International Women’s Day

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, on gaining this important debate on International Women’s Day. It gives me particular pleasure also to speak after not just the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, but also the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, since together we worked hard in earlier years to gain more seats for women in the UK Parliament. It is pleasing to see that the rights of women have made a tremendous advance since my grandmother was a suffragist. The progress in the UK has been rapid and is continuing but elsewhere the picture is considerably gloomier. I am sure that we do not wish to achieve political opportunity for ourselves here in the UK and consider that to be the end of the matter. We need to look more widely in the European Union and even further afield where the pursuit of fundamental freedoms and the establishment of some democratic principles in the minds of differing societies and their enshrinement in law is not an absolute. If women’s right to vote is to reach an international standard, we must pursue democracy as the way forward for those societies. It is interesting that the absolute prerequisites for women’s political involvement do not necessarily require a fully secular constitution or even a fully democratic one. A secular constitution, for example, was not essential in Pakistan when I monitored the elections on 18 February 2008. Flawed though that election was and run under a resolutely Islamic and highly prescriptive constitution, women still had the right to vote and I watched them exercise it in their thousands. What about partial dictatorship? Even a partial dictatorship can achieve political involvement for women. The election on 6 November 2005 in Azerbaijan was most certainly not free and fair, as the OSCE declared, yet again women voted and I watched them work even in the political polling stations. What about new constitutions? Is it impossible for women to vote then? Not at all. Twice in Iraq in 2005, in January and December, I saw and assessed women in their millions voting. What, therefore, is the key blockage if the right to vote is there and if a woman has a right to a legal personality? I monitored the elections in Afghanistan in September 2005 and in Yemen in September 2006. Both those elections were deemed to be free and fair internationally—and, I believe, correctly—but in each of them the women had significant and essential difficulties not in getting to the polling stations but in what happened thereafter: in exercising their right to vote. I suggest that there are three issues on which our Government and our people must concentrate if we wish women worldwide to be politically involved. The first, as I have declared already, is the legal personality, but that has to be followed by social attitudes and mores that accept that a woman has a legal identity. The second is the capacity to read and write and to understand the voting process: how to place your vote independent of pressure locally in the polling station, and what holding a pencil, looking at a piece of paper and placing a mark on a piece of paper actually mean. Finally, there must be a reasonable expectation that that vote will be fairly counted. In Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent in Yemen, I witnessed women entering the polling station, getting behind the screen to vote by themselves, and being absolutely incapable of understanding the process because they had never learnt to read and write. They were heartbroken and in tears. How can we help? There are a number of very simple ways: adult literacy and numeracy, which alas is not a DfID priority; training domestic election monitors—another vastly important thing, particularly if they are women; and funding and managing courses and lectures in the run-up to an election on the basic electoral process, particularly for women. Our national policy should be the promotion of these elements of democracy as the certain, assured and evidence-based way to bring women of any country into the political process.