Guest Blogger: Felice Gaer

It's IntLawGrrls' immense honor to welcome Felice Gaer (left) as today's guest blogger.
Felice is director of AJC's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, which conducts research and advocacy to strengthen international human rights protections and institutions.
She's also vice chair of the Committee Against Torture, to which she was elected in 1999 and again in 2003. She's the 1st American to serve on this body, which monitors state compliance with the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Felice has served three times as chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, of which she is currently a member by appointment of President Barack Obama.
She earned her bachelor's degree, with honors, from Wellesley College. She received master of arts and master of philosophy degrees -- both in political science -- as well as a Certificate of the Russian Institute, all from Columbia University. She was appointed 2010 Regents Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Between 1993 and 1999, Felice was a public member of numerous U.S. delegations. Among them were the delegations to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, and the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. Leader of those delegations, as Felice recalls in her guest post below, was Geraldine A. Ferraro, who passed away this weekend and who today joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Remembering Beijing: The Ferraro Factor

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

Geraldine A. Ferraro, who passed away this weekend, is a symbol of women’s rights advocacy.
As America’s first female candidate of a major party for vice-president, she broke barriers. But readers of IntLawGrrls may not know how actively and directly she influenced women’s rights issues in the international legal context as well.
Appalled by televised reports about the use of rape as a weapon of war by Serbs in the Bosnian conflict, Gerry contacted Madeleine Albright to ask what the new Clinton Administration was doing about it. She was immediately asked to join the Administration’s first delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, in February 1993, where she helped convince Member States to adopt a separate resolution addressing rape in war.
As Gerry told it, accomplishing this task required her to conduct gender-sensitivity training, too. For example, she found herself telling the male diplomats from the Islamic Conference that they needed to recognize that such sexual violence was not so much an insult to THEIR ‘honor’ (which was all they were prepared to declare) but rather a very real lasting physical and psychological abuse of the women who were victimized. Gerry emphasized that something serious had to be done by the Commission to name it, stop it, punish the perpetrators and aid the survivors. As a result, the Commission adopted a resolution that called for ‘joint and separate action to end this despicable practice,’ as well as for investigations, accountability and assistance to the victims.
Later that year, the protection of women’s rights was affirmed as a major focus of the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna – only a few hundred miles from Bosnia itself.
Gerry was then appointed to head the US delegation to the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva as Ambassador. After she took the reins of the delegation for its 1994 session, the UN created the post of Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, with a mandate to investigate and intervene to stop abuses worldwide. Additionally, at Gerry’s direction, attention to women’s rights and a gender perspective was incorporated into UN resolutions authorizing many other investigations into human rights abuses.
The following year, after setbacks at a spring Preparatory Conference (“Prepcon”), women advocates realized it was urgent to have strong US leadership on women’s human rights issues as a part of the negotiating team for the upcoming Beijing World Conference on Women, scheduled for September 1995. The World Conference was under attack from various quarters – representatives of the Vatican and Islamic countries had worked vigorously at the Prepcon to place large portions of the draft Platform for Action into brackets (meaning they would remain open to negotiation) and had added proposals challenging the universality of human rights. Some opponents of the Conference offered the concept of ‘human dignity’ as an alternative to that of equal rights (i.e., women might have dignity but may not have equal rights). Others demanded recognition of parental rights and duties rather than the human rights of women and girls, and questioned the use of the word gender. The topic of reproductive rights was challenged directly in ways seeking to undermine advancements stemming from the October 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development.
Gerry was appointed a vice-chair of the US delegation to Beijing in June 1995 and reached out immediately to NGOs and experts alike to work with her and tackle the issues one by one. She engaged in a wide range of informal contacts to try to improve the diplomatic atmosphere—and to reach agreements that affirmed rather than destroyed women’s universal rights. Ensuring a successful outcome in Beijing required her to engage with critics at home, as well as to interact with the representatives of the Vatican and Islamic states from Iran to Sudan. Conference language affirming universality of women’s human rights was threatened by other proposed language that would have both endorsed cultural relativity and emphasized national sovereignty, in particular, through repetition of a key footnote that had ‘saved’ the Cairo conference by encouraging each country to interpret the rights any way it wished. In the end, Gerry Ferraro succeeded in maintaining a US position that preserved the emphasis on universality of women’s rights for all, and concentrated on ensuring equal rights for women.
Hillary Clinton’s remarkable speech at the Conference fixed in delegates’ minds the concept that “women’s rights are human rights” and that they are not something different, inferior, or diminished as compared to other human rights.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action went on to affirm that violence against women was not merely an ‘obstacle’ to equality and peace as had been stated earlier in the 1980 Copenhagen World Conference on Women, but also an abuse that impaired and violated the enjoyment of human rights by women. It defined violence against women broadly – as a phenomenon occurring in public and in private – that had to be prevented, outlawed and punished. The document calls for reporting and monitoring of violations, investigations and prosecutions of perpetrators, due diligence by governments and accountability. The document identifies rape in armed conflict – the issue that spurred Ferraro to engage with the UN’s human rights bodies – as a war crime and under certain circumstances as a crime against humanity or act of genocide. The Beijing World Conference advanced women’s rights both conceptually and politically.
Gerry Ferraro, who was born on Women’s Equality Day (August 26), could claim a victory for the ideas, strategies, and ongoing efforts to bring women’s human rights issues into the mainstream of UN human rights bodies and world attention. Here, as in her unprecedented political candidacy, her efforts and achievements strengthened the position of all women.

