UN Women’s Rights Committee issues findings on Denmark

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has published its findings on Denmark, including the self-governing territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which it examined during its latest online session.

The findings contain positive aspects of how Denmark is implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. These include Denmark’s recent amendments to the Criminal Code to redefine rape on the basis of lack of consent rather than use of force or threat.

The Committee, however, remained concerned in a number of areas and made the following recommendations:

• Consolidate the Danish social model and use it as a catalyst for implementing COVID measures to place women and girls at the centre of recovery strategies;

• Take urgent measures to address the high rate of sexual violence committed against women with disabilities, in particular intellectual or psychosocial disabilities;

• Take steps to make employers accountable for sexual harassment in the workplace if they failed to provide sufficient measures to prevent such harassment, and ensure that victims of sexual harassment in the workplace and the educational system have access to effective remedies;

• Address violence women experience online and offline in public debate and ensure law enforcement measures in relation to the liability of social media companies for unlawful user-generated content;

• Collect comprehensive data on the causes of the high abortion rate in Greenland and provide appropriate health-care services to Greenlandic women during pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period and to their children;

• Remove punitive measures for women seeking abortion and consider amending the abortion law in the Faroe Islands to ensure equal access to safe legal abortion and post-abortion services for Faroese women as in Denmark and Greenland;

• Study the gender-specific impact of climate change on women in Greenland, in particular women dependent on traditional Inuit livelihoods, and ensure women’s equal participation in decision-making processes related to the climate crisis.