100th International Women's Day: the Philippines

Today is about women. Today, as we celebrate the 100th International Women's Day, we pay tribute to the migrant women workers in New York who, while working in inhuman working conditions at a textile sweat shop factory, met tragic death. That was about a century ago. Today, we celebrate the gains even as we still grapple with gargantuan gaps in our goals towards gender equality.

What are we celebrating?

The Davao City government last year passed the Reproductive Health Ordinance that gave birth to the setting up of health clinics where families could access government interventions and programs related mostly to children and women’s health needs. This is an icon ordinance that should be emulated by other local government units.

To fulfill our state obligation to the elimination of discrimination, the Magna Carta of Women of the Philippines was passed in 2009. This law has legislated substantive equality in social, economic and political spheres of our lives. As such, it has provisions on women’s right to health and access to services…. “ responsible, ethical, legal, safe and effective methods of family planning….”

The Regional Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao has approved an ARMM Gender & Development Code. We are told the office of the ARMM governor will sign it into law on March 30, 2011, in celebration of the Women’s Month.

That we are able to rest assured that if we write the United Nations Cedaw Committee as victims of discrimination as defined in the CEDAW, we have their full attention. That we can invoke the Optional Protocol to Cedaw which is a separate treaty to which the Philippines is a signatory and it allows us women who have been denied access to justice at the national level to have our claims reviewed at the international level.

As a result of women’s advocacy following the communication of Karen Vertido before the UN Cedaw Committee, there is now an indication that the Philippines should develop a sexuality and violence education training program for judges and prosecutors in the Philippines. To our Congress, the UN Cedaw Committee recommends that the laws against rape in our country be reviewed and that our country allocate enough funds for enforcement.

As an acknowledgment that indeed many people around the world are killed every year because of their sexual orientation, the good news in 2010 was that the outcome of voting at the United Nations which is to protect the Lesbians, Gay, Bi-sexuals & Transgenders (LGBT) people from extrajudicial executions has been finalized in the direction to restore the reference to sexual orientation.

In a historic move last year, the United Nations created UN Women, a new single agency out of four UN bodies to promote women’s rights and their full participation in global affairs will reinforce its expression in individual countries. More importantly, this merger includes a UN budget of
$500 million a year for projects towards elimination of gender discrimination.

In closing, let me count some of the big challenges ahead of us.

A majority of our women are still poor, victims of violence and excluded from positions of power and authority.

It has been reported by various groups in a March 8 statement that “ in 2009, 71,000 Filipino women left the country to work as workers/helpers in households; they made up 21 percent of the newly hired in the top 10 job categories abroad. “

The most tragic face of our government’s deployment of workers abroad is that some of these women economic refugees are facing death in foreign lands.