Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations - Transitional ...

Women’s Rights in Transitioning and Conflicted Societies
Foreword by Professors Christine Bell and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
This working report is designed to open a discussion on how women have figured in the
implementation of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. While equality for women was
not conceived of as a central issue in the conflict, women and equality issues were
substantively integrated into the Agreement. The difficulties with the Agreement’s
implementation at the political level have been publicly debated and much analysed. The
research of the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) has contributed to a growing
appreciation of the dilemmas and difficulties of implementation of the Agreement at the
institutional and legal level. This report forms a preliminary attempt to track how the
Agreement’s provisions on women and equality have been implemented, and begins to
unpick the relationship between equality for women and implementation issues more
generally. It begins to paint a broad picture of implementation: it starts from the premise
that asking the ‘women question’ is crucial, not just to equality for women, but also to
understanding more generally how implementation of a peace agreement does and does
not work. This report raises more questions than it answers, but in doing so, reframes
some of the key questions at the heart of current political and legal discourse. What does
it mean to secure something in the text of an agreement? What were the goals of the
Agreement? What does it mean to ‘implement’ the Agreement? How is successful
implementation to be measured: by whether institutions are up and running, or by
tangible benefits in life chances? What are the obstacles to implementation? From a
gender perspective, the report begins to track: where and how were women acknowledged
in the Agreement? What provisions stood to further women’s participation and equality?
How were these implemented in practice? What was the relationship between sectarian
and power divisions understood to be at the heart of the conflict, and women’s rights?
The report is very much a starting point, however, the information contained herein, to
our knowledge, has not yet been gathered together elsewhere. Indeed, the very difficulty
in accessing data relating to women and reform forms the basis of one of the report’s
main recommendations. While this work is very much in progress within the TJI, we felt
that the information in this report should be released publicly as soon as possible, as a
means of facilitating further debate. We are hoping that the response and debate it
prompts will itself feed into further collation of the information in the report and analysis
of the issues it raises. This is in line with the ‘praxis’ model of research – interchange
between research and practice towards models of social change – that has lain at the heart
of feminist approaches to socio-legal studies, and that also forms a key tool for TJI
research.
Background and Context
In most societies, including Northern Ireland there has been a greater public awareness of
women’s rights and of the deficits in equality across a range of contexts for women in
recent decades. Despite this awareness, systematic discrimination remains for a reality for
women - evidenced by a lack of meaningful equality of opportunity in employment,
payment differentials, the lack of access for most women to affordable childcare and the
double load that working women carry of combining career with primary care
responsibilities for children and elderly family members. In traditional societies in which
belief systems combine with and reinforce patriarchal structures the issues are even more
complex. Moreover, pervasive gender-based violence is an ongoing reality in many