August 2009 marked the 25th anniversary of the enactment of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (SDA), Australia's primary law on sex discrimination. In the 25 years since this Act was introduced, there have been important changes in how the Australian community responds to discrimination against, and the unequal treatment of, women. Community understanding of sex discrimination and the obligations to secure its elimination has improved. There has also been progress in eliminating some of the most overt forms of sex discrimination.
Notwithstanding these developments, as evidenced in the 2008 report of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee on the effectiveness of the SDA, significant challenges remain in the struggle to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and to achieve substantive equality between men and women. For example, evidence suggests that women are underrepresented on boards and in leadership positions, and are significantly more likely than men to be impoverished in retirement, since superannuation balances and payouts for women are approximately half of those of men. Research also shows that approximately 1 in 3 women in Australia will experience gender-based violence in their lifetime.
In an important step forward for women's rights, the Australian Government recently became a party to a human rights treaty - the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women - that provides women with a means to hold the Government legally accountable where it fails to protect and promote their human rights. Under this treaty, women can submit complaints to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women where they believe that the Australian Government has failed to protect their rights to non-discrimination and equality, and domestic remedies have been exhausted. The Committee can determine whether or not the Australian Government has violated a woman's rights and, if so, make recommendations on how it should remedy the violation(s). The Optional Protocol also empowers the Committee to undertake inquiries into alleged grave or systematic violations of women's rights.
Already the Optional Protocol has been used successfully to hold states legally accountable for their failure to protect women against gender-based violence and to protect their reproductive rights. For example, in A.T. v. Hungary, Ms. A.T. submitted that she had been subjected to severe domestic violence for a period of almost 5 years. Despite this sustained period of violence, which had been brought to the attention of state officials, A.T. was unable to seek refuge in a domestic violence shelter or obtain a protection or restraining order against the perpetrator, since none were available under Hungarian law. Moreover, protracted legal proceedings had proved ineffective in securing A.T.'s rights. The UN Committee held that, in failing to take adequate steps to protect A.T. against domestic violence, Hungary had violated the right to non-discrimination and the freedom from gender-based violence in the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The Committee called on Hungary to compensate A.T. and adopt measures to guarantee her physical and mental integrity.
In 2009, PILCH secured funding from the Victorian Women's Trust to run a seminar series on the Optional Protocol and how this instrument can be used to better protect and promote women's rights, both domestically and internationally. The seminars are scheduled to take place in Melbourne and select regional areas over the coming months and will be open to the legal profession, the community sector and women's rights advocates.
For further information about PILCH's work on women's rights, please contact Simone Cusack at simone.cusack@pilch.org.au.