 Mewn ddwybr o bobweithio, a rydw i'r llwyfr hwnnw, i'n ddinllun agorweith i ddrygiadwyd ddigonegau Cymru, convened i 2019. Fyddo i'n ddwybr i ddwybr i ddrygiadwyd i ddrygiadwyd i ddrygiadwyniadu cymorth, ymolod, rydym yn petrwyd gweithio i amdain ddysgu i Gweithio. Ydiolch yn ymddangosiaeth ymddangosiaeth yn ei ddwybr i displayedu i gyfnod agaway amddangosiaeth, all forms of discrimination against women. Can I welcome Emma Rich this morning, Executive Director of Engender? I believe that you are going to give us an opening statement. Emma, please. Thanks very much. Thank you to the convener and committee for inviting Engender to give evidence on CEDAW, which is the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. Since ratifying CEDAW in 1986, the UK has had legal obligations to respect, protect and fulfil women's human rights. The view of equality in CEDAW is based on the principle of substantive equality between men and women, and this acknowledges that equality of opportunity and equal treatment is insufficient to redress generations of ingrained disadvantage. It compels system change and a fundamental shift in the distribution of power, resources and safety. The five-year CEDAW examination cycle has just concluded its scrutiny of women's rights in the UK, and it's a timely moment for this committee to consider its response. Seeing international obligations work for women in Scotland is a strategic priority for Engender. We use our special consultative status with the UN to open up space for Scottish women's human rights and other civil society organisations to engage with the process. Over the past two years, we have consulted with women and organisations to identify priorities for action by both Scottish Government and UK Government to bring to the CEDAW committee's attention. We have been the lead organisation in writing shadow reports for Scotland and also for the four nations of the UK, along with colleagues at the Northern Irish Women's European Platform, Women's Equality Network Wales and the National Alliance of Women's Organisations. Our evidence to the UN committee is available in our shadow reports, but the critical issues for women in Scotland and across the UK are familiar. We call for action on violence against women and girls, on women's underrepresentation in council chambers and the Scottish Parliament, on equality in employment, education, healthcare and social security and a response to the crisis in social care. The CEDAW committee's concluding observations pick up on many of our concerns, including incorporation of CEDAW into Scots law, Brexit and women's rights, austerity, gender mainstreaming and data. They also make a number of specific and detailed recommendations that are relevant to Scotland and within the powers of the Scottish Government and Parliament. In our written evidence to the committee, we invited you to consider three issues, including how this committee might best track action in response to the CEDAW committee's concluding observations, how this committee might use the concluding observations and articles when developing its thematic inquiry work on women's equality and rights and how this committee might act to defend the treaty bodies, including the CEDAW committee that are being undermined by the current UN funding crisis. Also at a fourth, how this committee might ensure that the recommendation from the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership that CEDAW be incorporated into Scots law be best achieved. Thank you for that. You mentioned some of the concluding observations there and there's obviously quite a range of concern regarding women's inequality in Scotland incorporation. Obviously, we also have some work around the public sector equality duty. This committee has been particularly interested in quality of data. It's something that comes up quite a lot and I'm sure colleagues would agree that it's essential if we're going to have a collective understanding of the different lived experience of women and girls and men and boys that we get that. Another matter that jumped out was action on sexualised and sexist bullying. Obviously, that is not all of them. There are a number of things there, but those were just some that jumped out at me. In the gender submission, you also stated that there'd been less of a focus, less of a Scotland-specific focus and gave a couple of reasons to that and raised it as a concern. How do we change that? What actions can this committee take or their actions for the Scottish Government to take in addressing that? Thank you very much, convener. That's an excellent question. For very good reasons, which are namely that Northern Ireland currently doesn't have a Government, the international committees that we have seen in the last couple of cycles of both CEDO and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights have been very concerned about the failure to act on specific human rights violations in Northern Ireland and the one that the CEDO committee was particularly exercised by was Access to Abortion Healthcare. Overall, they're concerned that lacking a functioning Government means that anything across human rights is not being acted upon. We have observed through the actions of the CEDO committee a real lack of bandwidth within the committee. They examine five states in five days, giving one day to each