On November 7

On this day in ...
... 1943, Silvia Rose Cartwright (right) was born in Dunedin, New Zealand. She studied at the Otago Girls' High School in the same town, as well as the University of Otago, from which she earned her LL.B. degree in 1967. Since then, she's served as the 1st woman Chief District Judge, the 1st woman on New Zealand's High Court, and the 2d woman Governor-General of New Zealand. On the last post, WikiPedia writes:

Dame Silvia's term as Governor-General was from 4 April 2001 to 4 August 2006. This was the first (and so far only) time when the Monarch (Elizabeth II), Governor-General, Chief Justice (Dame Sian Elias), Speaker of the House (Margaret Wilson) and Prime Minister (Helen Clark) of a Commonwealth Realm were all female.

While a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, she helped to draft the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Since 2007, Cartwright's been a Judge on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

(Prior November 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 17

On this day in ...
... 1946, Dorcas Coker-Appiah (left) was born in Wenchi, Ghana. In 1972 she received her law degree, with honors, from the University of Ghana, and was called to the bar the same year. She's been a women's rights activist throughout her career, with a particular emphasis on legal literacy and leadership training. Coker-Appiah serves as Executive Director of the Gender Studies and Human Right Documentation Centre, based in Accra, and as a board member of WIPSEN-Africa, the Women Peace and SecurityNetwork Africa. Her publications include a co-authored chapter on "Societal influences on the conduct of conjugal relations," in a 2003 collection edited by Akua Kuenyehia, Women and Law in West Africa: Gender Relations in the Family -- A West African Perspective(reviewed here). Since 2003, Coker-Appiah has served as a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, succeeding Kuenyehia, who resigned upon her election as a Judge of the International Criminal Court.

(Prior August 17 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 7

On this day in ...
... 1945 (65 years ago today), Françoise Gaspard was born in Dreux, France. A feminist sociologist and a Socialist Party politican, she has served as mayor of her hometown, been a member of the French National Assembly, and held other national and regional positions. (credit for 2008 photo of Gaspard, at right, Marie-Josée Jacobs, Luxembourg's Minister of Family, Integration, and Equal Opportunities) Gaspard was one of France's 1st openly gay politicians, and among the very 1st who is a woman; furthermore, she helped introduce LGBT studies into French academia. She has represented France on the Commission on the Status of Women of the United Nations, and also has been a Vice Chairperson of the CEDAW Committee.


(Prior June 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On March 31

On this day in ...
... 1954, Violeta Neubauer (right) was born in Postojna in what is now the independent nation-state of Slovenia. She studied sociology at the University of Ljubljana. Neubauer's written nearly a dozen books on gender equality and human rights, and has worked on such issues at the national, regional, and international levels. She is a member of the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

(Prior March 31 posts are here, here, and here)

Read On! Gender Stereotyping

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading) A quick plug for a great new book on gender stereotyping and human rights law: Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives by Rebecca Cook and Simone Cusack.
It cannot be gainsaid that women have been, and remain, subordinated to men in nearly every nation-state, organized religion, legal system, and cultural tradition around the globe. With startling transnational consistency, women are the subject of persistent and pervasive stereotypes that

• devalue us,
• impede our full equality with men, and
• hamper our ability to make autonomous life choices.

Such stereotypes, while deeply engrained, are often invisible and unconscious in the way in which they socially construct what it means to be male and female in society and co-opt women in our own subordination. While many manifestations of overt discrimination against women—such as laws preventing women from owning property or engaging in certain professions—have been successfully challenged and dismantled through the invocation of international human rights norms and constitutional principles of equal protection, stereotypes at times seem impervious to law.
Not so, say Rebecca Cook and Simone Cusack in their impressive new book Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) (right). Drawing on exhaustive comparative research, Cook and Cusack argue that the law—and in particular transnational human rights law—has the potential to expose and deconstruct stereotypes that justify and perpetuate women’s subordination. The authors’ primary tool in this endeavor is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the multilateral treaty in the human rights pantheon devoted to women’s rights. As its title suggests, CEDAW operates from an equality paradigm, seeking

the elimination of measures that have the effect or purpose of impairing the exercise by women of human rights and freedoms on the basis of equality with men.

