for this week's UN millennium summit.
Mr Howard appealed yesterday for an end to "political point scoring" on the
Olympics, but acknowledged that Australia was likely to come under fire at
both home and abroad on its handling of Aboriginal issues.
Mr Howard said Australia's criticism of the UN committee system was likely
to come up at the summit and during his meeting with the UN
Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, but he would not find it difficult to
defend Australia's position because it was justified.
He did not expect it to dominate the discussions. "But where there's a flaw
in the committee procedure, we intend to point it out and we don't intend
to continue accepting without criticism a committee process which is flawed
and doesn't give proper account to the legitimate views of democratically
elected governments in Australia," Mr Howard said.
UN officials said Federal Government submissions on the development of the
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women described the inclusion of NGOs in the process as "innovative".
Australia said the protocol would improve the effectiveness of the
convention to deal with complaints of individual and systemic
discrimination against women, one UN document says.
The Government attacked the protocol last week, saying it placed too much
weight on evidence from NGOs.
Federal Cabinet said it would maintain its stand until the entire UN
committee system was reformed.
But the UN documents show that Australian delegates had pushed for NGOs to
have increased access to the complaints process, warning that limiting
their voices could discriminate against those women who could not present
cases on their own.
The protocol allows women to lodge complaints of personal or systemic
discrimination with the UN's committee system if they are not satisfied
with remedies available in their own countries.
The Federal Government says its attacks are not related to the recent raft
of damaging reports from UN committees criticising its policies on
Aboriginal health, mandatory sentencing and asylum seekers.
Mr Annan's secretariat has requested that no UN officials speak on the
record about Australia's attacks, for fear of deepening the rift with the
Howard Government.
Australia's involvement in the drafting of the Optional Protocol began in
the last days of the Keating government in March 1996 and continued under
Mr Howard until last November.
The documents provided by the officials show that Australia provided
partial funding for a meeting of experts at the Maastricht Centre for Human
Rights in the Netherlands, which produced the protocol's original draft.
They show also that the only countries that raised objections to the
protocol during the three-year consultation process were Indonesia, China
and Japan.
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