The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Dr. Yakin Erturk, has just submitted her Annual Report to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. This year’s report focuses on the “due diligence” standard as a tool for eliminating violence against women. Use of this standard in establishing state responsibility for violence against women by non-state actors drew from the famous 1988 judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Velasquez-Rodriguez, in which the Court said that the state has responsibility to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, punish and compensate abuses of human rights, even when those abuses are carried out by non-state actors. The standard appeared in UN instruments addressing violence against women starting in 1992; it has been articulated in the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1993, in the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), and in many other international and regional instruments.
Just what constitutes “due diligence” has not yet been fully explored (and it is a subject on which I am currently writing). Dr. Erturk and I spoke on this subject with members of women’s rights NGOs at a multi-day consultation in Bangkok last October organized by the Asia Pacific Forum for Women, Law and Development (APWLD), and again this past week at the United Nations in New York, at an event organized by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs. Dr. Erturk brings her very useful background as a social scientist to examination of the subject. Here is the link to her report (click on the top document listed, labelled E/CN.4/2006/61).
For more information on the “due diligence” standard, see pages 10-11 in the INTERIGHTS Bulletin, Vol. 14, no. 4, Special Issue on Women’s Rights in the 21st Century.
–Stephanie Farrior
