November 24, 2006	Friday	Ziqa'ad 2, 1427

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UNITED NATIONS, Nov 23: The head of the United Nations Fund for Women (Unifem) has welcomed the National Assembly’s decision to amend the Hudood law allowing women to seek redress of their issues in courts.

"We are very, very supportive that this issue (violence against women) is not judged in religious courts, but in criminal courts and in civil courts," Unifem Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer said at a press conference here.

Ms Heyzer said Unifem supported efforts by women’s groups to help end gender-based violence in Pakistan, as the government worked to amend Shariat laws that discriminated against women. She “believed the issue should not be judged in religious courts but in criminal and civil courts.”

She said that as part of UN efforts to end all forms of violence against women, Unifem would distribute $3.5 million among dozens of groups from Argentina to Zimbabwe in the coming year -- up from $1.8 million in 2005 and nearly four times more than that in 2004.

She said the grants would be funnelled through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and go to groups dedicating their time and energy to ensure the implementation of policies and laws that addressed violence against women.

“Violence against women knows no boundaries, it knows no territory, no wealth level and it really occurs everywhere, in every country in the world today,” said Ms Heyzer, in response to a question about violence against women in the United States.

While clarifying that Unifem’s mandate focused on developing countries, she said the agency adhered to the standards and human rights norms of the UN as it looked at occurrences of gender-based violence around the world.

In response to a question about why the Indian law making the ritual of sati illegal was not being enforced, Ms Heyzer said monitoring and accountability systems were vital to making the best laws and policies work, especially at the local level.

She said the issue of “ending violence against women was very deeply rooted and, therefore, the structured discrimination in women’s lives had to be dealt with and that was something that all the groups that were being funded had been looking at.”

It was also the responsibility of states to enforce laws after they were passed, she said.

Referring to the observance of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov25, she said: “We hope that this is a day of celebration as well as a day of reflection and a day of mobilisation for greater force to make sure that we can end this pandemic that has destroyed the lives of so many women and girls.”

The grantees can be delineated into three categories that cover 28 initiatives worth about $2.8 million spread around 20 countries, including one regional project.

Most of the 2006 trust fund grantees would support efforts to implement new laws or policies through activities like the training of judges, lawyers and police; pushing for greater budgetary resources; raising public awareness; and strengthening capacity among civil society groups so that they could better demand accountability, she said.

Initiatives to that end will be carried out in Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile, Grenada, India, Liberia, Mongolia, Niger, Paraguay, Rwanda, Somalia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Another set of initiatives will look at local or community-based delivery systems, such as reviewing court proceedings to identify obstacles that hindered the application of existing legal provisions, she said.