To improve women’s lot

HRH Princess Basma recently chaired the first meeting of the reconstituted Jordanian National Commission for Women, amidst hopes that the commission will do more to empower women and defeat biased gender stereotyping.

Created by the government in 1992, the commission has worked to make some inroads, trying to end all aspects of discrimination against women and increase their participation in all walks of life — especially in high public or private sector posts where, due to the still prevailing culture against women they rarely make it — but progress has been slow.

The commission, and anybody else, for that matter, does not have to go too far to determine how women fare in the country; it is enough to compare all relevant international standards that are binding on the country and to how they are implemented, or see what these treaty bodies have to ask, repeatedly, the country to do to end discrimination.

Top of these international treaties are the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the two related conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Jordan appeared before these international human rights instruments and was advised where it went wrong and what it should do to remain compliant with its treat obligations.

Jordanian women married to foreigners still cannot pass on their citizenship to their children, as Jordanian men do; they do not enjoy equal rights with men in marriage and divorce situations; and they remain seriously underrepresented in all walks of life, including Parliament, the judiciary and the Cabinet.

This is where the Jordanian National Commission for Women needs to work to prove its worth.

Having the country comply with binding international human rights treaties it signed should be its primary goal.

The first order of business for the newly reconstituted commission, then, is to look long and hard at the country’s international commitments and address their continued violations.

All it takes is to call on those concerned to implement the decisions rendered by international treaty bodies. Nothing more, nothing less.