Bending the Bow: Targeting Women's Human Rights and Opportunities
(A publication of the Open Society Institute's Network Women's Program, August 2002)

In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the number of women in the government and the work force has declined dramatically during the past decade. The message behind the decline is often an old one: a woman's place is in the home taking care of children.

In response, however, many women are sending out the message that their place is wherever they want it to be. They are organizing to secure political, social, and economic equality in the region's emerging democracies. They are using international human rights principles and laws to advance their rights and opportunities, and they are forcing more and more countries to recognize that women's human rights must be part of the discourse of democracy.

The Network Women's Program is working to strengthen the capacity of women's human rights activists and to connect them to the international women's movement. The Women's Program is committed to empowering women leaders who will advocate for gender equality in the political process, in the labor force, and throughout society.

The Silencing of Women's Voices

In 1994–95, women from around the world mobilized to participate in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Beijing marked the beginning of the struggle of the newly independent women's groups emerging in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to make their voices heard within the global women's movement.

At previous UN conferences on women at Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, and Nairobi in 1985, women from the region participated as representatives of official, government-sanctioned organizations. These women were a major presence, articulating alternatives and negotiating language that would shape international development priorities for the future.

At Beijing, the new women's groups faced numerous problems. First they had to find resources to get to the conference when state aid was not available. Then they had to learn how to influence the process of preparing and approving a final document so that it would reflect the negative consequences of transition on women's lives. The frustration they experienced in Beijing manifested itself in the landmark "Statement from the Non-Region," which was delivered by Polish women's rights advocate Wanda Novicka to the UN General Assembly.

Linked by the experience of communism and its collapse as well as efforts to establish democracy within new market economies, women from the region believed they had vital perspectives to contribute on the issue of women's rights and gender equality. And they recognized that their missing voices at Beijing reflected an even greater challenge at the national and regional level: to find a way to play a leadership role in the task of building new societies along democratic lines. Women in Russia, already marginalized during the perestroika years that preceded the Soviet Union's break-up, were among the first to confront this challenge. "Democracy without women is no democracy," the slogan adopted by the First Independent Women's Forum in 1991, became a rallying cry for the Russian women's movement.

In countries throughout the region, many women are finding themselves once again relegated to hearth and homeÑand especially to motherhood. This reversion to traditional women's work suits the needs of economies that no longer have paying jobs for over half of their working-age populations. It is bolstered by reformers' efforts to portray women's equality under communism as a "forced emancipation" requiring their full participation in the labor force along with exclusive responsibility for household maintenance and family caregiving. In the 1990s, many women, agreeing with this perception, looked forward to escaping from what were often thankless, low-paying jobs and retiring to the domestic world.

Democracy with a Male Face

The development of democracy with a male face also reflects the dramatic decline in women's political participation following the collapse of communism. Across the region, the number of women in national parliaments tumbled when quotas for women were lifted in the first free elections. In the early 1980s, in Russia, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, roughly 33 percent of deputies to the Supreme Soviet were women. In 1991, the number had fallen to less than 6 percent.

In Belarus, only 3 percent of deputies elected in 1990 were women. The decrease was even greater in local bodies, especially in rural areas.

Succeeding elections saw little change. In some countries, women's representation worsened. In Albania, for example, women's share of parliamentary seats fell from 36 percent before 1989 to 20 percent in 1991 and 7 percent in 1997. In other countries it improved, although only slightly. In Ukraine, women deputies represented a mere 4.2 percent in 1994 and only 5.6 percent in 1998. Women in Hungary saw their share of parliamentary seats fall to 7 percent in 1990 and rise to only 8.5 percent in the 1998 election. Women activists have advocated for quota systems in Georgia, Latvia, Poland, and other countries, but so far parliaments have rejected these proposals.

The few women elected to parliamentary seats seldom advocate on behalf of women. The situation is even worse with regard to high-level government positions: in only four countries did women make up more than 10 percent of government ministers in 1996, while in nine, including the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Romania, there were no women ministers at all. Some countries, notably Estonia, have taken steps to improve this situation, but prejudice against women's leadership still prevails. Upon announcing another all-male cabinet in 2000, Milos Zeman, prime minister of the Czech Republic, said: "When I compared possible female and male candidates, the males appeared in all cases as better experts." In countries where women did occupy ministerial positions, they were usually those of health, culture, or social welfare, where they command few, if any, resources. Placing women in such positions also reinforces gender stereotypes.

In short, as a recent report by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Women 2000, makes clear, women are not participating at the leadership level in emerging democracies and women's rights are not part of the agenda. Women's absence from the policymaking process diminishes efforts to reform economic, social, and legal systems. Enduring gender biases have contributed to the failure to revise outdated employment laws, modify health care fees to ensure equal access for women, and adopt enforcement laws on gender-based violence.

