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Public Hearing / Tribunal

There are many reasons to hold a public event. Holding a public event is an excellent method to build support for local CEDAW implementation. It provides an opportunity to reach a broader audience than is accessible through workshops. Through a public event you can demonstrate to people that women face discrimination and that enforcing CEDAW will address it. You will provide the audience with information on what’s going on locally and nationally and how they can get involved.

At hearings, women and their advocates testify about the relevance of CEDAW to their lives. A public hearing will involve individuals testifying in front of a government audience (although the general public is invited). It has more of an official veneer. On the other hand, you can hold a tribunal where judges/lawyers listen to testimonies and evaluate whether human rights have been violated. Women’s groups around the world have used tribunals to enormous success. Either event will take a lot of planning.

Determine: who your primary audience is and what you want from them? Public hearings usually are used as an opportunity for city officials to hear from constituencies. You should have no more than three specific things that you want from the audience; these specific requests will form the backbone of your CEDAW ordinance.

Who testifies is critical. A diversity of individuals should testify. You should have some mixture of women testifying directly about abuses they have experienced and advocacy groups testifying about local violations of women’s rights. You will definitely want some men to testify. You can also have people describe ways that enforcement of rights contained in CEDAW can or has improved their lives. The testimonies must have local relevance and contain remedies.

In San Francisco, we held a public hearing in front of city officials and the public because we did not want a legalistic tone. Rather we wanted a vision of community support. The support of the Board of Supervisors (city council) President Barbara Kaufman made the October 30, 1997 public hearing possible. At this hearing, women and their advocates testified about discrimination faced by women in San Francisco in the areas of economic justice, violence, and access to health. In each and every case they cited the CEDAW article whose enforcement could provide a remedy to the violation.

You will need a minimum of three to six months to organize a pubic hearing. You will need to:

• Select a date and time, either before passing a resolution or before passing the ordinance. The date could have other significance, March 8 (international women’s day), August 27 (gender equity day), December 10 (human rights day).
• Draft a timeline (who will do what by when).
• Select speakers and emphasize to them the importance of keeping within 3 minutes, mentioning human rights, and asking for a remedy. Your Task Force should help you find speakers. When selecting your speakers, look for compelling stories, but at all costs do not exploit your testifiers for the “shock value” of their stories.
• Conduct outreach to make sure the public is present. The Task Force should form the backbone of this work.
• Conduct media work (see next section).

Be sure to conclude the event with a call for some action to implement CEDAW. The more concrete you can be the better. This is your big opportunity for press coverage; you should capitalize on it as much as possible.

Next: Media

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