2020 GENDER SENSITISING PARLIAMENTS GUIDELINES: GOALS Building on the 2001 Gender Sensitising Commonwealth Parliaments Report The CPA’s Gender Sensitising Commonwealth Parliaments, The Report of a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Study Group, 2001 included a series of formal recommendations, as well as informal suggestions, that Commonwealth parliaments might adopt. Box 6 on the opposite page translates these into what can be reconceived as GSP ‘standards’. Yet, because they are far from exhaustive across the full work of a parliament and the full range of parliamentary actors and institutions, they are not in themselves sufficient to achieve GSP status today.iii Nevertheless, and not least because too many parliaments have yet to meet even these standards, they remain highly relevant to the new 2020 GSP Guidelines.
The 2001 CPA Report stressed the importance of national and international ‘political commitment’ to GSP change. It also recognised that ‘the legal regime has to reflect this commitment in letter and spirit’; and that ‘affirmative legal actions’ should flow from these commitments. Women parliamentarians were identified as the critical actors of political change, with an important role handed to the CPA Headquarters Secretariat to support women’s gender sensitising efforts.
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The Parliament of Grenada - a global leader in gender equality, with 46.7% women in the Lower House