Sonja Licht, president of the Fund for an Open Society–Serbia, believes that emerging democracies will not be open and stable until women with a gender equality agenda occupy senior policymaking positions. Recent geopolitical events in the Balkans and Central Asia only underscore Licht's contention that "a crucial part of global security is, by definition, human security." The human security framework requires the kinds of policy and budget shifts that are very often advocated by women.

In the short-term, the situation calls for strong women leaders, backed by a core of local advocacy groups and experts, who can propose gender-informed legislation, monitor violations of women's human rights, mobilize public opinion, and demand redress in legal and political realms. The rapidly expanding NGO sector is the one place where women are active on an equal basis with men. To the extent that governments in the region have made any progress toward implementing gender equality, the Women 2000 report concludes, it is the result of the work of individual women and women's NGOs.

Women's rights advocates face tremendous challenges. Constitutions in almost every country include the principle of gender equality and forbid discrimination on the basis of sex, yet few define discrimination and too little case law exists to provide a working definition. Monitoring and implementation structures are also lacking.

Empowering Women: Human Rights Leadership Training

One of the most significant achievements of the global women's movement over the past decade has been to convince the countries of the world that women's rights are human rights. This recognition has made it imperative that women's concerns be part of any national development agenda. Yet women's experience has shown that gender equality and women's human rights must be demanded and fought for at every level.

The Women's Program has made it a priority to create programs that enable women to use the human rights framework for effective advocacy. With Women, Law and Development International (WLDI) and Human Rights Watch, the Program established the Human Rights Advanced Leadership Training for Women, engaging NGO leaders from 22 countries (plus Kosovo) in an 18-month program for emerging women's movements. The program followed the framework of the manual Women's Human Rights Step by Step: A Practical Guide to Using International Human Rights Law and Mechanisms to Defend Women's Human Rights, published by WLDI and Human Rights Watch in 1997. In a series of three week-long training sessions, participants mastered the concepts and skills needed to implement effective human rights projects, then worked in teams to identify goals and strategies for executing projects.

With technical assistance visits from WLDI, office equipment, Internet access, and e-mail linkages with other participants made available through OSI's Internet Program, the teams initiated a range of projectsÑfrom drafting antiviolence legislation to demanding equal access to health care to confronting labor market discrimination. They conducted surveys and research, documented human rights violations, and launched public awareness campaigns. They introduced thousands of people in different countries to the concepts of women's human rights and gender equality as well as the mechanisms needed to implement them.

Participants in the program had the invaluable experience of working with and learning from internationally acknowledged experts in women's human rights. A consultant to the Women's Program in Azerbaijan noted that as a result of participation in the Human Rights Advanced Leadership Training for Women, "a significant number of women advocates have emerged in Azerbaijan. Women who participated in these programs have not only increased their legal literacy, faced challenges, and acquired new advocacy knowledge and skills, but also gained feelings of self-confidence and mutual support that reinforce them morally in troublesome living situations." Participants from many countries created national NGOs devoted to women's human rights; all had the opportunity to participate as equal partners in international networks advocating for women's human rights.

Nicoleta Bitu, a Romani rights activist, introduced program participants to the problem of increasing violence and discrimination against Roma as well as the role of Romani women in their own communities and the larger society. She organized women from Romani communities in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Macedonia to participate in an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in June 1999. In September, Bitu presented the first report on the situation of Romani women in Europe to the Specialist Group on Roma/Gypsy Issues of the Council of Europe.

Armed with new knowledge and self-confidence, women's human rights fellows are introducing human rights concepts to women in their countries and advocating on the international level. The leadership training helped Yevgeniya Kozyreva to produce alternative "shadow reports" on women's status in Kazakhstan. She presented them at the June 2000 United Nations Beijing +5 meeting and at hearings during her country's review by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in January 2001. The Committee monitors compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, one of the key conventions on women's human rights. "It has given me the possibility to see the world as a whole," said Kozyreva of the Human Rights Advanced Leadership Training for Women. "And to see our local problems as a part of the universal."

In January 2002, Fellow Elena Mashkova, director of the NGO Femina in Naberezhnye Chelny, in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, also came to the United Nations to monitor the Russian government's report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Several years' work on Russian women's human rights informed Mashkova's analysis. Adapting the materials to local contexts, Mashkova and her team conducted human rights training for women in Tatarstan and then for women in the Privolzhsky Federal District. Mashkova and Kozyreva are part of a major effort to empower women in the region with knowledge of their human rights.

Women's Deteriorating Economic Status

While teams addressed the entire range of human rights issues, the majority focused on the critical problem of women's deteriorating economic status and the lack of accountability on the part of either the state or the private sector. Eight teams (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Russia, and Yugoslavia) addressed the problems of widespread labor market discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. Three teams (Albania, Kazakhstan, and Russia) addressed the inadequacy of state-provided social benefits, including pensions. The second area on which teams (Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) concentrated was that of violence against women and the lack of government accountability for ending it.