examination and during the lunchtime of a state examination, they meet with civil society organisations from the state that they will be examining the next day. So it's an incredibly intense working arrangement. Committee members are unpaid and so must fulfil their committee obligations on the side of their paid work if they have some, and all of this leads to a real difficulty in getting enough space to get a grip on the materials, and we think one of the things that is troubling to them is understanding the devolution settlement of the UK. We think that's exacerbated by the way that the UK Government presents information to the CEDO committee. Often the state party report does not adequately differentiate between the four nations of the UK in terms of legislation, programmes, expenditure and other features of policymaking, and it just becomes very difficult for civil society to try and unravel that to satisfy the committee. We did in the previous cycle, the previous five years of CEDO, as in gender, bring over to Scotland one of the CEDO committee members, Professor Nicholas Brune from Norway, and because the committee members are unpaid and cannot access expenses for making such travel, it's incumbent on civil society or national human rights institutions to pay for that to happen, but it was our perception that that did enable a deeper understanding of the situation in Scotland and a more fulsome engagement with Scotland's devolution settlement in the concluding observations that we saw in the previous round. That is beyond our financial means sometimes, and particularly if critical committee members live in the global south, it's just too expensive for a small charity to fundraise to do that work. I suppose what the committee can do to play its part in raising the profile of CEDO on the importance is what we have asked you in our submission, which is to respond formally to the CEDO concluding observations to track the concluding observations, which are the committee's recommendations for action, to consider how those apply best in a Scottish context, and in doing so signal that Scotland, as part of the four nations of the UK, is very interested in this human rights instrument and in what realising it could achieve for women's rights and equality. In terms of actions for the Scottish Government perhaps? I think a similar set of actions for the Scottish Government so one of the recommendations that has come from the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership has been to develop a mechanism which could process the outputs of all of the treaty processes, so all of the eight that the UK is signed up to have similar different overlapping processes, but all produce a set of concluding observations. I think the last time there was an estimate of how many outstanding it was in the region of 600, which is quite a number of individual recommendations for any Government to process, but we think that a systematic approach is required. Thank you. Gail Ross is going to come on to ask you about funding after this and you did touch on some of it in your answer there, but I just wonder if there are any more issues around the CEDAW committee's function and operation that you think we should know about? We received some correspondence this morning from IRAW, which is a Malaysian-based NGO that does a lot of monitoring of the CEDAW structures within the UN system. They advised us that the UK Government has now paid its subscriptions, which is helpful but very late and too late for a different budget process to be selected. They were further able to identify that there have been 25% cuts applied right across the UN system, which is having a particularly negative effect on the treaty bodies, including CEDAW, because they are so reliant on external advisers and experts and the members are unpaid, but the cost of bringing them together for hearings and examinations is critical. IRAW were able to advise us that not only will the CEDAW committee not be seeing some states, which it was due to examine according to their normal cycle of examinations, but some of the matters referred to it using the optional protocol, which is an inquiry system so a state can ask the CEDAW committee to investigate egregious breaches of rights. It can also refer egregious breaches of rights to them using a complaints mechanism. Both of those things are now not happening and some of the circumstances being referred to CEDAW according to IRAW involve egregious breaches, including torture, missing people and other instances where the state is failing to act. So these cuts occasioned by member states failing to pay their subscriptions has already impeded CEDAW's urgent human rights work. Thank you for that. Gil Ross. