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Insincere commitments to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have the capacity to improve domestic rights protections. This chapter explores why the Hungarians ratified the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW, and the role individual petitions play in promoting women’s rights domestically. Ethnic minorities such as the Slovak Roma are not the only groups to have suffered during the tumultuous period of transition in Central and Eastern Europe. As this chapter will demonstrate, even among some of the most liberal, democratic countries in the region such as Hungary, women are engaged in battles to secure basic human rights from their governments (Bretherton 2001, 63). The statistical analysis in chapter 3 revealed that transitioning governments undergoing debt crises in Central and Eastern Europe are statistically more inclined to make these sorts of cheap commitments to women’s rights. Hungary faced a debt crisis in the late 1990s, and experienced targeted pressure from the European Commission to adopt liberal gender laws consistent with those of Western Europe. The selection of Hungary as a case study is thus consistent with broader statistical trends among postsocialist regimes. The Hungarian case is also indicative of a broader regional trend only recently emerging throughout Central and Eastern Europe—coercive, state-sponsored sterilization of Roma women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination AgainstWomen and the Optional Protocol The United Nations General Assembly (GA) adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1979 with an overHungary and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 5 116 Hungary and CEDAW 117 whelming vote of 130 in favor,none opposed.and ten abstentions (UN Division for the Advancement of Women 2010).The CEDAW incorporates disparate treaties, all dealing with narrower facets of women’s rights.1 The Convention entered into force following ratification by the twentieth member state in 1981. The Convention defines gender discrimination in Article 1 as “any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect . . . of impairing . . . enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.”The CEDAW condemns gender discrimination in all of its forms, and requires states parties to pass legislation to protect women from discrimination generally (Article 2), and in the political, economic, social, and cultural fields to ensure the advancement of women in society (Article 3). States parties are tasked with modifying cultural practices that reinforce women’s inferiority in society under Article 5. Article 7 guarantees a variety of forms of political equality such as voting, running for and holding office, and the formulation of government policy. In Article 10, states parties agree to offer women equality in educational opportunities. Detailed protections for women in employment comprise Article 11.The particular problems of rural women are addressed in Article 13. Article 16 requires states parties to the CEDAW to eliminate all forms of gender discrimination related to marriage and family relations, which has become controversial for Hungary. Though the CEDAW was adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, the Optional Protocol, which affords citizens the right to petition the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, was not adopted by the GA until 1999.2 The Optional Protocol entered into force following the receipt of the tenth state ratification in December of 2000. In chapter 2, we saw that governments have been quite inclined to commit to both the CEDAW and the CEDAW Optional Protocol. More governments have ratified the CEDAW treaty than any other treaty examined here, and seventy-seven states (40.3 percent of the global population) have ratified the Optional Protocol. Hungary and the CEDAW Hungarian ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women took place in 1982, during the Communist era. The Hungarians were among the first in the world to ratify the Optional Protocol, with a full parliamentary vote in June 2001. Hungary’s public commitments to women’s rights and the CEDAW are undermined by patterns of gender bias and discrimination in the postcommunist period (Morvai 2004). Cultural attitudes toward women continue to be shaped by the Communist legacy, which ascribed equal work in a rapidly industrializing economy to equality (Fodor 1994). The [3.139.70.131] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 00:17...

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