U.N. Recognizes World's Women
Failure by governments across the Islamic world to respect women's rights is hampering even hesitant steps toward political change, Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi said Monday as the United Nations observed International Women's Day.
"The rights of women and democracy are one and the same thing," the Iranian lawyer and rights campaigner said during a visit to the International Labor Organization to celebrate International Women's Day.
Speaking alongside Ebadi, Carla Del Ponte — chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal — said women have raised their profile on the international stage over the past decade.
She cited Louise Arbour, Del Ponte's predecessor as prosecutor who is stepping down as a justice of the Canadian Supreme Court to become U.N. high commissioner for human rights, and former Irish President Mary Robinson, who held the top U.N. human rights post from 1997 to 2001.
"In most democratic societies over the past generation, women have been given the opportunity to realize their professional aspirations," Del Ponte said. "It's not the same in the rest of the world."
In a study released to coincide with International Women's Day, the Geneva-based Interparliamentary Union — which counts 142 national legislatures as its members — said women now make up a record-breaking 15.3 percent of the world's lawmakers.
With 49 percent, Rwanda is the country with the highest proportion of women parliamentarians. The African average is 15.1 percent. Sweden is second with 45 percent.
The United States, which does not have a parliamentary system, was not included. There are 76 women currently on Capitol Hill — 14 of them in the Senate — for a 17 percent share.
If the U.S. were ranked in the report, it would have placed 14th, between Croatia and Israel.
Although the organization does not have a separate category for Muslim countries, the figure for Arab states is 6 percent. Muslim-majority countries like Iran and Indonesia would not be counted in the Arab category.
The report indicated that many of the countries where women are best represented have recently emerged from wars — such as Rwanda, Eritrea, Mozambique. Those nations increased female participation during democratization, the report says.
Women's rights are an excellent indicator of the general human rights situation in a country, Ebadi said, speaking through an interpreter.
Ebadi, who received the Nobel Peace Prize last year, was the first Muslim woman to win the award.
"Many people use Islam to justify the unequal position of women. They are wrong. Islam is a religion which believes in the equality of all human beings. The position of women is Islamic countries is due to the patriarchal system in these countries. Not only does this system reject the equality of men and women — it also rejects democracy."
Ebadi, who became Iran's first woman judge during the waning years of the Western-backed monarchy, was forced to resign by the clerical rulers who took over in the Islamic revolution of 1979. Her law office then became a base for rights campaigns.
An Iranian woman faces an easier situation than does a woman in hardline Saudi Arabia but still needs her husband's permission to work, travel or divorce, Ebadi said.
In Iran's courts, the evidence of one man is worth that of two women, she added. Even though a majority of Iran's graduates are women, they are far more likely to be unemployed than their male counterparts.
"To protest the unequal situation of women in Iran, I've dressed in black today. I'm in mourning for women's rights in Iran," Ebadi said.
Iran's hard-liners have denounced Ebadi as a foe out to dismantle her homeland's Islamic system through Western-backed rights campaigns. Ebadi says it is the hard-liners themselves who have betrayed ordinary Iranians — in particular women — who overwhelmingly backed the country's 1979 Islamic revolution.