Commissioner Jackie Blue. Photo: HRC
Commissioner Jackie Blue. Photo: HRC

SocietyJuly 27, 2018

Why we must heed UN calls for action on treatment of women in Family Court

Guest writer
Commissioner Jackie Blue. Photo: HRC
Commissioner Jackie Blue. Photo: HRC

The UN committee on women’s rights listened to our voices, and we cannot ignore their recommendations, writes Jackie Blue is the Equal Employment Opportunities and Women’s Rights Commissioner

Every four years New Zealand women get a chance to voice their concerns about women’s rights to a United Nations committee of 23 independent experts, who then provide a report and recommendations to our government.

Before I went to Geneva earlier this month to speak to the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Commission engaged with many New Zealand women to ascertain their top human rights issues.

They said, overwhelmingly, that gender-based violence was the primary human rights issue for New Zealand women. This was no surprise as research shows us that cases of violence against women are drastically under-reported. In 2016 there were over 118,000 police domestic violence callouts – one every five minutes and yet this could be only 20% of domestic violence incidents.

We went to Geneva with a focus on five main human rights issues. I used my time before the CEDAW Committee to focus on gender-based violence.  On the same day that I spoke for the Human Rights Commission, New Zealand NGO’s also put their concerns forward to the CEDAW Committee.  Two days later, the CEDAW Committee held a full day examination of our government, led by Jan Logie, parliamentary under secretary to the minister of justice (domestic and sexual violence). The questions to our government reflected many of the concerns NGO’s and the Commission.

Last Monday, CEDAW issued its ‘Concluding Observations’ which included recommendations on equality, access to justice, gender-based violence, trafficking, education, health, employment, sexual harassment, data collection and family relations.

It was clear that CEDAW had listened to us and the NGOs.  Many of its recommendations addressed gender-based violence. The Committee endorsed the Commission’s recommendation that New Zealand needed a cross-party response to combat the alarmingly high level of gender-based violence in this country. They also recommended the government allocate resources to develop a comprehensive prevention strategy for gender-based violence against women.

We were also pleased by other recommendations that reflected our meetings with New Zealand women. These included a call for the government to collect and report separately to CEDAW on the number of cases of violence against women that have been investigated and have led to prosecutions, data on women who have received legal aid and women victims of violence who have been compensated.

New Zealand’s Family Court, already the subject of a review commissioned by the Minister of Justice, received a lot of attention at the CEDAW examination.

Like the members of CEDAW, I was shocked and dismayed at the evidence in the submission made by The Backbone Collective, which was one of the NGOs.

The experiences of the hundreds of women who contacted the Backbone Collective were overwhelmingly negative and canvassed prejudice, marginalization, large debts, negative impacts of health and well-being and inconsistency of judicial decisions.

The CEDAW report published this week called on the New Zealand government to upgrade the Ministerial Review into the Family Court to a Royal Commission of Inquiry with an independent mandate to engage in a wide-ranging evaluation of the drawbacks and obstruction of justice and safety for women inherent in the Family Court system.

More Reading

    Understanding the urgency and scale of these human rights issues, CEDAW wants to see a progress report from the New Zealand government in two years’ time on the issues of: a cross-party strategy on gender-based violence; the Royal Commission into the Family Court; removing abortion from the Crimes Act; resourcing of the Human Rights Commission; and amending the Immigration Act 2009 to allow the Human Rights Commission to process complaints from migrants.

    Dr Jackie Blue is the Equal Employment Opportunities and Women’s Rights Commissioner

    Read the CEDAW concluding observations here.

    Keep going!
    A Greek coastguard helps a refugee child to disembark, at the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on February 18, 2016. (Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)
    A Greek coastguard helps a refugee child to disembark, at the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on February 18, 2016. (Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)

    SocietyJuly 26, 2018

    The refugee crisis isn’t over. NZ must keep our promise to help those affected

    Guest writer
    A Greek coastguard helps a refugee child to disembark, at the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on February 18, 2016. (Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)
    A Greek coastguard helps a refugee child to disembark, at the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on February 18, 2016. (Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)

    Shaymaa Arif from Hamilton has spent part of this year volunteering as an Arabic interpreter at a medical clinic in Moria Camp, one of the camps in the Greek Islands where refugees are struggling to survive. She says New Zealand must not turn its back on the crisis. 

    It is so easy for us in New Zealand to isolate ourselves, to put a virtual dome around us that separates us from the problems happening everywhere else in the world. To be honest, even within New Zealand, we sometimes hold the us vs them mentality.

    But the refugee crisis is still ongoing. Even if we want to separate our emotions from it all, facts remain facts.

    Boats are continuously arriving every day onto Greek Islands, and there are still numerous deaths at sea when safe passage should be a human right.

    When our government begins delaying plans to increase the refugee quota, it has a massive impact. Those are an additional 750 people. Seven hundred and fifty people who are struggling day by day in a country that they cannot settle into and call home. Refugee children are usually deprived of education and forced to enter into exploitative labour in order to contribute some form of income to the family. Even men and women who are working often have their salaries withheld because there are rarely any laws surrounding refugee working rights.

    The conversation in New Zealand about the refugee crisis has tended to pit two vulnerable groups against each other, or two crucial issues against each other: that we can’t pay for refugees, because there is something else that needs more urgent attention.

    Recently, the narrative has been that because of our housing crisis in the northern cities of New Zealand, we simply cannot focus on increasing the refugee quota. Both Labour and the Greens, now in government, campaigned on increasing the refugee quota. Finding strategies and solutions to do this should have been a priority when election campaigning was still occurring, not after the government has already come into power.

    There are more than 1.4 million people displaced across the world. In Camp Moria on Lesvos, where I volunteered, there are already 8,000 residents. There is capacity for only 3,000. Living conditions are inadequate and refugees have to wait for months, if not years, until their papers are processed.

    Yes, New Zealand is a small country, but we have to do our bit in emergency response situations. We might ask why taking 750 more people is causing such controversy here, in the context of millions displaced. Let us not forget that behind every number is a name, a future, that we can choose to either acknowledge or ignore.

    We are signatories to the United Nations Refugee Convention. We have obligations. So I urge the New Zealand government: let’s continue doing our bit.

    The Bulletin is The Spinoff’s acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

    Sign up now


    Society