Gov’t urged to fight violence against women

Mrs Bernice Sam, a Gender Consultant on Tuesday called on Government to put in place appropriate measures that would ensure that laws governing violence against women work.

Mrs Sam, a former Board Member of Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), said the government needed to do more to ensure that administrative structures put in place by the state were active to ensure the realization of women’s rights.

She was addressing a workshop organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in collaboration with WiLDAF on the Shadow Report to Ghana’s 6th and 7th combined report to know the progress on Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

The theme for the workshop: “Consultation on NGO Shadow Report to Ghana’s 6th and 7th Combined Report” is to highlight the gains as well as the challenges in ensuring that the rights of women are enhanced.

She said it was important for active collaboration amongst actors working directly and indirectly to enhance women’s rights with the aim of harnessing resources as well as avoiding the duplication and wastage of scarce resources.

Mrs Sam said the country being a signatory to CEDAW had been able to make progress in the abolishment of witch camps and the practice, managing laws that regulate marriage from the Muslims perspective and dealing with the affirmative action law.

She thus called on all NGOs and state parties to join efforts in making sure that all structures put in place to kill the canker of violence meted out against women worked for development.

Mr Babatunde Ahonsi, UNFPA Country Director, said the UNFPA’s mandate affirmed the right of every individual to enjoyment of the highest standard of physical and mental health to empower individual men and women with equal opportunities as a means of creating conditions that allowed the poor to break out of the poverty trap.

He said Ghana being a signatory to several international and regional conventions in the area of gender equality had taken steps to translate commitment to many of the international conventions and consensus document into national laws and policies.

Mr Ahonsi said within the framework of human rights established and accepted by the global community, certain rights were particularly relevant to women such as the right to health and education as enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals.

He said it was therefore important for Ghana as a country to do a lot more towards that direction to ensure that the commitments that Ghana had signed onto were translated on the ground to concrete interventions that would benefit women fully.

Mrs Catherine Bob-Milliar, National Director, Department of Gender reiterated that governments had put measures in place in the 1992 constitution to ensure that CEDAW worked to eliminate violence against women in any form in the country.