The following guest post was written by Velia Marquez Rojas and Henry Off. Velia is a constitutional lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Studies in Mexico City and has worked in various roles in the Supreme Court of Mexico since 2019. Henry is Board Member at the Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and a lawyer currently working as an independent consultant at the International Criminal Court. The views in the blogpost are those of the authors.
This summer, Canada ratified its first major inter-American human rights treaty, the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women, better known as the Belém do Pará Convention. It was a significant moment. Until June, Canada was, alongside Cuba and the United States, one of only three members of the Organization of American States that had not ratified the Convention.
The Convention is the only binding regional treaty specifically dedicated to addressing violence against women. Its ratification was long overdue given Canada’s longstanding, and often deeply flawed, efforts to address gender equality and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).
Canada’s ratification of Belém do Pará is not just symbolic. The experience of countries like Mexico shows how ratifying and implementing the Convention, together with relying on the substantive body of jurisprudence developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), can lead to significant changes in domestic laws and practices addressing violence against women. Canada can, and should, look to Mexico’s experience for lessons about how the Convention and this jurisprudence can inform its own legal framework and response to violence against women.
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