Charles Kong Soo

So­cial ac­tivist and co-or­di­na­tor of the Net­work of Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tions for the Ad­vance­ment of Women Hazel Brown has de­scribed her de­trac­tors as hyp­ocrites, say­ing they op­posed the draft gen­der pol­i­cy be­cause they er­ro­neous­ly be­lieved the Gov­ern­ment was about to pass leg­is­la­tion ad­vo­cat­ing same-sex mar­riage and abor­tion.

She was speak­ing at her or­gan­i­sa­tion's com­mem­o­ra­tion of In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day (IWD) at the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade, Port-of-Spain, on Fri­day. Apart from an in­for­ma­tion fair on the Prom­e­nade, a ral­ly and street pro­ces­sion were al­so held to com­mem­o­rate the event.Speak­ing about the pro­posed draft gen­der pol­i­cy, Brown said there were sev­er­al ar­eas which it touched on but none of them re­lat­ed to same-sex mar­riages or abor­tion, an­oth­er is­sue which cause some con­cern to some seg­ments of so­ci­ety, among them Ro­man Catholics.

"The draft gen­der pol­i­cy deals with 14 ar­eas of con­cern of T&T and is not as our de­trac­tors will have it about same-sex mar­riage," Brown said."There is noth­ing in the draft pol­i­cy about same-sex mar­riage or about abor­tion. There is noth­ing there."So now it is out in the open where every­body can see that those are hyp­ocrites who are call­ing for the Gov­ern­ment not to ap­prove it on the ba­sis of some pol­i­cy on same-sex mar­riage, there is no such thing."

She de­scribed the 2013 gen­der pol­i­cy as "a work­able, sen­si­ble and ap­pro­pri­ate draft" for T&T, not­ing it was very dif­fer­ent from the 2005 and 2009 drafts. Brown said the new draft will ad­dress women's em­ploy­ment, where there was a huge gen­der gap in wages for women.Im­prove­ments in health ser­vices avail­able to women, in­clud­ing re­pro­duc­tive health rights, which was thrust in­to the lime­light with the re­cent births of sex­tu­plets, ed­u­ca­tion, child mar­riage, en­vi­ron­ment and dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness.

OW­TU ed­u­ca­tion and re­search of­fi­cer Nicole John­son said a del­e­ga­tion of women from the joint trade union move­ment on Fri­day took two let­ters to Min­is­ter of Labour Er­rol McLeod and Min­is­ter of Gen­der, Youth and Child De­vel­op­ment Mar­lene Coudray at their re­spec­tive of­fices at the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Com­plex, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.The let­ter ad­dressed to McLeod called on him rat­i­fy Con­ven­tion 189 that would give recog­ni­tion to do­mes­tic work­ers.

The let­ter sent to Coudray called on her to ad­dress three key is­sues:

�2 to en­sure a bal­ance be­tween women's ac­cess to work and fam­i­ly by im­ple­ment­ing mech­a­nisms such as day care cen­tres and af­ter-school pro­grammes

�2 en­sur­ing no more vi­o­la­tions against women in the work­place such as fir­ing preg­nant women, dis­miss­ing women if they are un­well and re­fus­ing to hire un­mar­ried women and 3: in­flu­enc­ing her Par­lia­men­tary col­leagues to sup­port these ini­tia­tives.