Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitorship (DNB)
2011’s Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor is
Shanthi Dairiam, Founder and First Executive Director of Women’s Human Rights Action Watch Asia-Pacific, member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (2005-2008).
Shanthi Dairiam, a Malaysian, started her career as an educationist. For the past 30 years she has been engaged in the management of women’s rights programmes. She has much experience as a human rights activist building capacity for the achievement of the human rights of women and has been involved in the promotion of women’s rights through law and policy analysis and reform at the national, regional and international levels. In 1993 she founded the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific, a regional and international independent, non-profit global NGO, based in Malaysia, which monitors and facilitates the implementation of the UN Convention .on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against (CEDAW). This programme has facilitated the monitoring implementation of the CEDAW consistently in 13 countries of Asia and worked collaboratively with women’s groups that monitor the implementation of CEDAW in around 115 countries of the world.
She has worked as Programme Associate in the Asia Pacific Forum on Women. Law and Development, as Programme officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat, London and as Head of Programme and Technical Services at the Federation of Family Planning Associations, Malaysia. She has served as a women’s rights expert for key UN agencies such as UNDP, The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNIFEM and UNICEF and has provided technical services to governments in the Asia Pacific Region, Africa and Latin America assisting them to build capacity for the implementation of CEDAW.
In Malaysia, she is the Vice President of Women’s Aid Organization, a programme that addresses domestic violence, and has been appointed as a member of the National Advisory Council on Women since 2005. In 2004, she was elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women for a four-year term (2005-2008). She holds a Masters degree in English Literature from the University of Madras India, and a Masters degree in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.
On Thursday, November 10, 2011, Shanthi Dairiam presented the 14th Annual Dame Nita Barrow Lecture:
Women's Human Rights: The Promise and the Reality
A World View from Women’s Global and Local Organizing
CEDAW (the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) stands out as the primary international legal instrument on which women can draw for the realization of their human rights. However, its impact as a treaty can be maximised only with the active involvement and advocacy of women as rights holders. Drawing on her own extensive experience and study Shanthi Dairiam will present an overview of general trends in the achievement of women’s right to equality, the conceptual and contextual barriers to women’s equality and women’s relentless organizing around CEDAW
NOVEMBER 10, 2011, 7PM
Ignatieff Theatre, 15 Devonshire Place, Toronto
Reception to follow at OISE Library, 252 Bloor St W
Free and open to the public
ASL interpreted.
Presented by the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE), with support from The International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Video recording of the lecture will be available online shortly.
Click here for a review of the lecture on the OISE website, and click here for another review by an attendee of the lecture.
Shanthi is also teaching the following course at OISE, University of Toronto:
OISE AEC1132 Special Course, Autumn 2011
Women’s Human Rights: Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome The Significance of International Human Rights Standards
COURSE OUTLINE/TOPICS
PART ONE will examine the gap between law and policy providing equal opportunities and women’s enjoyment and exercise of the right to equality. It will help establish that discrimination against women which continues to occur in policy and practice is universal and is at the root cause of women’s inequality in spite of many formal attempts to create equal opportunities.
PART TWO will address discrimination as defined by the standards of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (the Convention) and identify key sites of discrimination implicating various institutions both public and private. It will raise questions regarding the role of law and policy in reinforcing dangerous stereotypes and social norms about women and men and will point to the nexus between the personal or private sphere and the public sphere in creating gendered hierarchies through law, policy and practice, reproducing and entrenching women’s inequality.
PART THREE will focus on the role of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty System, in particular the role of the Convention in advancing women’s right to equality. It will help create an understanding of the special features of the Convention and its unique potential to redress women’s inequality. This will include a study of the mechanisms set up by the United Nations, as well as their effectiveness to hold States accountable to fulfill their obligations under the Convention to women’s equality.
PART FOUR will, through the careful examination of specific cases, explore ways the standards of the Convention have been used in selected contexts to ensure that a rights approach in compliance with the principle of substantive equality is adopted in the creation of law, policy or programme to ensure de jure and de facto equality for women.
Interested in seeing a previous DNB lecture? Check out the lecture by Teresa Ulloa Ziaurriz in February 2011, on “Prostitution – Abolition or Regulation? Views from Latin American and Global Front Lines" streaming here.
The Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitorship is generously funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Read more about them at www.idrc.ca.