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CLADEM HONDURAS

The Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women's Rights– Honduras

 

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE 2006 REPORT ON THE FULFILLMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS. 

 

 

CLADEM-HONDURAS has adhered to the reports presented by the Center for the Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and their Families (CPTRT) and Committee of Relatives of Detained-Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) before the Commission for the Fulfillment of the ICPC, likewise has adhered to the report presented before the same Commission by Institutions’ Network for the Childhood’s Rights (COIPRODEN) on the fulfillment of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

 

CLADEM-HONDURAS is also presenting the Report before the Commission of Human Rights, undertaking the following articles of the Pact: 

 

Articles 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 17 and 23 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. The report analyzes women’s exercise and advantage of the rights that are established in the articles above mentioned. 

 

The analysis was done from the conditions in which women exercise their rights in Honduras and at the end of each article the demands were presented by women’s organizations to the Committee in order to make the necessary recommendations to the Honduran State. 

 

In this summary we emphasize, for each article, the following issues: 

 

Article 2. 

1. Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

2. Where not already provided for by existing legislative or other measures, each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take the necessary steps, in accordance with its constitutional processes and with the provisions of the present Covenant, to adopt such laws or other measures as may be necessary to give effect to the rights recognized in the present Covenant.

3. Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes:

(a) To ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms as herein recognized are violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity;

(b) To ensure that any person claiming such a remedy shall have his right thereto determined by competent judicial, administrative or legislative authorities, or by any other competent authority provided for by the legal system of the State, and to develop the possibilities of judicial remedy;

(c) To ensure that the competent authorities shall enforce such remedies when granted.

There is a dilemma regarding the hierarchy between conventional and constitutional dispositions. Dilemma exposed in the recently past electoral process, when shepherds of churches were promoted like candidates in public charges ignoring the constitutional dispositions which requires in order to hold those charges, the candidates should be secular, while the shepherds wanted to make worth their political rights in conventional dispositions, that guarantee the right to be chosen without restrictions of any nature. Women’s organizations are interested to establish explicitly in the internal Law, the prevalence of the Human Rights’ conventions, to assure, among others, dispositions contained in the American Convention on Human Rights that establishes:  

 

Article 4.  Right to Life

1.         Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life. 

 

Boldfaces are ours, and we do so in consideration of the omission that the ecclesiastical hierarchy and shepherds of many churches do about that part of the disposition "in general", that should be understood as the permission contained in dispositions of the internal legislations of the States that at the moment to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights, included dispositions that decriminalize the interruption of pregnancy and the possibility that other States could adopt them subsequently. 

 

The ignorance of the conventions on human rights is very notorious and particularly the ICCPR.  It has not been extensively published by the Honduran State.

 

The women’s movement is convinced that in the measure in which shepherds and priests participate in issues related to the exercise and advantage of reproductive and sexual rights of women, in that measure, the secular character of the State of Honduras is lost and standstill and even these women rights’ recognition move backwards. 

 

According to the Penal Code discrimination against women constitutes a crime and this disposition recently was modified through the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman, with the purpose of establishing lower sentences in relation to other discrimination crimes. 

 

The report recognizes the formal advance to avoid the discrimination against women achieved through the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman. Also   indicates that discrimination against women in the exercise and advantage of their rights does not carry out legal dispositions to guarantee them not to be discriminated by reasons of pregnancy in the workplace as in the educational one and regarding the right to property on the goods acquired in the couple relation. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

1.      Assume the recommendations formulated by the Commission of the Convention on Human Rights to other States, especially those related to the hierarchy of the Human Rights that, to our judgment, should be over the States’ Constitutions and give publicity to those recommendations, In order to avoid confusions at the moment of prioritize the application of a conventional or constitutional norm. 

 

2.      Take all the necessary measures to guarantee the laicism of the State, avoiding the influence of the religious fundamentalisms in the actions that government should take to guarantee the exercise and enjoyment of the rights recognized in the ICCPD.

 

3.      Take all the necessary measures to give strict fulfillment of Conventions and Pacts on Human Rights that guarantee the non-discrimination of women.  Likewise, to reform the Republic’s Constitution to establish the intolerance of the Honduran State to the discrimination against women, as well as the violence against the woman by reasons of gender.   