More radically, Article 5(a) of CEDAW further obliges states 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.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, an expert body charged with enforcing the Convention, has made clear in its 19th General Recommendation that states must

• not only protect women against discrimination in the public and private spheres, but they must also
• improve the de facto position of women and
• address prevailing gender relations and the persistence of sex- and gender-based stereotypes.

Cook and Cusack rightfully recognize the as-yet unmet potential for Article 5(a) to transcend CEDAW’s equality paradigm and provide an expansive framework for achieving substantive equality and a real and durable transformation in women’s daily lives.
Starting with a useful primer of social science research on the organizing role that stereotypes play in human cognition and drawing on rich case studies, the book presents examples of how governmental laws, institutions, policies, and practices can apply, enforce, and perpetuate pernicious stereotypes that harm women by denying women benefits, imposing burdens on women, or degrading women. As a prescriptive contribution, the book offers a series of practical measures to be employed by all branches of government to better carry out state obligations under CEDAW to eliminate stereotypes in the public and private spheres. In addition, the authors urge the Women’s Committee to pay greater attention to the role that stereotypes play in the forms of discrimination it confronts and to broaden its remedial agenda to demand more from states in the form of structural changes to root out gendered stereotypes. The book closes with a blueprint for what a CEDAW General Recommendation devoted to stereotypes might look like.
This is a great achievement for the authors. Cook (right) is Professor of Law and Faculty Chair in International Human Rights, Faculty of Law, at the University of Toronto. She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of many books, including Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives.
Cusack is a public interest lawyer at the Public Interest Law Clearing House in Melbourne, Australia.

On January 3

On this day in ...
... 1940 (60 years ago today), Dr. Silvia Pimentel (left) was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Holder of degrees in law, the psychology of education, and legal philosophy, she has been a professor since 1973 in the Faculty of Law at Pontifícia Universidade Católica in São Paulo. (photo credit) Pimentel is a founding member of numerous women's advocacy groups, among them the International Women's Rights Action Watch. She's the author of "The New Civil Statute of Women," proposed to the National Congress in 1981 and made a part of the Brazil Civil Code in 2002. Since 2005 she's served as an expert member of the CEDAW Committee, which monitors state party compliance vel non with the 1979 Convention on the Eradication of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

(Prior January 3 posts are here and here.)

On September 17

On this day in ...
... 1939 (70 years ago today), Mary Shanthi Dairiam (right) was born in Malaysia. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English Literature from the University of Madras, India, and then, decades later in 1991, an M.A. in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex in England. (photo credit) She served as Executive Director of International Women Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific from 1993 to 2004, and since has been active in other NGOs, in governmental organizations, and in the U.N. system. A sampling: member of the CEDAW Committee, 2005-2008, CEDAW Committee Rapporteur 2007-2008; member of the Gender Equality Task Force of the U.N. Development Programme; member, National Advisory Council on Women, Malaysia. Her publications include The Practice of Child Marriage in South Asian Countries: A Gross Form of Gender Based Discrimination and a Violation of Human Rights (2006).

(Prior September 17 posts are here and here.)

Inside/Outside: Women & International Law

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post, based on "Feminist International Legal Studies and Thirty Years of the CEDAW Convention," a paper I delivered earlier this month at the Asian Society of International Law conference in Tokyo, Japan)

French Revolutionary feminist Olympe de Gouges (right) puzzled over whether women’s rights are best protected through general or specific norms. The record of the human rights system of the United Nations illustrates that both general and specific provisions have been of limited value to women. That fact provokes a question: Can this situation be changed at the institutional level? Consideration of key institutions may point to answers.

