A G E N C Y : V O I C E A N D I N F L U E N C E W I T H I N T H E H O M E A N D I N S O C I E T Y
characteristics. For example, a legal court may be a day and a half trip away from home, yet social norms discourage women from sleeping outside the household. Or higher illiteracy rates of elderly women hinder their ability to know their rights. Countries in East Asia and the Pacific have made varying degrees of progress in guaranteeing and enforcing equal rights for men and women. As discussed in the previous section and in chapter 2, several countries in the region have plural legal environments, in which the interaction of customary or religious law and statutory law means that women’s legal stature can vary substantially across ethnic groups, even within a country. International conventions, national laws, and institutions Nearly all countries in the East Asia and Pacific region have acceded to and ratified international commitments to reduce genderbased discrimination and promote agency for women as laid out by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), with a few exceptions. The ratification of CEDAW indicates a public commitment by governments to abide by a set of internationally recognized standards regarding gender equality. As of the end of 2011, only six countries in the world have not ratified the CEDAW agreement, including Palau and Tonga in the Pacific (CEDAW 2012). The signing of CEDAW has served as an instrument to open up space for people to argue for legal and institutional reform to promote women’s agency. In several East Asian countries, legal and institutional reforms came about after the ratification of CEDAW, at the behest of CSOs and government agencies arguing for the fulfillment of their countries’ international commitments. For instance, individuals, CSOs, and government agencies tasked with women’s issues in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam used CEDAW conventions and frameworks as the basis for promoting women’s participation in local government and for examining whether existing laws on violence and discrimination
against women were aligned with the convention. The organizations then used this information to advocate for an overhaul of existing laws or propose new ones to rectify omissions (UNIFEM 2010). Beyond CEDAW, many countries in the region have put in place domestic laws to support the advancement of women and gender equality (UNDP 2010). In the past 10 years, gender equality laws such Vietnam’s Gender Equality Law (2006), the People’s Republic of China Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women (amended in 2005), Lao PDR’s Law on the Development and Protection of Women (2004), and the Philippines’ Magna Carta of Women (2009) have been adopted with the aim of providing a more comprehensive approach to addressing gender equality. Most countries in the region have also adopted domestic violence legislation over the same period, including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Lao PDR, M alaysia, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Papua New Guinea, for example, reformed its criminal code in 2002 to dramatically change its sexual assault regime by introducing grading of offenses according to the gravity of harm and eliminating marital immunity. Still, many countries (mostly Pacific Island states) lack adequate legislation for gender equality (UNDP 2010). Most countries in the region have equal rights under inheritance laws, as discussed in chapter 2. Evidence from India suggests that women who own a house or land significantly reduce their risk of marital violence (Agarwal and Panda 2007). The majority of countries in East Asia no longer differentiate by gender in statutory law. Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Thailand, and Vietnam do not have p lural legal systems and have legislation for p roperty and inheritance rights that have no discrimination against women. However, plural legal systems exist in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and these laws discriminate against women in inheritance (see chapter 2 for more details). In the Pacific, Kiribati and Tuvalu have unequal statutory
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