(credit for September 12, 1995, UN/DPI 120801 photo by Chen Kai Xing of Ferraro, center, in Beijing)

In passing: Geraldine A. Ferraro

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

Geraldine A. Ferraro died from blood cancer yesterday in a Boston hospital. She was 75 years old.
While working by day as a schoolteacher, the New York native enrolled in night classes at Fordham Law School; "she was one of two women in a class of 179 and received her law degree in 1960." As a district attorney she focused on crimes involving violence against women; later, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, she pushed for legislation on equal rights, abortion rights, and other women's issues.
Ferraro made in history in 1987: chosen as the Democratic nominee for Vice President, she was the 1st woman to run at the top of a major party's slate.
She and her running mate, U.S. Sen. Walter F. Mondale, lost the election to Ronald Reagan and his running mate, wo later would become the first of two men named George Bush to serve as President of the United States.
In later years, Ferraro contributed to the promotion of human rights. She served as the United States' Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission from 1993 to 1996, during the administration of President Bill Clinton. In a statement issued yesterday, he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

For us, Gerry was above all a friend and companion. From the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns to the important work of international diplomacy, we were honored to have her by our side. She was a tireless voice for human rights and helped lead the American delegation to the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Through it all, she was a loyal friend, trusted confidante, and valued colleague.

Guest Blogger: L. Song Richardson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome L. Song Richardson (right) as today's guest blogger.

A specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and prosecutorial ethics, Song is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and this semester she's a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Song earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her B.A. in psychology from Harvard College. While at Harvard she earned distinction for her classical piano performances, which included performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before entering academia, Song was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. As a state and federal public defender and private practitioner of criminal defense, she represented defendants in numerous white collar, serious felony, and capital cases. That expertise is evident in Song's guest post below, which exposes a defect in foreign evidence-gathering mechanisms and proposes a solution to the problem.

Song dedicates her post to Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924-2005) who, as Song writes,

in 1968, became the first African American woman elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She became an international figure as a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and, throughout her career, tirelessly championed numerous issues including civil rights, women’s rights and the rights of the urban poor.

In addition, as prior IntLawGrrls posts have noted, Chisholm ran for the highest office in the United States. In her most concerted campaign she entered several Presidential primaries (below left), and received 151.95 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In 1984 Chisholm was trounced in a bid for the Democratic nomination for Vice President by another woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro. Chisholm was not the 1st African American person nominated for President at a major-party convention. As we've posted, that milestone was reached in 1888 by Frederick Douglass, who'd also run for Vice President in 1872 on a minor-party ticket headed by a woman, Presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Nor was Chisholm the 1st woman nominated for President at a major-party convention; as we've also posted, 8 years earlier Margaret Chase Smith had made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nod. Nonetheless, the placement in IntLawGrrls' foremothers list at right of this 1st African American woman to have her name placed in nomination is especially apt on this day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

Another Old Feminism icon jumps the shark*

As one with a penchant for wearing my Ms.-issued T-shirt, "Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman," I was thrilled back in the summer of 1984 at the prospect of casting 1 of my 1st-ever top-of-the-national-ticket votes for Geraldine A. Ferraro (left). Ferraro had just defeated an African-American candidate, former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Shirley A. Chisholm, by a delegate vote of 3,920 to 3, to seize the Democratic vice presidential nomination.
Was unsettled soon after that convention by stories questioning my candidate. Was discomfited later in the season, as I watched what, I was forced to admit, did not seem to me anywhere near the stellar performance I'd expected in Ferraro's debate with her GOP opponent, incumbent Vice President George H.W. Bush. Neither matter was enough to change my vote, though.
The chance to put A Woman in the White House trumped any and all doubts in my mind.
Other voters disagreed, however, and in 1984 Republicans trounced Ferraro and her presidential slatemate, Walter Mondale, by a popular vote margin of 58.8% to 40.6%, an electoral vote margin of 525 to 13, and an abysmal states-won margin of 49 to 1.
The experience taught me caution in choosing candidates.
I have voted, of course, for many women since, for in these interim decades there have been many, many women on the ballot. But I have never voted for The Woman when convinced that her opponent was the better choice. In general, I have been pleased with the women who've led where I lived -- U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to name 2. But by no means have all women leaders pleased me. Still, as this post indicates, I've carried a soft spot for Ferraro all these years, notwithstanding that her candidacy resulted in 4 more years of Reagan-Bush, followed by 4 of Bush-Quayle -- a stretch that helped pave the way for 7-years-and-counting of Bush-Cheney.
No soft spot any more.
IntLawGrrl Johanna E. Bond wrote a while back of her disappointment in Ms. founder Gloria Steinem. Now Ferraro's joined Steinem as an icon of Old Feminism who seems bent on permanently staining her own image in the eyes of New Feminists.
No stomach for repeating what Ferraro's said these last several days; click to read her initial words, and her subsequent defense of herself.
Suffice it to say that a "feminism" that defends women against all, and above all, a "feminism" that reduces everything to a phenomenon to be explained by assigned identities, that ignores intersections among sex and class and race and ethnicity and other attributes, a "feminism" that divides when it ought to unite, deserves no embrace.
Words of division merit only 1 response: denunciation and rejection, now and always.

* "jump the shark" is among my favorite phrases; definition here.

On July 12, ...

... 1984, U.S. Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro was chosen as the Democratic nominee for Vice President, making her the 1st woman to run at the top of a major party's slate. In November the New York native and her running mate, U.S. Sen. Walter F. Mondale, received only 40.56% of the popular vote, and lost every state except his home of Minnesota. By a margin of 57%-42%, women voters preferred the GOP ticket of Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush, reported Maureen Dowd at the time, adding: "All nine female challengers for the Senate lost their bids. And of 41 female challengers for the House, only two won, with the chance for a third in a Utah race still too close to call.'" In 1993 Ferraro led the United States' delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
... 1954, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party-Minn.) was born in South St. Paul, Minn.