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I thank you for coming in. So just to follow on that line of questioning, what do you think we as a committee can be doing to put pressure on the UK Government to make sure that they actually do pay on time and make things easier? I think it would be very helpful for the committee to urgently make clear to the UK its concern in this matter. Perhaps to ask some questions about why this failure to pay has come about and to emphasise the fact that failing to pay has had a disproportionate impact on the treaty bodies that are investigating and examining states in a context in which women's rights are being fundamentally undermined. I'm just back from a meeting of the European Women's Lobby. I'm the board member for the UK at the moment in Brussels, and we heard from sister organisations right across Europe that the rise of populism has brought with it profound anti-feminist action. My colleague from the Czech Republic said that in respect of the Istanbul Convention, which is a Council of Europe Convention on Violence Against Women, an NGO with an unclear funding source had sent a leaflet to every single household in the Czech Republic, telling them that the Istanbul Convention would undermine the family and the wellbeing of citizens in the Czech Republic. There are certainly well-funded attacks on women's rights, and the CDOR examination process and the optional protocol processes provide quite a rare space at the moment in a global context to explore and investigate women's human rights. Just for the record, how much is the UK's contribution? I'm sorry, I don't have that information. You say in your submission that you're going to have to postpone some sessions. Is that still likely to happen now? Yes, the CDOR, so the funding arrangements at the moment are in relation to the budget for 2018-19, which is nearly concluded for the UN. The cuts to the sessions have already had to take place because they have to be planned in advance. At the moment, for two consecutive years, there will be two sessions instead of three and no optional protocol work will be able to be progressed by the committee, which is already hugely oversubscribed. There's been one significant optional protocol case in the UK, which came from Northern Ireland on the issue of abortion healthcare, and that took some six or seven years to wind its way through the system because the demand on the committee massively exceeds the capacity to be able to consider matters referred to it. You talk about breaches of rights and states failing to act and instances that the committee has stepped in, if the committee is unable to do that because of the shortfall in funding. Are there any other organisations that are picking those cases up? No. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Gail. I'm just looking at my list at Fulton. Thank you for coming along in your evidence so far. In terms of the Scotland Civil Society response, I know that you touched on this in a wee bit in your opening remarks, but how do you co-ordinate that response and set priorities from it? Thanks for that. We had a participatory process to identify priorities for the Scotland report. We put out a call for evidence, which was principally to organisations. We convened an expert advisory group with representatives from all of the national women's organisations, race equality organisations, disability organisations, Professor Nicole Busby, who is Scotland's only Professor of Equality Law, with an interest in CEDAW. We also issued a survey for individual women and groups of women to complete. We then had a series of events that went out into communities, including accessing island and rural communities, black and minority ethnic women and disabled women specifically, using face-to-face meetings and webinars as well. We then sifted all of the evidence that came back to us, looking at specifically issues that were of concern to the committee that they had identified in previous examinations, going article by article through the treaty to see how things fit in with that framework and looking at issues which were within the competence of the Scottish Government and Parliament to act. We put other issues relating to UK Government action or inaction into the Four Nations report that we developed with colleagues in Wales, Northern Ireland and England. Unfortunately, there is a word limit of 6,600 words, so we had many, many things we wanted to say but had to compress quite significantly, as you will see. Thanks very much for that. A brief supplement on a specific point, convener. You mentioned the engagement with the racial equality groups and I wondered if you took an account or could comment on the Close the Gap report that was released fairly recently. I've actually put a motion in about Parliament but it's about the main findings. I won't go into it all either. Three quarters of BME women in the workplace of experienced racism, discrimination, racial prejudice and bias, well 42%, indicated the experience of bullying, harassment or victimisation simply because they were a BME women. I understand that in order to tackle the labour market inequalities, particularly also because there is also wealth inequality, it's compounded, it's a necessary step for Scotland to realise its ambition for inclusive growth. Did you come across that in some of the discussions that you had and did you take that report into account? Unfortunately, that report was produced after the examination. Yes, Anna Richie-Allan, who's the Executive Director of Close the Gap, was on our expert advisory group and was able to share some preliminary findings from some of their field work. We are very much bereft of data on the experience of black and minority ethnic women in Scotland, which speaks to the convener's earlier point about the essential nature of data. I think that Close the Gap has done a very strong piece of work. We also need, because the committee is unable to assess the quality of civil society produced