"Poverty and violence are two dominant phenomena in our society; they are deeply and indisputably connected," the Yugoslavia team concluded. For this reason, the team's initial strategy of raising awareness about domestic violence shifted during the war and bombing campaign of 1999 to focus on women's economic security. Perceiving that the country's economic, political, and social crisis would intensify in coming years and that violence against women would increase, they advocated for the broader empowerment of women. "We believe that one important condition for a violence-free life for women," they said, "is the realization of their economic and social rights, and especially their economic independence."

A major problem contributing to women's deteriorating economic status is the failure of existing legal measures on gender equality to prevent discrimination against women in employment. In post-communist countries, women seeking employment are constantly asked questions about marital status, family obligations, and their plans for children. Employment advertisements are gender-specific. Qualifications for men pertain to education and experience, while those for women often involve age and appearance. Some employment discrimination reflects existing protectionist legislation, but most represents a new effort to avoid the costs of maternity leave or other family-related health benefits.

All of these attitudes and practices characterize the labor market in Lithuania, where women constitute 54 percent of the labor force. Women over 40 years old find it almost impossible to secure jobs since physical attractiveness is usually preferred over skills. Young women offered jobs are often forced to sign declarations stating that they will not get pregnant during the time of their employment.

Such discrimination continues despite passage by the Lithuanian Parliament of the Law on Equal Opportunities of Women and Men in December 1998, the first of its kind in the region. The legislation mandated the appointment of an ombudsperson to investigate cases of discrimination in both the public and private sector. The first appointee is Ausrine Burneikiene, a close ally of the Women's Program.

So far, Lithuania is the only Central and Eastern European country that has an ombudsperson specifically dealing with gender issues. The introduction of this office and its practical work provides a positive example for the region and hope for improvement in the status and protection of women's rights in Lithuania.

Lithuanian participants in the Human Rights Advanced Leadership Training for Women program worked with a labor law specialist to determine that the country's labor law lacked sufficient enforcement mechanisms, especially in light of a legal culture that viewed men as wage earners and women as homemakers. A newspaper article about the team's findings caused an uproar and prompted a national debate. Labor issues comprise a significant portion of the complaints received by Ombudsperson Burneikiene.

There has been some progress in monitoring violations of women's rights, especially in countries seeking membership in the European Union. In the Czech Republic, for example, an amendment to the Civil Procedure Code shifts the burden of proof in gender discrimination cases from the employee to the employer. The same is true in Hungary, where laws now allow people to bring suits against an employer and require the employer to prove absence of discrimination. However, in practice, judges seldom uphold these new requirements.

In other countries, the state not only fails to enforce employment laws but also makes it difficult for individuals to do so. In countries of the former Soviet Union, for example, plaintiffs cannot bring charges against an employer but must lodge a criminal complaint against an individual civil servant, which in effect excuses state agencies from being held responsible. This highlights the extent to which gender discrimination still permeates all institutions of society. At a time when laws and their interpretation are taking on greater importance in the lives of individuals, it also shows how critical it is that women participate fully in the process of restructuring the laws.

The Disparity between Rights and Practices

The vast majority of women, including many who are NGO leaders in their countries, are unaware of equal rights laws and how to use them to address the great disparity between legal rights and existing practices. In Uzbekistan, for example, the "average woman" has a secondary education and five to six children. She is economically dependent on her parents, her husband, or the relatives of her husband, and must focus on housework and child rearing. The human rights training team found that women in Uzbekistan seldom understood even the "basic principles of democracy." Custom dictates, they pointed out, that "an Uzbek woman should be submissive and an obedient slave for her husband, his relatives, and the keeper of the family fire."

Participants from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries commented that the training projects were their first exposure to the issue of women's human rights in their countries. Most teams from Central Asia devised projects to increase public awareness of women's human rights. Facing significant personal risk, the Turkmenistan team, for example, created a center to provide information to women about their legal and other rights.

A measure of the program's success in empowering women leaders was apparent in the personal comments of many participants, who had always assumed that only lawyers could use national and international laws to advocate for women's human rights. The experience of implementing a human rights strategy helped them realize that they too can master the knowledge and tools to work on behalf of women's human rights.

Sharing experiences with other women was inspiring. "When we are in our own countries, we think it is hopeless," said Nato Shavlakadze of the Peoni Women's Club in Georgia. "But because there were examples from other countries and we spoke with people from these countries, we were empowered."

