Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Many Zimbabwean women think that the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 7 should protect their rights even if our own Constitution does not. After all, Zimbabwe ratified CEDAW on 13 May 1991. CEDAW’s Article 2(f) requires all governments which have signed it ‘to take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices which constitute discrimination against women’. Article 5(a) requires ‘states parties’ to take all appropriate measures ‘to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’. But ten years after signing this convention, our government has not yet incorporated CEDAW into its own laws, in accordance with section 111B of our Constitution. CEDAW’s provisions, therefore, do not protect women in Zimbabwe. In our High Court, Justice Gillespie 8 noted two years ago that the denial of rights to immovable property to women in unsolemnised and unregistered customary unions contravenes Article 16 of CEDAW. 7 Adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, CEDAW entered into force on 3 September 1981. 8 Jengwa v Jengwa (HH-152-99), 1999 (2) ZLR 121 (H). 9