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Nigeria: Cedaw Participants Slam Govts
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Daily Champion (Lagos)
3 July 2008
Posted to the web 3 July 2008
Ngozi Okpalakunne
New York
Participants at the on-going Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, the United States (US) have described violence against women as the most prevalent form of human rights violation.
Speaking at the convention, Ms Favour Irabor listed forms of violence against women to include domestic violence, harmful traditional practices, sexual exploitation and rape of women and children and wife beating, which is even allowed by the Penal Code, the northern Nigeria equivalent of the Criminal Code.
In a similar vein, the chairperson of CEDAW's committee, Ms Dubravka Simonvic, said that the failure of most governments to domesticate the women's rights convention into their national laws amounted to an infringement.
While welcoming the laws enacted by some of the states to combat certain instances of violence against women, Irabor said that there was an urgent need for immediate action by the federal government to combat violence against women across Nigeria, government takes laws permitting wife battery and the institution of laws prohibiting marital rape, female genital mutilation, and other forms of violence that are not addressed by the Criminal Code.
On women participation in politics, Ms Irabor said "at the moment, there is less than five per cent representation of women both in elective and appointive positions within the three tiers of government, despite women constituting 50 per cent of the electorate.
Government has declared that it was working towards 35 per cent political representation of women by the year 2015, which still does not provide proportionate representation.
This declaration, she said was clearly backed by concrete programmes, adding that women's lack of access to political spaces was further compounded by the discriminatory indigeneship practices. She recommended immediate steps, including adopting special measures to enable and strengthen women's participation in political decision making in Nigeria.
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Also speaking on behalf of the NGO Coalition, Ms Elizabeth Orji observed that rural women in Nigeria suffered the worst form of exclusion in multiple ways of discrimination, especially in health education and political participation.
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