 

4.      Reform the article 86 of the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman (LIOM) that regulates the sanction of the discrimination crime against women, in order to put at the same level the sentence with the other discrimination crimes, just as the Penal Code establishes it.

 

5.      Take all the necessary measures in order to give fulfillment to the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman. 

 

6.      Regulate the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman (LIOM) to achieve its effectiveness. 

 

Article 3.

 

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights set forth in the present Covenant.

 

Regarding the equality of women and men’s rights, the report points out that utilization of a sexist language in Honduran legislation is an obstacle to promote this equality. Nevertheless, the efforts the State has done are recognized, among them, the approval and put into effect of the Equality of Opportunities Law for Woman where, in matter of political women’s rights, has adopted affirmative actions establishing as base quota the thirty percent for the charges of popular election, arranging besides in this Law, the measures that guaranteed that this quota would really correspond to women, taking into account that the electoral system of that moment was closed.  However, it shows that the new Electoral and Political Organizations Law still maintains the thirty percent quota for women, modifying the electoral system established for the election of women and men representatives to the National Congress and to the Central American Parliament as an open and personalized system, without establishing the mechanisms to guarantee those quotas reserved to women, such disposition that was an affirmative action itself turned into an express discrimination in the present law. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

  1. Honoring the international commitments, to align its national legislation in order to guarantee, in an effective way, the equality of women and men’s rights. 

 

  1. Guaranteeing an administration of non-sexist justice and to implement the public policies to promote women’s advance. 

 

 

 Article 6.

 

1. Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

2. In countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime and not contrary to the provisions of the present Covenant and to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This penalty can only be carried out pursuant to a final judgment rendered by a competent court.

3. When deprivation of life constitutes the crime of genocide, it is understood that nothing in this article shall authorize any State Party to the present Covenant to derogate in any way from any obligation assumed under the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

4. Anyone sentenced to death shall have the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence. Amnesty, pardon or commutation of the sentence of death may be granted in all cases.

5. Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women.

6. Nothing in this article shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant.

 

 

The formal advances to protect women’s sexual, emotional, physical integrity and material contentment are recognized. Advances that are declared with the ratification of the Inter-American Convention On The Prevention, Punishment And Eradication Of Violence Against Women, the approval of the Law against Domestic Violence, the Penal Code reforms and the inclusion of other sexual crimes, as slave trade and commercial sexual exploitation, as well as in the elaboration and approval of the National Policies against the Violence toward Women. 

 

Nevertheless the advances shown in the Report, indicates the persistence of factors that, in some way, increments women’s deaths that each day are carried out with greater cruelty.  It also indicates that another of the characteristics of these crimes is the lack of measures for the pursuit and sanction of the crime in an efficient way, which allows becoming an impunity that is supported in stereotypes of gender, blaming the victims. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

  1. Implement in the right and proper way the Convention On The Prevention, Punishment And Eradication Of Violence Against Women.

 

  1. Assign the necessary resources to the justice administration for an efficient pursuit of the crime and establishment of the corresponding sanction.

 

  1.  Establish penal sanctions for the justice administrators that do not apply correctly the legislation.

 

  1. Establish a statistical system that collect the information of violence against women, in an objective and uniform way for all the public institutions that, by Law, attend cases of violence against women for gender reasons.

 

  1. Do the necessary and pertinent efforts to modify the patriarchal culture that tolerates gender violence against women. 

 

Article 7.

 

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.

 

 

The report indicates that the space, where cruel treatment to women is given with greater frequency, is at the private space, on behalf of the husband or home companion. 

 

In this sense, the efforts carried out by women’s organizations are recognized, first by breaking the women’s silence set against this violation of their right to live free of violence, that approximately more than a decade was seen as a natural and private problem and then to prompt the approval of the Law against the Domestic Violence. 

 

It is affirmed that there are advances, but also there are challenges that the State should assume to guarantee to all women in the rural and urban area, the bare conditions so that victims may access to justice and receive the legal and emotional attention that this problems deserve. To these effects it is specified the need to assign all the necessary resources to the justice administration, and to continue modifying the cultural patterns of justice administrators to guarantee the application of the Law against Domestic Violence, still and when sanctions have to be established for those who doesn’t observe the protection measures of the victims in an immediate way, taking into account that there are women that have lost their lives by hand of their home companion while they expected the measures established in the Law were executed. 