Next Steps in the Struggle for Equality

At the completion of the human rights training program, the Women's Program supported its partners, WLDI and Human Rights Watch, in publishing a collection of case studies, Becoming an Advocate Step by Step: Women's Experiences in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States. The case studies describe the challenges and triumphs of women becoming human rights advocates, working to bring about legal and institutional changes in ways that promote and protect women's basic human rights in countries throughout the region. The Women's Program supported translations of the practical guide, Women's Human Rights Step by Step, in cooperation with Soros foundations in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mongolia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

"We trained women and opened their eyes to the fact that their destiny is in their hands," said Rosetta Aitmatova of the Women's Support Center in Kyrgyzstan. "They have to fight for their rights instead of sitting and waiting for the government to help them."

In 2000, Beijing +5, the UN General Assembly's five-year review of progress in the implementation of the Platform for Action, provided an historic opportunity for women in the region to insert themselves into the UN review process that endeavors to hold governments accountable for past, present, and future commitments to women. The review process also offered a strategic opportunity to raise awareness about women's human rights and gender equality within every country in the region.

The Women's Program sponsored a small grants competition for NGOs to conduct campaigns to implement the Beijing Platform for Action in their countries and raise public awareness nationally. NGOs from Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia used these grants to carry out media campaigns, launch public awareness events and performances, and reach out to new constituents. In some cases, they also worked across national and ethnic boundaries. During the refugee crisis in Macedonia, for example, the Women's Program coordinated a dialogue among a network of 30 women's groups representing several ethnic identities and promoted models of cross-ethnic cooperation through the media. Efforts at dialogue continue despite the tensions among the country's Macedonian and Albanian citizens.

With the support of the Women's Program, women activists attended each of the Beijing +5 preparatory meetings as well as the special session in New York. Participating Soros foundations held monthly NGO Beijing Prep roundtable meetings for national agenda-setting. In all, some 90 women sponsored through the Soros foundations network participated in the Beijing +5 meetings. At every meeting, women alerted their sisters from other regions to the experiences and concerns of women in their countries, making sure they would no longer belong to a nonregion in the eyes of the international women's movement.

The Women's Program has realized its goal of empowering a strong regional group of women's human rights advocates and helping them to integrate a regional perspective into the agenda of the international women's movement. Future work will focus on assisting this group, as well as other advocates, in taking on new challenges.

The Women's Program will support the development of regional and subregional women's initiatives designed to provide advocacy tools to as many people as possible in the campaign for women's equality and basic human rights. On the national level, the Women's Program and participating Soros foundations will continue to support a wide range of initiatives to increase women's civic participation—through voter education or participation in political activism and elections.

The Women's Program will continue to support advocates' efforts to hold governments accountable for their commitments to women's full human rights. Within the next decade, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights, the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, and the Beijing Conference on Women will all have 10-year review processes, during which both advocates and opponents of gender equality and women's human rights will mobilize to advance their agendas.

An immediate priority is to help women's human rights activists take advantage of the gender equality requirements and monitoring mechanisms in European Union (EU) treaties and directives as well as the EU accession process, which provide a significant but challenging opportunity for women's rights advocates. In March 1998, the European Union formally launched the accession process, involving applicant countries in the Soros foundations network: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. As the 1998 Report of the Commission on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men clearly states and European Social Affairs Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou, the director-general, stresses: "There is no accession without equal opportunities between women and men."

The European Union has an important role to play in promoting equal opportunities in these accession countries, where gender equality is still not considered an integral part of democracy. Compliance with EU principles on gender equality should be a major criterion for countries seeking membership. However, for advocates in these countries, the absence of enforcement mechanisms against gender discrimination is a crucial issue. "Almost all accession countries have commissions or departments on equal opportunities, but, with very few exceptions, they hardly understand the concept, not to mention the initiatives they may take or the competence they have to carry out activities in this respect."

The Women's Program is committed to making sure that candidate countries promote equal opportunity principles. Even though equality between women and men is guaranteed in the constitutions of all these countries, discrimination persists in the application and implementation of equal rights. Operating regionally, the Women's Program benefits from its unique position to advocate for and monitor the extent to which the EU accession process seriously considers issues of gender equality and women's rights. An immediate priority is to provide women's human rights activists with tools to effectively utilize the EU's gender equality requirements and monitoring mechanisms, as well as the accession process itself, to help secure equal opportunities and women's rights.

A joint initiative by the Women's Program and the Soros Foundation–Romania, the Equal Opportunities For Women and Men in the European Accession Program will equip the EU candidate countries and their NGO communities with detailed reports reviewing the status of compliance to equal opportunity criteria.

With the support of the Women's Program and working in partnership with regional advocacy networks, women's human rights advocates from the postcommunist countries will be heard even more widely in the coming years. Women will raise awareness on gender equality and human rights standards and increase national, regional, and international pressure on all countries in transition to allow women to take their rightful places in the building of open, democratic societies.