PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

160 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
nationally do not differ greatly from those they face in their everyday
activities. Taking position on budget allocations, amending laws and adopting
new ones, along with scrutinising the Executive are the daily business of
parliaments, as we saw in chapter six.
However, parliaments still need to be involved in international work, as the
following examples regarding gender equality illustrate.
Gender equality
Many treaties require States to submit periodic reports on the status of
national implementation. This is the case for the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and its
Optional Protocol. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women is the treaty body empowered to monitor enforcement and
make comments and recommendations which are then submitted to the State
concerned with a view to improving compliance. Until recently, many
parliaments were ignorant of this procedure. Not so today.
For example, in South Africa all national reports to this Committee (indeed
to all the international monitoring bodies) have to go to parliament for debate,
and parliament makes sure that the reports contain a wide variety of views,
including those of civil society. To make this happen, parliament holds
debates and public hearings, calls in ministers and requests documents and
reports from a wide range of departments and citizens’ groups. In South
Africa, members of parliament are included in national delegations that take
part in the proceedings of the CEDAW Committee, thus ensuring that they
better understand the subsequent recommendations, and of course Parliament
plays an active role in seeing to it that the recommendations are also effected
at the national level.
When passing national legislation on the CEDAW Convention, the
Netherlands Parliament added a provision to the law that requires the government
to report to Parliament every four years on the implementation of the
Convention before presenting its report to the Committee in its capacity of
State party. The concluding comments of the Committee are also presented
to Parliament.
Some Parliaments, such as that of Uruguay, hold a session in parliament
to follow-up on the CEDAW Committee’s recommendations and call on
members of the government to discuss them in parliament.
In Trinidad and Tobago, where there is no parliamentary committee with a
specific mandate to address gender equality issues, the reports to the CEDAW