 

Likewise is indicated the lack of a common statistical system to all the private and public institutions that works with women that suffered violence on behalf of the man with whom they are or they were emotionally bonded. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

  1. Implement right and proper way the Convention On The Prevention, Punishment And Eradication Of Violence Against Women. 

 

  1. Assign the necessary resources to the justice administration for an efficient pursuit of the crime and establishment of the corresponding sanction.

 

  1. Establish penal sanctions for the justice administrators that do not apply correctly the legislation.

 

  1. Establish a statistical system that collect the information of violence against women, in an objective and uniform way for all the public institutions that, by Law, attend cases of violence against women for gender reasons.

 

  1. Do the necessary and pertinent efforts to modify the cultural patterns that women internalize and tolerate the violence in all its expressions exercised against women by reasons of gender. 

 

Article 8.

 

1. No one shall be held in slavery; slavery and the slave-trade in all their forms shall be prohibited.

 

2. No one shall be held in servitude.

 

3.

(a) No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour;

 

(b) Paragraph 3 (a) shall not be held to preclude, in countries where imprisonment with hard labour may be imposed as a punishment for a crime, the performance of hard labour in pursuance of a sentence to such punishment by a competent court;

 

(c) For the purpose of this paragraph the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include:

(i) Any work or service, not referred to in subparagraph (b), normally required of a person who is under detention in consequence of a lawful order of a court, or of a person during conditional release from such detention;

 

(ii) Any service of a military character and, in countries where conscientious objection is recognized, any national service required by law of conscientious objectors;

(iii) Any service exacted in cases of emergency or calamity threatening the life or well-being of the community;

 

(iv) Any work or service which forms part of normal civil

obligations.

 

 

Prostitution is recognized like one of the worst forms of exploitation increasingly more visible, fact that goes accompanied by slave trade and commercial sexual exploitation. 

 

Also the formal advances are recognized to sanction the crimes of sexual exploitation of girls, children, adolescents and women and other connected crimes.  Nevertheless, it refers to the need to adopt measures and public policies directed to the prostitution’s prevention from a better education as well as the access to a decent work. 

 

The slave trade is perceived as mostly being involved in activities related to prostitution and the American Embassy recognizes the limitations of the Honduran State to face this problem in due form. 

 (SEE ANNEXS:  REPORT ON SLAVE TRADE 2005 HONDURAS (ROW 2) of the Embassy of the United States of America). 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

  1. Give efficient accomplishment to the national and international legislation that sanctions slave trade and commercial sexual exploitation.

 

  1. Pursue and sanction the procurement of slave trade and commercial sexual exploitation in an efficient way.

 

  1. Define and execute projects for the social reinsertion of women, adolescents and girls that have been object of slave trade and commercial sexual exploitation.

 

  1. The State must invest, in an efficient and transparent way, the funds of the debt relief, in its condition of heavily indebted poor country, in the strategy of poverty eradication.

 

  1. Set out resources for the repatriation of slave trade victims.

 

  1. Take all the measures to avoid sexual tourism.

 

  1. Regulate the domestic work on equal terms with the productive work. 

 

Article 17. 

 

1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.

2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

 

The Honduran State has limitations to guarantee women’s right to privacy and a worthy treatment in the mass media. 

 

The report describes a case where, due to a women’s organization intervention, the General Attorney Department closed a radial program that incited men to violate the women’s right to live free violence and instructed them on the different methods and "appropriate" objects to flagellate their couple. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

1.  Take all the necessary measures to avoid that the mass media slander the dignity of the women, adolescents and girls. 

2.  Sanctioning, in due form, the women’s human rights violation through the mass media. 

 

Article 23.

 

1. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

2. The right of men and women of marriageable age to marry and to found a family shall be recognized.

3. No marriage shall be entered into without the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

4. States Parties to the present Covenant shall take appropriate steps to ensure equality of rights and responsibilities of spouses as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. In the case of dissolution, provision shall be made for the necessary protection of any children.

 

The formal advances in legal matter for the protection of the family are recognized. Honduras is one of the few countries that, since 1984, count with a Family Code with autonomy, separated of the Civil Code in force since 1906. 

