A/HRC/41/42/Add.2 be punishable by law, and the victim shall have the right to obtain compensation in accordance with the law. 14. Despite this significant progress, the Special Rapporteur is concerned by the fact that discriminatory provisions remain. While article 10 (1) of the Constitution provides that no citizen of Nepal may be deprived of the right to obtain citizenship, article 11 of the Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 2006 limit the autonomy of women with regard to nationality and their ability to transmit citizenship through marriage and to their children, as highlighted by both the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The acquisition of Nepalese citizenship by descent is conditional on evidence that both the father and the mother of the child are Nepalese citizens. The criteria for the transmission of citizenship from Nepalese mothers to their children remain discriminatory, as they require the mother to be a resident of Nepal, exclude children born to women who are not permanent residents and make citizenship subject to conversion for children whose previously unidentified father is later proven to be a foreigner. This provision is not in line with article 9 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. 2. Legislative framework and policies on combating and preventing violence against women 15. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the substantive legal reforms undertaken by the Government over the past three years with the aim of harmonizing its national legal system with the new constitutional provisions and international commitments to human rights. Although this progress is indeed noteworthy, the Special Rapporteur was informed that the process of repealing or amending gender-discriminatory provisions and adopting new laws and policies is still ongoing, while legislation and harmful practices that discriminate against women still exist. Considerable implementation gaps with respect to new laws relating to the rights of women, ranging from laws on harmful practices, sexual violence and domestic violence to laws on trafficking, continue to pose significant challenges. 16. In 2015, the Government identified the need to amend 315 laws and enact 110 federal laws, 22 provincial laws and 6 local-level laws in order to fully implement the provisions of the Constitution. The legislative reforms have resulted in the establishment of a new legal framework on the rights of women and included amendments to genderdiscriminatory provisions in 32 acts through the Act to amend some acts for maintaining gender equality and ending gender-based violence of 2015. 17. Although it may be too early to assess the full impact of recently adopted laws and provisions, current gaps in the effective implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes for eliminating gender-based violence against women are compounded by limited budgetary allocations. The main challenge now is to ensure that laws and policies on the rights of women and violence against women are properly interpreted and fully implemented at the federal, provincial and local levels. 18. Under the new federal system, judicial committees have been established at the local level as a means of facilitating access to justice for women, in particular those living in rural and remote areas. The committees, 90 per cent of which are led by women, are chaired primarily by the Deputy Mayor or Vice-Chair (the vast majority of mayors are male) and include women representing minority groups, including women from Dalit and indigenous communities. Despite this promising statistic and high expectations, the Special Rapporteur is concerned that, given the lack of legal expertise and knowledge of gender-sensitive investigation procedures among committee members, as well as the unclear relationship between the committees and court procedures, the limited financial resources, the insufficient coordination between federal, provincial and local structures and the quasijudicial and political nature of the committees, results may be limited. 19. While noting as positive the overall efforts being made to improve access to justice for women, the Special Rapporteur is concerned by the fact that considerable challenges remain, including the lack of training for the police and judiciary to enable them to adopt a gender-sensitive approach when investigating cases, the social stigma associated with reporting and the general lack of awareness among women of their rights. The economic 5