reports, they really rely on administrative data when we're communicating with them about specific problems. So I would hope that the committee would see Close the Gap's excellent report as an urge towards finding and securing administrative data on the experiences of black and minority ethnic women in the labour market, but certainly the differential experience of black and minority ethnic women, disabled women and other groups of marginalised women is very much on the committee's mind and is interleaved in our report. Oliver Mundale. Thank you, convener. I just wondered whether you'd had a response from the Scottish Government on the point raised in the civil society response. We haven't had a formal response from the Scottish Government to the concluding observations. It has not been their practice to respond formally to concluding observations, and I think that would be one of the systematic pieces of process we would want to see introduced, and certainly something that seems indicated in the recommendations from the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership is something that is important. At the moment, there is not a systematic approach to picking up concluding observations and then integrating them into action. To be absolutely clear, I think that there should be. We do think that there should be, yes. That's very helpful. Thank you. Mary Fee. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Emma. I want to ask you a bit more about this Parliament as a guarantor of human rights and how we could further progress the issue of women's rights, mainstreaming and equality. CEDAW has made a number of different concluding observations. Most of the things that they raise in this committee specifically has looked at, whether it's through inquiry or whether it's come up in inquiries that we've done. If, as a guarantor of human rights, the Scottish Government were to incorporate CEDAW into Scots law, are all the other parts of the jigsaw ready for that to happen? No, the other parts of the jigsaw aren't ready. I refer the committee's certainly to a report produced by Professor Nicole Busby, foreign gender, on the question of CEDAW incorporation directly. She identifies a number of things that would have to happen in order to make that live, including a process by which cases were supported and run and case law would be developed over time, because on the first day of incorporation there wouldn't be case law and so there would need to be a process of arriving at that in order to provide public bodies, including Scottish Government, with legal certainty about how they should approach decision making and how they should act. There have been a number of approaches taken by states around the world to incorporating CEDAW, and I'm sure you're very familiar with the Wales example of incorporation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. So it would be possible for Scotland to develop a suite of duties or other mechanisms to integrate thinking about CEDAW into Scottish public bodies, thinking about equality and rights. It would even be possible, Professor Busby thinks, to integrate CEDAW into a revised and refreshed public sector equality duty in some measure so that public bodies would have to think about CEDAW when they were considering how to respond to that. But certainly the pieces would not be in place and there would need to be concerted action on the part of public authorities, any regulator, the Parliament, the Government and civil society in order to make CEDAW a reality for women and girls. I know the next question that I'm going to ask you is asking you to do a guesstimate, but if all of that work was to take place, how long do you think that that could possibly take? I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I think we can see that we are still, we're still acting on and developing case law with regards to the bits of the Equality Act that used to be the Equal Pay Act and used to be the Sex Discrimination Act. So I think the work of equality and rights is never done. But I think that we could see some impact from any approach to integrating CEDAW into Scotland's thinking, just as in Wales we have seen the incorporation that they have done on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, bearing some fruit in their public authorities. The Government advisory group on human rights, could they take a more proactive role in encouraging those things to happen? Sorry, who was that there? The Government's advisory group on human rights, could they take a more proactive role in encouraging all those little bits to happen? Yes, I mean, I think the recommendations that have come forward from the First Minister's advisory group on human rights leadership did cover all of those questions, how this might be implemented, how it might be brought to life. The announcement has just come out as you'll be aware that the new group has been formed to take this work forward and so I think that will be an urgent part of their work plan to think about not only what any bill or bills might look like, but how all the rest of the work around that is done to make this work. I was quite interested in the comment about getting committees to do thematic inquiries. Even for this committee when we do budget scrutiny, it's very difficult to follow a line of spend through a budget. Do you think it