Azerbaijan’s record on women’s rights to face scrutiny

Azerbaijan’s record on women’s rights to face scrutiny by UN Committee

GENEVA (16 February 2015) – Azerbaijan’s record on women’s rights will be examined by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) on Wednesday 18 February in meetings that will be webcast live.

Azerbaijan is one of the 188 States parties to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and so is required to submit regular reports to the Committee of 23 independent experts on how it is implementing the Convention.

The Committee will engage in a dialogue with a delegation from the Government of Azerbaijan on questions relating to the promotion and protection of women’s rights in the country, and will also hear from NGO representatives. The session will take place in Conference Room XVI at Palais des Nations in Geneva from 10:00 - 17:00 (13:00 – 20:00 in Baku). The live webcast can be viewed athttp://www.treatybodywebcast.org/.

Among the possible issues to be discussed are: measures to tackle deep-rooted stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes that contribute to increased practice of child marriage; efforts to combat trafficking in women and girls; measures to tackle high rate of abortion which is used as birth control method; high number of sex-selective abortions, reflected by newborn ratio of 116 males to 100 females; efforts to close gender pay gap; procedures for establishing statelessness, given high number of citizens of former USSR.

Azerbaijan’s report and further information can be found at:
http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=901&Lang=en .

The concluding observations on Azerbaijan and the other States being reviewed - Gabon, Ecuador, Tuvalu, Denmark, Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea, and Maldives - will be published on 6 March here: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=901&Lang=en

ENDS

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