Platform of Organizations for Cooperation with UN Human Rights Mechanisms has submitted an alternative report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Platform hopes that the CEDAW Committee in its examination of the Republic of Serbia will give recommendations while raising the issues of:
• Conducting gender impact assessment of austerity measures on women’s human rights.
• Defining criminal act of Sexual intercourse with a helpless person as a qualified act of Rape in the Criminal Code of Serbia.
• Working continually and systematically on stopping gender-stereotyping and patriarchal labeling of women/girls by the governmental officials.
• Separating women’s status of legal capacity (women put under guardianship) from informed consent about sexual and reproductive rights, and prohibit forced abortions, administration of contraceptives without informed consent, forced sterilization and other forced treatments that constitute inhuman and degrading treatment.
• Ensuring adequate, accessible, and functioning services for women with disabilities survivors of violence.
• Providing organizational change and capacity building to remedy difficulties in ensuring adequate police intervention in domestic violence cases.
• Providing functional mechanisms for participation of women from vulnerable groups in creation, implementation, and assessment of public policies, and participation in public and political life on an equal basis with others.
• Ensuring protection of women’s right to health and access to free prenatal and maternal care for Roma women without documents.
• Improving position of refugee women, including protection from violence, respect to the principle of granting special measures for protection of women in the asylum procedure, ensure integration in the society’s economic, social, and cultural life.
• Combating invisibility and stigmatization of intersex persons, ensuring adequate medical, psychological, and social support to intersex persons and their families, adopting adequate protocols and annual data gathering, amending legislation on personal documents and introduce ‘other’ as option when registering the sex of the child in registry books.
Report can be downloaded HERE.