would be helpful if I oppose this as a possibility, not something that would happen? If every subject committee in Parliament over and above the work that they do were asked every year to look at one thing and each committee did a thematic inquiry into one specific thing and then it was all pulled together at the end? Whether it's women in housing, women in mental health, women in the justice system, if every committee was to look at one specific thing, would that help? I don't want every committee in this Parliament to be considering women in equality all the time, but I appreciate that there are lots of competing demands on this place. I think there are definitely considerations to be given to how all of the committees work together to focus on equality. There's been lots of discussion over time across many parliaments about how to do post-legislative scrutiny that thinks about women's equality and rights, whether rapporteurs are a useful feature of parliamentary committees. I think there's definitely some consideration to be done. I think the excellent work this committee did on thinking about human rights in the Parliament could perhaps be emulated by a piece of work looking at equality in the Parliament and seeing if there are any similar sets of recommendations that could come forward about how to grapple with those questions. I think an idea, as you've mentioned or some other similar ideas, may have some merit, but I think that what we would like to see is systematically an approach taken that is proportionate but that does ensure that women and girls' equality and rights are thought about in all committees. We are, after all, more than half of the population and live still very distinct lives, so that is certainly something that should be done to ensure that good legislation and policymaking happens. I suppose that if each subject committee did even a very short thematic inquiry, it may help to sharpen the mind or the thinking about how they specifically look at women. Perhaps indeed. All for sharpening minds. Annie Wells. Good morning, Emma. A question from me on the letter that was sent to the cabinet secretary and copied to the committee. Can you advise if you have received the response and what that response was? We have not yet received your response from the cabinet secretary. I cannot ask what the response was better than. Thank you very much, Emma. Emma, do you have anything further that you would like to share with the committee or ask of the committee? Before you do, or while you are thinking about it, are you able to provide us with the information? I am sorry, I have forgotten the name of them. You said that there was a sister organisation that let you know that the... I will try to think of the correct term here. The dues were paid by the UK Government. Absolutely. I will pass that correspondence on to you. Certainly, yes. I think that the final call I would make would be to reiterate the calls of the beginning that this committee has done some terrific work over time, some of which we drew on in our submission, particularly the inquiry into prejudice-based bullying and our ongoing concerns about the experience of girls in school and the impact on their education of experiencing epidemic, sexual harassment and sexualised bullying. I think that this committee has perhaps more work to do when it comes to thinking about women's equality and rights. I would return to the calls that I made about how you might track these CEDAWR concluding observations and how you might think about the articles of CEDAWR when you are deciding which areas of work to focus on. Again, the threat to the treaty bodies has not dissipated just because the UK Government has now late paid its dues. How will you act to ensure that the CEDAWR committee is an institution that is preserved and protected? I think that the question of CEDAWR incorporation is really interesting and this conversation has just touched on the beginning of that. I would urge the committee to give very considerable regard to that as an interesting question. Thank you. My colleague Mary Fee is making signs of me that she has another question. Thank you, convener. It was just when you were giving that answer there and you were talking about the concluding observations, perhaps instead of saying to committees to do a very short thematic inquiry on a specific thing, if each committee was tasked with looking at one concluding observation and doing an inquiry into that, would that be a more beneficial way of actually getting in-depth information? I think certainly because CEDAWR is such a broad treaty and it covers really all elements of life. I wonder if the committees might instead see all of the concluding observations and decide which ones are most relevant to their work and that might be an approach, but I think these questions are certainly ones for this committee to consider in terms of how the rest of the Parliament responds to women's equality and rights issues and specifically to CEDAWR and other treaty bodies concluding observations. Thank you. Thank you, convener. Thank you for joining us a lot to think about this morning. We appreciate your evidence. Thank you for coming in. The next meeting of the committee will be on Thursday, 20 June, where we will consider the children's equal protection from assault Scotland bill at stage 2. I now close the meeting.