Advocacy & Policy

The thematic focus of the upcoming UN WGDAWG Report on ‘Women and Girls in Poverty and Inequality’ – Harvard Law School

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Event banner for discussion “The thematic focus of the upcoming UN WGDAWG Report on ‘Women and Girls in Poverty and Inequality’” on November 29 at 12:15pm in WCC 2009 or on Zoom with photos of panelists Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, Fatema Sumar, Alicia Ely Yamin and Melissa Upreti.

On November 29 at 12:15pm ET, Dorothy Estrada-Tanck and Melissa Upreti, respectively Chair and Member of the United Nations Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls (WGDAWG), will speak at Harvard Law School previewing the thematic focus of the report the Working Group is preparing for presentation to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly in 2023. Estrada-Tanck and Upreti will be joined by discussants Alicia Ely Yamin from the Petrie-Flom Center at HLS and Fatema Z. Sumar, Executive Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

In its report, the WGDAWG seeks to address the causes of underlying discrimination in the realization of women’s and girls’ human rights, especially lack of access to economic and social rights, due to cross-cutting risk factors stemming from both gender inequality and socioeconomic inequality; deepen the understanding of the implications for women’s and girls’ multiple human insecurities and vulnerability to experiencing human rights abuses primarily in the socioeconomic dimension of their lives; reveal the opportunities for structural transformations in culture, law and policy to foster women’s and girls’ human rights, human security and socioeconomic equality (including, e.g. in the fields of taxation, debt, trade and redistribution, and gendered budgeting in economic and social policy); and identify promising approaches, especially in a (post) COVID-era, to tackle their condition of poverty and socioeconomic inequality and construct social justice. 

Panelists:

Dorothy Estrada-Tanck is Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Murcia. She was recently appointed Chair of the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls (WGDAWG). Estrada-Tanck was a Visiting Fellow at the HLS Human Rights Program in 2019-20 and currently is a Visiting Scholar at Boston University School of Law.

Melissa Upreti is a member and former chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls. She is a Fellow in the University of Toronto Law Faculty’s International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program.

Fatema Z. Sumar is the Executive Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. She has a distinguished career as a practitioner in the US government and civil society. Sumar most recently served as a presidential appointee as the Vice President of Compact Operations at the US Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Alicia Ely Yamin is currently a Lecturer on Law and the Senior Fellow on Global Health and Rights at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; and Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy at the global health justice organization, Partners In Health.

The event is sponsored by HRP, the International Human Rights Clinic, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Center for International Development at Harvard University.  



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