 

This Code, in spite of being emitted when Honduras was already a high party of the CEDAW, it still contains dispositions that in its application, results in discrimination against women and therefore, in the practice, there is not a true protection to the Honduran families. This situation itself evidences the lack of dispositions that authorize the families the family planning, for example. 

 

There are no public policies that guarantee the exercise and enjoyment of reproductive and sexual rights, as well as access to methods of family planning, neither dispositions that guarantee the women’s property right on the goods acquired within a couple relationship, which does not comply the conventional disposition of equality of rights during and at the end of marriage. 

 

The demands of women’s organizations to the Honduran State for the fulfillment of this article are:

 

  1. Emit the necessary Family Code reforms to guarantee the rights of all the family members. 

  2. Modify the penal legislation in order to decriminalize the abortion under certain circumstances.

  3. Take the necessary measures to guarantee women’s real access to the family planning methods of their election, properly informed. 

  4. Assign the necessary resources to protect women’s reproductive and sexual health beyond the “familiar” conception which not allows seeing women’s needs in their condition of human being. 

 

Tegucigalpa, M.D.C., September of 2006.

 

 

Fulfillment Report on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

2006.

 

 

Women’s Right to Non Discrimination

 

Article 2:

 

1. Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

 

2. Where not already provided for by existing legislative or other measures, each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take the necessary steps, in accordance with its constitutional processes and with the provisions of the present Covenant, to adopt such laws or other measures as may be necessary to give effect to the rights recognized in the present Covenant.

 

3. Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes:

(a) To ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms as herein recognized are violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity;

(b) To ensure that any person claiming such a remedy shall have his right thereto determined by competent judicial, administrative or legislative authorities, or by any other competent authority provided for by the legal system of the State, and to develop the possibilities of judicial remedy;

(c) To ensure that the competent authorities shall enforce such remedies when granted.

 

Honduras is a High Contracting Party of agreements and conventions of human rights that compel the discrimination of sex, gender, race, social class, and any other destructive against human dignity. These commitments should be above the Constitution of the Republic of Honduras, in attention to conventional arrangements and solutions of parties created at the conventions to follow until its fulfillment in the parties. The Honduran Constitution establishes that when there is a contradiction between the agreement and the law, the agreement will prevail.

 

Despite the previous, it is unknown if there is or not jurisprudence about the ranking of the Constitution and the conventions of Human Rights. In some occasions it is argued that the Conventions of the Human Rights are even above the Constitution, since the constitutional article number 18 establishes that “in case of conflict between the Treaty or Convention and the law, the first will prevail”, must be understood that the law includes the Constitution , consequently Supreme Law of the Nation, that’s why it does not lose its character of law, while other jurists consider that in this article with the word law it is made reference exclusively to secondary laws.

 

On the other hand, in the recent elections process, were set up for candidate for representative, in the first elections, fourteen church ministers, that represented 4.3% of the total 322 men and women that ran for such positions. Many citizens were against this, arguing that the secular state would weaken more, that the Constitution was violated, which establishes in its article 198, that to be a representative it is required, amongst others, to belong to the secular state and, especially, that the arrangements of the American Convention of the Human Rights included in Article 12 that regulates the right to conscience and religion and consigns in numeral 3: “The liberty to express own religion and beliefs is only held to the prescribed limits of the law and which are necessary to protect the security, order, health, and the morals or the rights or liberties of the others.”

 

Even though this broad opposition it was allowed to the ministers to work openly in their proselyte campaign and some of them obtained the necessary votes to go to the general elections. Objection in last minute to be presented to the Supreme Court of Elections for their inscription as candidates for representatives in the general elections, the court, pronounced denial in the inscription arguing that the ministers did not have the established requisite in the Honduran Constitution related to “belong to the secular state”.

 

Facing this denial resolution, the interested presented a Protection Resource before the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice, arguing the supremacy of the American Convention of the Human Rights before the proper Constitution of the State of Honduras, pretending to make worthy the arrangements of this Convention which establishes:

 

  

Article 23. Right to Participate in Government

 

1.     Every citizen shall enjoy the following rights and opportunities:

 

a. to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives;

 

b. to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters; and

 

c. to have access, under general conditions of equality, to the public service of his country.

