Shadow reporting raised at women’s meet

AUCKLAND — The importance of shadow reports was highlighted in this week’s CEDAW reporting meeting involving 14 Pacific Island countries. Shadow reports are NGO reports prepared by Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) on CEDAW, as opposed to the official government reports, which are compulsory by ratifying states.

Former CEDAW committee member to the UN, Dame Sylvia Cartwright, says NGO ‘shadow’ reports are useful and important for committee members trying to gain a clear view of progress for the elimination of discrimination against women by nations who have ratified CEDAW. Cartwright, who is Governor-General Designate for New Zealand, served eight years on the committee.

For 39 delegates from the Pacific who will return to their countries this weekend, the clarification on shadow reporting from Cartwright and UNDAW (Division for the Advancement of Women) official Jane Connors has taken much of the mystery away from the process of adding an alternative report to the compulsory government commitment.

Cook Islands’ President of the National Council of Women, Frances Topa-Apera, had earlier in the meeting called CEDAW in the Pacific ‘an open sore’. She explained that CEDAW training had been given to the region, ‘for so long – we’ve been through an information era and finally today the trend has come round to providing us with the skills needed to produce outputs. In the past, I saw CEDAW as an open wound, because every time we met to discuss CEDAW we would aggravate the wound, we wouldn’t find the treatment to address it.’

But will NGO shadow reports take hold in the Pacific, where many NGOs are subsidised or housed by government? Topa-Apera is non-committal on the question of a shadow report for the Cook Islands.

‘In countries where the NGOs and governments work very well together there is no need for the shadow report, but in countries where they work with less communication, there is a need,’ she says. ‘Overall, shadow reporting provides a good alternative for NGOs to express their position on CEDAW’.

As in Cook Islands, Niue’s National Council of Women (NCW) has close links with government, but NCW representative Peki Tauasi says a shadow report will help both government and non-government organisations measure their progress.

‘It’s a good idea to move together with the government, because without each other we won’t go very far,” she says, “but at the same time we shouldn’t leave it to government to do the report, we definitely have to do an NGO study as well.”

And one of the region’s most high-profile NGOs, Samoa’s Mapusaga o aiga, is also keen to look into preparation of a shadow report. This advocacy, care and counselling centre for women and families living with violence is responsible for much of the progress on this front at a time when domestic abuse issues still need increased public airing in the country.