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.)

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.

Go On! So Many Conferences ... So Little Time

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) In addition to the ASIL annual meeting that Diane previews above, two noteworthy conferences, both set for Friday, April 3, 2009, are fast approaching:

Reproductive and Sexual Health and the African Women's Protocol

Washington and Lee University School of Law, Lexington, Virginia

Description:

The African Women's Protocol, adopted by the African Union in 2003 and in effect in 2005, is the first regional human rights instrument to focus comprehensively on women's rights. The symposium will serve as a discussion of the Protocol's utility at the intersection of reproductive/sexual health and women's rights, both quintessentially unmet needs of the African continent.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic, lack of access to contraception, harmful cultural practices, sexual violence and exploitation, deteriorating access to health services, and abortion will be among the topics of Symposium papers.
Washington and Lee's 2008-09 Scholar-in-Residence, Charles Ngwena, Professor of Health and Human Rights at the University of the Free State, South Africa, will chair the symposium, bringing together prominent scholars from Africa, Asia, Canada and the United States.

Speakers include IntLawGrrls' own Susana SáCouto.

CEDAW and Its Optional Protocol

New England Law School, Boston, Massachusetts

Description:

New England Law Boston will sponsor an international conference on April 3 entitled 'CEDAW and Its Optional Protocol.' Cosponsored by the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the conference will recognize the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); examine work undertaken as a result, and discuss ways of increasing its effectiveness.
Members of the CEDAW Committee who will participate include Shanthi Dairiam, Pramila Patten, Cornelius Flinterman, and Silvia Pimentel. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights will be represented by Jane Connors, director of the Human Rights Treaties Branch of the High Commissioner's Office. The conference will consist of several panels examining challenges to the effective implementation of the Convention, the issue of United States ratification, and the jurisprudence of the Committee, including comparative analyses of the work of other treaty-bodies and regional human rights institutions.

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 October 6

On this day in ...
... 1999, by its Resolution 54/4, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The treaty, which establishes a mechanism for monitoring compliance with the principal convention, was opened for signature 2 months later, and entered into force on December 22, 2000. It has 90 states parties; not among them is the United States, which is not a party to the principal convention, either.
... 1998 (10 years ago today), late at night, after luring him out of a bar, attackers beat and tied to a post Matthew Shepard (below right), 21, a gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He was unconscious when discovered the following evening, and died on October 12. Shepard's death provoked outrage throughout the country; President Bill Clinton declared: "[C]rimes of hate and crimes of violence cannot be tolerated in our country." In 2007, the Matthew Shepard Act, federal legislation targeting hate crimes based on a victim's perceived sexual orientation passed the Senate but failed to become law. This epilogue takes a look at Laramie 10 years later.

On December 10, ...

... 1981, the BBC reported on a "mystery disease" that was "causing increasing concern in the United States." It stated that "[t]he unknown condition, which consists of two separate diseases -- a form of pneumonia and skin cancer, has been found in 180 patients in 15 states since last July." The disease had "claimed around 75 lives so far in the US and," the report added, "up to 92% of the victims are homosexual men." The disease, of course, was AIDS, which since has killed "[a]round 24 million people" in the world, and has become "the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa."
... 2007 (today), is celebrated Human Rights Day, in recognition of the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as we've described here, here, and here. As indicated by the logo above, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Right is already gearing up for a 60th anniversary next year for the Declaration, which, it states, "has the Guinness World Record for most translated document in the world," having been rendered in languages ranging from the 6 officials, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, "to Pipil, spoken by some 50 people in El Salvador and Honduras." Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that at least 3 other U.N. instruments have been opened for signature on this day: the Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982; the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1984; and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1999.