Honouring Alda Facio: 6 years of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls
This Webinar was live broadcast on December 4, 2020. The recording is now available here:
On the occasion of the completion of her six-year mandate as Expert Member of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, this webinar honoured the many contributions of Alda Facio to the promotion of women’s human rights worldwide as part of that mandate, considering the impact of the WGDAWG during the last six years.
Speakers Include:
- Alda Facio – on key highlights from her mandate with the WGDAWG
- Dorothy Estrada-Tanck – new Expert Member of the WGDAWG on her focus for the mandate
- Civil society presenters on impacts of engagement with the WGDAWG, including:
- Magda Szarota (Poland) – Artykul 6
- Terry Ince (Trinidad & Tobago) – CEDAW Committee of Trinidad & Tobago (CCoTT)
- Daysi Flores (Honduras) – JASS Mesoamérica
- Amanda Dale (Canada) – Canadian Femicide Observatory
Presenter Bios:
Alda Facio is a feminist human rights activist, jurist and writer. She has lectured extensively around the world and written many articles on women’s human rights. In 2003 she was the 7th Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto where she founded the Women Human Rights Education Institute and is now its Academic Director. She is a permanent advisor to several international NGOs including JASS (Just Associates and Ixpop, an indigenous women´s organization from Guatemala. She was one of the founders of CLADEM, the Latin American Committee for Women´s Rights and of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1996, she was its first Director. From 2014 – 2020 she was appointed to the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls as one of five members of this Special Procedure of the UN Human Rights Council. Alda has participated as a government delegate in many world conferences and working groups including the Rome Conference which adopted the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the working group which drafted the Optional Protocol to CEDAW. She was the director of the Women, Gender and Justice Program at the United Nations Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention from 1990 to 2018. She has written hundreds of articles for different journals and magazines and her book on a methodology for mainstreaming a gender perspective into the law is used in many law schools and Judiciary Schools in Latin America.
Dorothy Estrada-Tanck is the newest member of the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls. She assumed her functions on 1 November 2020. She is Assistant Professor of Public International Law and International Relations at the Faculty of Law of University of Murcia (Spain) and Director of its Legal Clinic. Her academic and professional activities have focused on international human rights law, human security, women’s rights, gender equality and violence against women, human rights of migrants and refugees, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, and economic, social and cultural rights. She previously worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Mexico); UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Mexico City Human Rights Commission; UN Women/Mexican Supreme Court/Inmujeres; Case Matrix Network (Centre for International Law Research and Policy); and the NGO Fundación CEPAIM (Spain).
Magda Szarota is a disability studies researcher, human rights activist, Managing Board Member of Humanity in Action Poland, Steering Committee Member of the Feminist Alliance for Rights at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers and Founding Member of Artykuł 6 (a Polish feminist disability rights collective).
Terry D. Ince is a social entrepreneur and women’s human rights advocate. Terry is the Convenor and founding member of the CEDAW Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (CCoTT), a non-governmental organization committed to stakeholder advocacy for the implementation of the CEDAW convention and its mandates, through collaboration, education, development, advocacy and wisdom sharing in Trinidad and Tobago.
Daysi Flores is the country coordinator for Honduras with JASS Mesoamerica. She is a civil engineer, social media and communications expert, environmental activist and a women’s and human rights activist. In 1998, she co-founded the Young Women’s Network of Honduras. Daysi is a member of Feminists in Resistance that rose up to oppose the 2009 military coup d’état in Honduras. She forms part of Las Petateras and the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras.
Dr. Amanda Dale is an international women’s human rights scholar and activist, with a distinguished career in area of gender-based violence. She is faculty with the Women’s Human Rights Institute, is Vice-Chair of the Board at Inter Pares, and is advisory board member of the Canadian Centre for Legal Innovation in Sexual Assault Response (CCLISAR), and the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.