|
Is Article 130 of the Labor Law of the Philippines which disallows women to work at night for security reasons discriminatory?
This was the issue posed before a group of five lawyers during the workshop session at the Training on Gender Sensitivity and CEDAW conducted on October 6 and 7, 2006. The group was presented with the complaint filed before the Supreme Court by a female secretary working in a factory who challenged Article 130 on the ground that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
For group member Tomas W. Reyes, the case was a simple legal issue. As far as he was concerned, there was a legal basis for disallowing women from working at night and that law had to be followed. “I tried to look at the wisdom of the law under the presumption that it became a law, so it must be good. It had to be followed,” recalls Reyes, a lawyer for almost 20 years, of his initial stand on the issue.
But deeper discussion of the case with his colleagues in the training, more than half of whom were women, made Reyes understand the sentiments of women. “I realized that if we look from the perspective of women, the provision disallowing them to work at night is very wrong,” Reyes says. “Why should the blame, the burden, and prohibition be placed on the shoulders of women? In fact, if we look at women as equal in dignity with men, the situation should be remedied not by banning women from working at night but by putting in security measures that will protect women.”
Thus began what Reyes calls his “journey in my involvement in gender sensitivity mainstreaming activities”. The training, he says, “clarified things for me” with the CEDAW document preamble providing the guiding light. “I saw that the far more profound basis for rights of women is human dignity of women,” he says. “The first statement in the CEDAW document reaffirms faith in the fundamental rights, that all human beings are born free. I was so convinced that the far-reaching basis of respect for a person is the dignity of the person.”
The two-day training Reyes attended was the first of five training sessions on CEDAW for the judiciary conducted by the Ateneo Human Rights Center (AHRC) in close collaboration with the Philippine Judicial Academy (PhilJA). The AHRC is based in the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila Law School, one of the leading law schools in the country; its key officers are respected law professors and hands-on practitioners of issues related to women, children, indigenous peoples, and other disadvantaged groups. The PhilJA was created by law as the training ground for judges and court personnel; it is directly supervised by the Supreme Court.
The CEDAW training sessions were aimed at building the capability of judges and lawyers to make gender fair and rights-based decisions. Trained were court personnel of the Supreme Court, appellate courts, select executive judges and family court judges and their respective clerks of court and researchers. Funding support for the five training sessions came from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded UNIFEM CEDAW Southeast Asia Programme.
Aside from the case discussions, the training had three other major inputs: the concept of gender sensitivity; gender-fair language; and CEDAW and the courts. Lecturers were seasoned lawyers who have extensive experience with human rights issues with focus on women and children. The sessions were interactive. Says lecturer AHRC lawyer Gilbert Sembrano of the training design, “We start from where the participants are, their understanding of basic concepts of gender. Then we explain.”
Reyes’s broadened view on gender equality qualified him to be one of the four lawyers assigned to work on gender audit of Supreme Court administrative circulars in 2007. Gender audit is one of the seven core strategies identified by the Supreme Court’s Committee on Gender Responsiveness in the Judiciary (CGRJ) to achieve its vision and mission for a gender responsive judiciary. It requires the study of Supreme Court documents to check if these are gender responsive.
As an initial run on gender audit, the review team was tasked to evaluate the extent to which the judiciary’s administrative circulars comply with CEDAW. They studied all the circulars issued by the Supreme Court for a ten-year period, from 1996 to 2007, following an instrument they developed to categorize if a circular is “Complying” or “Non Complying”. Their findings are to be compiled into a report and will be submitted to the CGRJ for consideration. Reyes looks forward to the extension of the gender audit program to the lower courts. He says, “We suspect that more gender concerns will surface if we go to the destinations of the circulars.”
Reyes works at the Office of the Chief Attorney, the legal research office of the Supreme Court. Like his colleagues in the Supreme Court, it is difficult to leave his post to attend trainings for extended periods. The two days given the CEDAW training was just enough time, he says. If there would be an extension of the CEDAW module, he hopes it will be a deepening of his initial learnings and that the inputs will be contextualized to his work.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