 

2.     The law may regulate the exercise of the rights and opportunities referred to in the preceding paragraph only on the basis of age, nationality, residence, language, education, civil and mental capacity, or sentencing by a competent court in criminal proceedings.

 

Article 12. Freedom of Conscience and Religion

 

1.     Everyone has the right to freedom of conscience and of religion. This right includes freedom to maintain or to change one's religion or beliefs, and freedom to profess or disseminate one's religion or beliefs, either individually or together with others, in public or in private.

 

2.     No one shall be subject to restrictions that might impair his freedom to maintain or to change his religion or beliefs.

 

3.     Freedom to manifest one's religion and beliefs may be subject only to the limitations prescribed by law that are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or the rights or freedoms of others.

 

4.     Parents or guardians, as the case may be, have the right to provide for the religious and moral education of their children or wards that is in accord with their own convictions.

 

 

Also pointed out in its argument the violation of the following articles of the American Convention of Human Rights:

 

 

Article 24. Right to Equal Protection

 

All persons are equal before the law. Consequently, they are entitled, without discrimination, to equal protection of the law.

 

Article 25. Right to Judicial Protection

 

1.     Everyone has the right to simple and prompt recourse, or any other effective recourse, to a competent court or tribunal for protection against acts that violate his fundamental rights recognized by the constitution or laws of the state concerned or by this Convention, even though such violation may have been committed by persons acting in the course of their official duties.

  

But, overall, the ministers argued discrimination and the greatest ranking of the arrangements contained in international conventions of the Human Rights, above the proper constitutions of the States.

 

The Honorable Court solved to ask the ministers to resign their positions, to which they denied to do, arguing that according to the arrangements of the American Convention of Human Rights no one can be an object of restriction moderations that can lessen the liberty of keeping his religion or beliefs or to change his religion or beliefs. Really, the petition was not for them to resign their beliefs, but their condition of ministers of a church, position that without a doubt was the one that would give them victory. This resolution of the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice was celebrated by many citizens. However, in the elections card, a photo of the son of a minister was included, who had not participated in the primary elections, so he occupied the place of the minister once the elections finished. The candidate was elected, but was not allowed to occupy the position as representative, instead his son occupied it.

 

Today the Congress has a representative, son of a minister of a church that did not want to resign to his ministry, but exercises his power and takes decisions permed by religious concepts, through his son. The question is: Where is the secular state, where the guarantee of the state to fulfill with the international commitments, the Constitution, the law and the protection of the others that we are not religious?

 

However, this discussion, which was public, the state does not have a position as so, situation that is seen aggravated because the personnel of the administration of justice  organs, in its majority does not know the conventions of the human rights. Either the majority of citizens know the agreements or conventions of Human Rights. The ICCPR, in particular, has not been published by the state.

 

From the defense’s point of view of the rights of women, the protection of the secular state is important because it guarantees in great measure, the possibility to empower its demands against the religious fundamentals; it is worth to say, the fight for the non- penalty of abortion and the opposition before the promotion to establish the rights of the unburned, just as the Childhood Commission and the Family of the Congress proposes, in its proposal of Responsible Paternity and Maternity Law.

 

Also is important to point out that the right to no discrimination is devoted in the Honduras Constitution, except for the discrimination for the reasons of gender. The Congress approved a law called “ Law of Equal Opportunities for Women” that entered in effect in March 2001 that incorporates the definition of discrimination contained in the Convention  for the Elimination of all the Ways of Discrimination against the Woman, which was ratified by Honduras since 1981. The quoted law Equal Opportunities for Women regulates the right for women not to be discriminated in the family, in the health, environmental, education, culture, communication, work, social security, land owning, credit, home and decision taking in the structures of the political power.

 

The approval of this law was very controversial, since there was resistance from the fundamentalists groups of churches, specially the catholic, who did not accept the sexual education nor the right for teenagers to continue their studies in their daily school when they became pregnant, arguing that it represented a bad example for the rest of female students. The action of canceling out the pregnant student is still there, even though the law. The religious fundamentalisms could not stop the real formal advances. Other strong  oppositions took part with the legislators that were against taking action to guarantee a base payment of 30% to share the political power with women and, guarantee the right of women for acquir