Women's Convention
The most wide-ranging of the international human rights treaties devoted to women is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in Resolution A/RES/34/180 on December 18, 1979. The Women's Convention also attempts to overcome a dichotomy between public and private spheres of activity observed in international law, in which law is used to regulate ‘public’ areas such as politics or education, but leaves ‘private’ areas such as the family unregulated. The Women’s Convention, for example, explicitly affirms women's right to equality in a limited way within the family, unlike human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
One striking omission from the Women’s Convention is the prohibition of violence against women. This may be because, at the time of the treaty’s adoption, the global extent of violence against women was not well-understood, or because violence was not analysed as a matter of discrimination. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Women’s Convention monitoring body, endeavored to fill this vacuum. In 1992 CEDAW adopted a General Recommendation on Violence against Women, stating:

Gender-based violence is a form of discrimination which … impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its broad coverage, the Women’s Convention is widely disregarded.
It has attracted an impressive number of parties -- 186 to date. But many states have made broad reservations to provisions of the treaty, which effectively undermine their commitment to it. Most of these reservations are based on assertions of culture and religion. Some states have objected to some of the wide reservations, and CEDAW has probed reserving states on this issue. Under the international legal regime governing reservations, however, no more direct sanctions can be used to pressure states to withdraw their sweeping reservations.

CEDAW Optional Protocol
Adopted in 2000, the Optional Protocol allows for both individual communications to CEDAW and an inquiry procedure in cases of systematic and widespread violations of the treaty. These mechanisms have been invoked much less frequently than comparable provisions in other human rights treaties. As an example, CEDAW has made a single inquiry under Article 8 of the Optional Protocol in July 2004 dealing with violence against women in Mexico. The Committee has adopted views or made decisions on 11 communications since 2004, and of these, has found 4 breaches of the Convention. In contrast, the Human Rights Committee has considered 1279 registered communications with respect to 77 countries under the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, and recorded over 250 decisions/views during the same period.

CEDAW Committee
I should note the significant role played by the CEDAW Committee. It has been very active in developing jurisprudence under the Women’s Convention, emphasising direct and indirect discrimination against women and focussing on the reality of women’s lives and the need for structural change, rather than simply formal equality.

Feminism's Paradox
Overall, however, the development of international human rights standards dealing with women illustrates a strategic dilemma. It is the dilemma that Olympe de Gouges identified in the 18th century as the paradox of feminism: whether women’s rights are best protected through general norms or through specific norms applicable only to women. This dilemma pervades modern international legal responses to the unequal position of women. The attempt to improve women’s lives through general laws can allow women’s concerns to be submerged in what are deemed more global issues; however, the price of creating separate institutional mechanisms for women has been the building of a women’s ghetto with less power, resources, and priority than the ‘general’ human rights bodies.
Attention to questions of women and gender in the U.N. human rights system has been haphazard. At best, there is attention to the position of women in particular contexts, mainly in statistical terms. But there has been little understanding of the way in which stereotypes about sex and gender roles can affect the human right in question. Violations of women’s human rights are typically presented as an aspect of women’s inherent vulnerability, as if this attribute were a biological fact.
Olympe de Gouges’ conundrum about the best strategy to pursue women’s rights cannot be easily resolved. Women are always likely to struggle for recognition of their rights, whether they operate within general or women-specific agencies. The way ahead is to work through all available institutions, to lessen the disparity between the lives of women and men across the globe. Breaking away from the limited equality paradigm endorsed by international law would be a good beginning.
Thirty years after the adoption of the Women’s Convention, and after 20 years of feminist scholarship in international law, we can observe that feminist vocabularies have arrived in international law. I have suggested that the vocabularies can be hollowed out by bland repetition and deployed to reinforce the status quo. However, the language of justice and international law contains radical potential, even if it is realised only occasionally. As Sally Engle Merry (right) has observed, international human rights law in particular

is always in danger of escaping its bounds and working in a genuinely emancipatory way.

The most valuable aspect of the Women’s Convention is the cultural change it can encourage through identifying and defining problems in an international forum.

On August 19

On this day in ...
... 1919 (90 years ago today), Afghanistan won independence from Britain, which had taken control of the Central Asian country in a 19th C. effort -- which British imperialists called "The Great Game" -- to buffer itself from Russia. Precipitating the handover was the 3d Anglo-Afghan war, on account of which "the war-weary British relinquished their control over Afghan foreign affairs by signing the Treaty of Rawalpindi." (credit for Afghanistan flag circa 1919-1928)
... 1940, Dr. Hanna Beate Schöpp-Schilling (left) was born in Duisburg, Germany. Following education at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Munich, and Yale, she held academic appointments in American literature and culture at the 1st of those universities, then worked at several research institutes; she is now a consultant and author focusing on women's and children's issues, labor markets, and human rights. Since 1989 Schöpp-Schilling has served as a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, serving from 2001-2004 as Vice Chair of the Committee, which monitors compliance with the similarly named international convention.

