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Ben Hoare Bell’s involvement in the United Nations

One of the great joys for me as a non-practitioner is working with high quality specialist solicitors who are pushing to defend the rights of those who are facing difficulties. Several of our staff are very involved in ensuring that women and children who are subject to abuse are supported.

The British government has signed up to and agreed to various United Nations treaties such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Other treaties concern prevention of child cruelty, torture, trafficking and, most importantly for the United Kingdom’s purposes at the moment, CEDAW or the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women.

The treaty has a number of very significant duties to the United Kingdom government, as signatories to the treaty can be held to account. Every four years the Government is asked to write a report for the United Nations CEDAW Committee who will then examine the Government on how well it is adhering to its duties and obligations under the treaty.

The UK Government wrote their latest report in 2011 in which they indicated that they were complying with the duties and obligations under the treaty extremely well. This is only the first step in the process as following the Government’s report on itself, various interested stakeholders write a response to the Government report which is basically a “tell it like it is report.” Various members of Ben Hoare Bell are members of the North East CEDAW Shadow Report Group including Cris McCurley, Ronagh Craddock, Amy Perch and Rachel Brown.

Cris McCurley has been delegated as the North East representative to the national working party to write the Shadow Report and she has particularly addressed the legal issues.

The CEDAW convention obligates the government to ensure equality for women with men before the law and in family life, and in particular with access to justice. A big part of the shadow report will therefore deal with the legal aid cuts.

Cris was interviewed in 2010 for the Law Society Gazette about breaches of CEDAW as a result of the severe cuts to legal aid in private law proceedings.

On Wednesday 20th February 2013 Cris attended the Ministry of Justice consultation on the guidance that the Ministry of Justice are putting out to those who are victims of domestic abuse and who are needing to apply for legal aid for family matters.

The main concern of everyone who responded to the legal aid act consultation was that the most vulnerable people in our society will not have legal aid to fight for their children or matrimonial finances, or even for divorce after the 1st April this year.

Given that there is still a great disparity in the earning capacity of men to women in the United Kingdom, this will impact women far more than it will on men.

The 2012 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act swept away legal aid for everyone in cases of family law matters except where children were being removed from parents by the Local Authority, and in a very small number of other closely defined cases. As the majority of the media coverage has been about legal aid being withdrawn for Civil matters, many people have not grasped that civil means family law matters, such as divorce, financial settlements between divorcing people, disputes about who are going to see the children, and who they are going to live with.

Much publicity has been put out by the Government to say that anyone who is a victim of Domestic abuse will still be able to get legal aid to help them in these important family law matters. This is not exactly honest, as victims/survivors will have to provide evidence before they will get legal aid, and in some cases, pay for the evidence (e.g. medical records/reports, reports about criminal convictions – up to £60 a time) regardless of whether they have an income or not. It seems that ministers who have made the decision think that anyone should be able to afford this amount to obtain the necessary evidence.

Part of Cris’ role as delegate to the UN/CEDAW examination this July will be to ask the CEDAW ‘Judges’ to sanction to government for not easily allowing access to Justice for women, especially women who are victims of abuse.

Cris is currently working on a briefing paper for Baroness Scotland who is going to challenge the Government over the decisions that they have taken over access to Legal aid, and therefore Justice.

Watch this space for further blogs. We will endeavour to answer any questions that you have about this important issue.

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