Human rights working group calls for policies to abolish traditional practices.

Human rights working group calls for policies to abolish traditional practices

Calling on Governments to adopt clear-cut policies and appropriate legislation to abolish the practice of female circumcision, the Working Group on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children concluded its second session in Geneva (9-13 September).

The Working Group, a subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights, recommended that Governments educate the public on the potentially dangerous physical and mental effects of female circumcision, which it termed "prejudicial to the health and well-being of women and children'.

Governments were called on to include strategies aimed at the eradication of this practice in their primary health care programmes. They also were asked to "sensitize' decision-makers, professionals, professional bodies and non-governmental organizations, the mass media, village leaders and community health and development workers so as to obtain their co-operation in order to influence attitudes towards the eradication of this practice.

Today, it is believed that the practice exists in more than 28 African countries, with 75 million women and children affected, and in some Asian countries.

The Group's report (E/CN.4/AC.42/ 1985/L.5 and Add. 1) contains a number of suggestions made to the Commission concerning measures to be taken against the practice of female circumcision, as well as other practices which affect the health and safety of women and children.

Some other "harmful practices' cited in the report include facial scarification, forced feeding of women, preferential treatment of male children resulting in high female mortality, early marriage, taboos which prevent women from controlling their own fertility, nutritional taboos that result in withholding certain nutritious foods from women and children, and traditional birth practices which are dangerous to the baby and the mother.

Some countries were now confronted with the incompatibility between those practices and obligations assumed as States parties to various international human rights conventions, the report states, including the International Covenants on Human Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child.