Honour protocols on women participation in politics

THE Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, Ms Akua Sena Dansua, has called for the institution of checks against countries that fail to honour protocols on the protection of the rights and political inclusion of women.
According to her, most member countries of the Africa Union and the United Nations have refused, with impunity, to honour such protocols as the affirmative action to increase women participation in politics because they know there are sanctions to be applied against them.
The minister was speaking in Accra yesterday at a two-day workshop on ways to improve the representation of women in political party activities.
It was organised by the Labour Party of the United Kingdom in collaboration with the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
The workshop was organised based on the Protocol on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Africa Women Protocol), which came into force in Africa in November 2005.
The protocol commits the signatory states to adopt all measures necessary for women to enjoy equal rights in all aspects of society, including political parties. The participants were from Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Cameroon.
Ms Dansua said most countries had over the years paid lip services to enhancing women capacities and offering them quality opportunity to actively participate in the decision making process at all levels of society.
Asked what form of sanctions she was talking about, she suggested naming and shaming of such countries or attaching the attainment of such protocols to the qualification or otherwise of membership to conferences of the AU and the UN.
She noted that under the current government, six out of the 28 ministers; five out of 27 deputy ministers, three out of the 23-member Council of State, three out of eight deputy regional ministers and one out of the 10 regional ministers were women.
The minister said although the situation in Ghana was not the best, it was better than what was the case in some of the developed countries where women were not given special dispensation.
She called on the participants to share experiences and ideas on how to maximise women participation in active politics.
Ms Roberta Blackman-Woods, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Women in the UK, described the progress made by the UK in terms of increasing women participation in politics as not encouraging and “a slow progress”.
She said before the 1997 elections, the country took a decision to develop a short list of safe seats and that increased the number of women in Parliament.
Ms Blackman-Woods, who is also the Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Durham, said what was needed was structural mechanism within various political parties to increase the participation of women, especially the removal of cultural and other boundaries that hindered women participation in leadership position in political parties.
She said currently, the UK Parliament had 19.5 per cent women while the Labour Party women representation in Parliament was 27 per cent.
The Director of Communications of the NDC, Mr Seth Ohene, said Prof Mills government was committed to its campaign promise of ensuring that women constituted 40 per cent of both government and party leadership positions.