Guest Blogger: Erin Daly

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Erin Daly (left) as today's guest blogger.
Erin is Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty Research and Development at Widener Law School in Wilmington, Delaware. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan, then practiced 1st Amendment and employment law at the San Francisco law firm of Cooper White & Cooper.
Since entering academia in 1993, she's produced many publications on comparative environmental law, constitutional law, and transitional justice, among them Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (2006), for which a Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, wrote the foreword. Co-authoring the book (issued in paperback in 2010) with Erin was Jeremy Sarkin, the South African legal expert about whom we posted yesterday.
Erin has served as a Vice-Chair of the Young Lawyer’s Division Law and Media Committee of the American Bar Association. Earlier this month, Erin was elected the Chair of the Section on International Human Rights of the Association of American Law Schools (a position that IntLawGrrl Christiana Ochoa held a while back). In her guest post below, Erin recaps the Section's "new voices" programs during AALS' 2010 annual meeting, discusses Section plans, and welcomes suggestions for the coming year.
Erin dedicates her post to Coretta Scott King (1927-2006), about whom we IntLawGrrls have frequently posted. She was, of course, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (prior posts) -- and she was also a civil rights and human rights activist in her own right. Today the United States observes Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is, as Erin writes, a holiday that Coretta Scott King

named in honor of her husband, but which is really a testament to her own lifelong commitment to making the world a better place through service to others and to holding up ideals of equality and human dignity, whether in the context of literacy, poverty eradication, or the rights of minorities of all kinds in the United States and abroad. She took on each new challenge with grace and intelligence and continued throughout her life to push for greater rights for all.

(source for 1984 Charles Tasnadi/AP photo of her leading a picket of South African embassy in Washington, D.C.) Today we are honored to include Coretta Scott King in our list of foremothers just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Now (en)force

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, (prior posts) has entered into force. (hat tip)
Some months after the U.N. General Assembly adopted the multilateral treaty on December 20, 2006, IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales predicted that this effort to address the phenomenon of forced disappearances "may represent the future of international human rights law – enforcement through specificity." Jaya wrote:

The enforced disappearance treaty makes the interesting move of labelling and targeting a certain pattern of human rights violations, thus creating very specific norms that might be used by advocates to overcome the enforcement problems faced by more general human rights treaties. In addition, the Convention’s enforcement committee has the ability to hear urgent claims, to undertake field investigations, and to bring widespread and systematic enforced disappearance to the attention of the General Assembly.

The treaty will be monitored, as Jaya's post indicated, by the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Among the 5 independent experts who comprise this Working Group is 1 woman, Jasminka Džumhur (left), a gender and human rights specialist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Chairing the group is Jeremy J. Sarkin, a South African legal expert. Other members are:
Olivier de Frouville, a law professor at l'Université de Montpellier 1 in France; Osman El Hajjé, a law professor and president of the Jinan University Human Rights Centre in Lebanon; and Ariel Dulitzky of Argentina, a clinical law professor at the University of Texas.
Despite her optimism back in 2007, Jaya worried that desired "near-universal ratification" might be hard to come by.
Entry into force, at least, was relatively rapid.
The convention entered into force almost exactly 4 years after being adopted -- on December 23d of last year, 30 days after Iraq became its 20th state party. Today, less than a month later, it now has 21 states parties, Brazil having ratified soon after Iraq. Beside those 2 countries, the other states parties are Albania, Argentina, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Germany, Honduras, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Paraguay, Senegal, Spain, and Uruguay.
As pointed out in a U.N. press release respecting the status of the treaty, about 70 other states "have taken the preliminary step of signing it, an expression of their intention to ratify it at some point in the future."
And yet many countries remain fully outside the treaty regime. Among those that have neither signed nor ratified are 4 of the P-5 members: China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.