Chapter three: Democracy and good political governance restrictions on women. The Gender and Development Policy of 2003 argues for women’s property and inheritance rights, whilst the Legal Capacity of Married Persons Act of 2006 provides married women with full legal rights to own property and hold title to land. The Land Amendment Bill (2008), once enacted, will provide for joint titling of land belonging to spouses married in community of property. Although unmarried women do not inherit under customary law, they may be allocated property by way of written instruction in terms of the Laws of Lerotholi (1903). Unmarried women governed by common law have the right to inherit either intestate or by means of a will. 283. The Lesotho Bank Amendment Bill of 2008 will repeal the existing Lesotho National Development and Savings Order of 1971, in terms of which women are regarded as minors who cannot open a bank account without the consent of their husbands. Further, the Ministry of Gender and Youth, Sport and Recreation (MGYSR) has developed a proposal to establish a microcredit scheme for women. Several measures have been adopted to improve the situation of women in the workplace and to promote their right to employment. 284. Lesotho has ratified a number of international instruments concerning the political rights of women and has put in place a number of measures to domesticate these instruments. However, the country has ratified CEDAW with reservations on issues of culture and chieftainship, meaning that its constitution does discriminate against women on the basis of customary law and religious denomination. This exception clause therefore contradicts various sections of the constitution, which extol nondiscrimination on the basis of gender. 285. Lesotho has acceded to various international and regional instruments that promote the participation of women in power structures, decision making and leadership. Among these are the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (2003) and the SADC Declaration on Gender and Development (1997). The latter has been translated into Sesotho and has been disseminated together with the Gender Policy, though there is some doubt as to how widely these have been disseminated. Despite constitutional, institutional, policy and legal frameworks, the CSAR points out, the majority of the poor, unemployed and landless in the country are still women, a situation exacerbated by the fact that so many of them are still governed by customary law, which considers them as perpetual minors. 286. Several measures have been adopted in order to promote women’s political rights. Despite the National Assembly Amendment Act of 2001 (section 36A) aimed at gender mainstreaming by political parties, no accompanying guiding principles or mechanisms for enforcement exist and therefore little success was achieved in having political parties include gender in their manifestos. Some visible success was achieved, though, in terms of the Local Government Electors (Amendment) Act of 2005, which stipulated that no less than 30 per cent of the seats in the local councils should be reserved for women. In this way, Lesotho far exceeded the SADC requirement of 30 per cent representation and reached 58 per cent in the local elections of 2005. The CSAR reports that some groups in civil society expressed dissatisfaction with the quota system, alleging that it constituted a form of discrimination against men and other groups in society. 287. Lesotho also made significant progress in gender mainstreaming in other areas of political and decision-making leadership between 1996 and 2008, as evidenced in the table below. 83