Hazel Brown, co-ordinator of the Network of NGOs of T&T for the Advancement of Women, says the United States needs to fix their house before anyone else’s.
Brown was speaking in response to the United States Ambassador to T&T John Estrada’s recent Guardian interview in which he stated that his policy priorities in T&T included human rights—the rights of women, LGBTI and combatting domestic abuse.
Brown was a recipient of the Medal for the Development of Women (Gold) for her dedicated work in advancing women’s rights and issues in 2011.
She said the first issue that the United States needed to handle was to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) which was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, and is often described as an international bill of rights for women.
In a brief interview, Brown said: “The first thing we would want to put to the Ambassador is that the United States government is the only one of three countries that has not signed onto the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).”
Browne said the first thing the United States has to do is to join the lobby to sign the CEDAW.
“You can’t promote when you not doing it in your own country. Iran and Afghanistan are the other countries that did not support women rights,” she said.
On the other hand, she said the United States Embassy has always been open and had a good working relationship with the organisation.
“We want them to continue the support given for sharing and understand what is done. They supported workshops and seminars and we hope they continue the good work that was done. What he (Estrada) is doing is nothing new that he came up with.”
Grim picture
Reports by the Police Service revealed that altogether there were over 15,000 reports of domestic violence against women between 2004 and 2014,” she said.
Head of the Victim and Witness Support Unit, Margaret Sampson-Browne, says that there were 163 women murdered between 2005 and 2015, according to CAPA statistics. She said that was one too many and there were thousands of reports of domestic violence during that time.
Browne said she was seeking assistance for a brochure that would be put in police stations to educate the public. Another problem she mentioned was the lack of shelters for the victims.
“We don’t have a lot of shelters and one of the reasons that the victims don’t want to come is because of the inadequacies of the homes. There are many reasons they don’t make reports to the police stations.”
Gay rights
Executive director of The Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation (CAISO) Colin Robinson says legislation for the rights of LGBT was necessary as T&T was still under archaic law.
“We are subject to universal period review by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. I was in the middle of that process and it raises questions of our records against torture, children and women and gender-based violence. It got crazy.
He said T&T was congratulated at the Disability Convention for their efforts made and credit for improvement in other sectors.
“We have to put all that in place. We are doing well and one of our remaining challenges is that we don't allow our citizens to go international when it comes to human rights,” he said.
Robinson said T&T needed to be accountable to a common state of standards.
“That is human rights. We don't allow our citizens to go international and we have to make sure our protections at home are strong and issues are raised,” he said. He said a lot of our laws were old and there should be a lot of changes in legislation.
“We passed the Children’s Act in 2012 and we also criminalised children who have sex with each other and want to send them to jail for life. Rights are rights for everybody and not one set of people. Children need to be done in a different way because they can suffer. Gay rights is to be treated as everybody else,” he said.
Reports by the Police Service revealed that altogether there were over 15,000 reports of domestic violence against women between 2004 and 2014.
Serious crime statistics
Violence against women in the following years:
2013 2014 2015 2016
Sexual offences/rapes
550 829 625 52
Serious Indecency
71 80 70 7
Total Number of Murders in T&T
408 403 420 121
Number of women murdered
between 2010 and 2014:
2010 48
2011 26
2012 41
2013 34
2014 9