(Prior August 19 posts are here and here.)

On August 11

On this day in ...
… 1948, Ferdous Ara Begum (left), member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and a specialist on gender issues, was born in Bangladesh. (photo credit) Begum has worked for many years in areas related to women and children’s rights. She worked for the government of Bangladesh as Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, providing social and legal protection for women and children. As a Board Member of Grameen Bank, she helped offer microcredit to rural poor women in Bangladesh. She has also published on trafficking and dowries, and given talks on HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness.
… 1934 (75 years ago today), French pilot Hélène Boucher (right) became the fastest woman in the world. (photo credit) She beat the record by flying an average of 485 kilometers per hour (301 mph) over 100 kilometers (62 miles). She also held the altitude (5,200 meters, or 3.23 miles) and 8 other world records. Boucher, a stunt pilot, was the 1st woman buried at Les Invalides. She was posthumously dubbed Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.

(Prior August 11 posts are here and here.)

In passing: Fumiko Saiga

(In passing marks the memory of a person featured in IntLawGrrls)

Fumiko Saiga (left) passed away yesterday following a brief illness. Saiga, a Judge of the International Criminal Court and member of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women Committee, was 65 years old.

She'd been elected to the Court in 2007, as IntLawGrrls noted last fall. Her prior career had been in Japan's foreign ministry, where she served as ambassador to Norway and Ireland, and as ambassador in charge of human rights issues such as violence against women. The last appointment recognized her efforts on behalf of women's rights: among other achievements in this regard, Saiga had spearheaded Japan's 1985 ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and had served on the CEDAW Committee for much of this past decade.

Earlier this year Saiga was re-elected to the ICC. She'd been serving in Pre-Trial Chamber II and Trial Chamber II. In a release ICC President Sang-Hyun Song said of his colleague:

'Judge Saiga’s death is an enormous loss to the Court. Her sharp legal acumen and dedication to impartial justice, coupled with her balance and grace, made her an eminently capable jurist.'

HIV+ Women & Forced Sterilization

The Legal Assistance Center, a human rights organization in Namibia, currently represents approximately 10 HIV-positive women who have been forcibly sterilized in government hospitals. Lawyers working on the cases for LAC report that some of the women had no idea that doctors had performed the sterilization while they were undergoing Cesarean sections. Many of the women did not discover the sterilization until they reported back to the hospital for follow-up care or other services. Some women consented to the procedures, but did so under duress. Although there is on-going litigation at the domestic level, these cases may end up before the Committee that monitors the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women at some point in the years to come.
Namibia ratified the Optional Protocol to CEDAW on May 26, 2000. In 2006, the CEDAW Committee decided a forced sterilization case brought by a Hungarian Roma woman who alleged that she had been sterilized without her informed consent. According to the Committee,

Before leaving the hospital the author asked the doctor for information on her state of health and when she could try to have another baby. It was only then that she learned the meaning of the word 'sterilization.'

The Committee found that the government had violated Article 10(h) of CEDAW by failing to provide appropriate family planning information. The Committee also found that the lack of informed consent violated Articles 12 and 16, which – respectively – guarantee the right to non-discriminatory health care services and the right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights. In both cases, the women faced a pernicious form of discrimination based both on gender and HIV status or ethnicity.
Kudos to the Legal Assistance Center for taking this issue on!

On May 14, ...

... 2007 (today), the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women begins its 38th session, which will run through June 1 in New York. The 23-member Committee monitors compliance with the similarly named 1979 Convention, which has 185 states parties (the United States not among them). This session's agenda includes consideration of periodic reports from Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Pakistan, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Syria, and Vanuatu.

... 1847 (160 years ago today), a ship filled with Irish immigrants reached the quarantine station at Grosse-Île, Québec, Canada. The arrival marked the start of a sailing season in which more than 100,000 women, children, and men -- fleeing An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger that decimated Ireland in the mid-1840s -- would arrive. Many were emaciated or ill, and thousands died at sea or on arrival. In less than a decade the famine would claim 1 million people (1/8 Ireland's population) dead; another 2 million emigrated.