On April 2

On this day in ...
... 1894, Jeanne Deroin died in England, 88 years after she'd been born into a working-class family in Paris. An embroiderer by trade and "an ardent then disillusioned republican" by politics, Deroin embraced Saint Simonianism in the 1830s and 1840s. Among her inspirations was IntLawGrrls foremother Olympe de Gouges (prior posts). With the ferment of 1848, Deroin became an advocate for socialism and women's rights. A journalist as well as an activist, she was imprisoned for "political conspiracy" in 1850; on release, she eventually fled to England and resumed publishing women's rights tracts. (credit for image, from fine-art print entitled "Women Carrying Jeanne Deroin (1805-94) in Triumph, from 'Les Femmes Celebres'")

(Prior April 2 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Hilary Charlesworth

It is IntLawGrrls' immense honor to welcome Hilary Charlesworth (right) as today's guest blogger.
A foremost scholar in international and human rights law, Hilary, about whom we've frequently posted, is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Professor in RegNet and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Australian National University. She also holds an appointment as Professor of International Law and Human Rights in the ANU College of Law.
She has held visiting appointments at the law schools at Harvard, Washington & Lee, New York University, the University of Oregon, Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne, and UCLA. She was also the 2005 Sir Ninian Stephen Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Law Faculty, University of Melbourne.
Inaugural President from 1997 to 2001 of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law, Hilary served as a Co-Editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law from 1996 to 2006 and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law from 1999 to 2009. She has worked with various nongovernmental human rights organisations on ways to implement international human rights standards, and was Chair of the Australian Capital Territory Government's inquiry into an ACT bill of rights, which resulted in the adoption of the ACT Human Rights Act 2004. She is Patron of the ACT Women's Legal Service, the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture and Lawyers Without Borders.
In 2006 Hilary, along with London School of Economics Professor Christine Chinkin, received the American Society of International Law award for outstanding contributions to the development of international human rights law: the Goler T. Butcher Medal, whose namesake is an IntLawGrrls foremother.
For her own foremother, Hilary has chosen to share with IntLawGrrl Hélène Ruiz Fabri the 18th C. feminist and slavery abolitionist writer Marie Gouze, known as Olympe de Gouges (right).
In 1793, 45 years after she'd been born to a washerwoman mother and butcher father, Gouges died beneath the guillotine. Among her most famous works was the 1791 Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, which IntLawGrrls excerpted on a recent Bastille Day. Gouges also theorized the paradox of feminism; Hilary's guest post below considers that concept in this 30th year since U.N. adoption of a multilateral women's rights treaty.

Heartfelt welcome!

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 June 21

On this day in ...
… 1813, Laura Secord (right, at center) set out to warn British forces of an impending U.S. attack on Queenston, Ontario, during the War of 1812. Laura had married James Secord in 1797. In the early 1800s the coupled moved to Queenston. When the American army invaded, they were forced to billet U.S. officers in their home. On this evening in 1813, they overheard the Americans plan to attack British forces. Since James was disabled by a battle wound, and despite the danger, Laura took the message. Her journey took her more than 18 hours, but eventually she reported to the British officer in charge. (image credit; click here for a 1-minute movie about the event.) Two days later, some 400 Indians successfully ambushed an American force at the Battle of Beaver Dams. In the official reports of the victory no mention was made of Laura Secord; indeed, her role was not acknowledged until 1860. Thereafter, she became celebrated as a heroine in history, poetry, and drama. In 2003, she was designated a Person of National Historic Significance by the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
… 2009 (today), World Humanist Day "is celebrated… as a way to spread information -- and combat misinformation -- about the positive aspects of humanism as a philosophical life stance and means to affect change in the world.” The American Humanist Association has this to say:

Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

One of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers, Olympe de Gouges, was a humanist.

(Prior June 21 posts are here and here.)

Honor if not yet justice for women journalists

“Words can save lives,” said Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (left, © UNESCO), about whom we've posted, along with other women journalists killed in the line of duty. Politkovskaya was assassinated in October 2006; on Thursday, a Moscow jury acquitted the three "low-level" suspects. Amnesty International researcher Friederike Behr monitored portions of the trial and indicated it was fair. After over 2 years of investigation, the authorities were unable to produce clear evidence of guilt, perhaps because they were not looking in the right place. Politkovskaya criticized Kremlin policy with respect to Chechnya and met the fate that is becoming all too familiar: just a month before the trial, a human rights lawyer and a 25-year-old reporter were killed in broad daylight, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has said that 16 journalists have been killed in Russia because of their work since 2000. Indeed, Miklos Haraszti, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's representative for media freedom claims that "Russia is a country where for years and years now, journalists who cover human rights issues and corruption are being murdered and assaulted." On Friday, however, the presiding judge offered a bit of hope that Politkovskaya's killers may be found and brought to justice by ordering the case reopened.
In bright contrast to this sombre saga, the annual Journées Olympe de Gouges in Montauban, France, are dedicated this year to women journalists. As readers may recall, Olympe de Gouges, an IntLawGrrl foremother, was an 18th-century humanist who wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Women and was guillotined during the French Reign of Terror. Each year, the city of her birth honors her with days filled with documentaries, theater, art exhibits, discussions of research, conferences etc. on topics related to the rights of women and citzens. The Journées will be held March 5, 6 and 7 this year; this year's "godmother" is Lebanese television journalist May Chidiac (right, © UNESCO) Chidiac survived, minus an arm and a leg, a car bomb in 2005, continues her work as a journalist and, in 2006, was awarded one of the three Courage in Journalism Awards presented by the International Women's Media Foundation, as well as the the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. Write on, grrls!

On November 3

On this day in ...

... 1958 (50 years ago today), the UNESCO Palace, headquarters of the U.N. Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization, opened in Paris. Among those commemorating the inauguration was Tunisia, which issued the postage stamp at left.

... 1793 (215 years ago today), during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges (right) perished beneath the guillotine. IntLawGrrls has posted before on this revolutionary, abolitionist, feminist writer, who is the transnational foremother of our own Hélène Ruiz Fabri.

Déclaration des droits de la femme

To mark the 218th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille that led to the demise of the French monarchy, we quote from Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen penned in 1791 by a Revolutionary woman, namesake of IntLawGrrl Hélène Ruiz Fabri, Olympes de Gouges (below right):

Preamble. ... Considering that ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of women are the sole causes of public miseries, and of corruption of governments, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, unalterable and sacred rights of woman ....
Article 1. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. ...
Article 2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man and woman. These rights are liberty, prosperity, security and above all, resistance to oppression.
Article 4. Liberty and justice consist in giving back to others all that belongs to them; thus the only limits on the exercise of woman's natural rights are the perpetual tyranny by which man opposes her; these limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason.
Article 7. No woman can be an exception: she will be accused, apprehended and detained in cases determined by law; women, like men, will obey the rigorous rule.
Article 10. No one ought to be disturbed for one's opinions, however fundamental they are; since a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to address the House, providing her interventions do not disturb the public order as it has been established by law.
Article 13. For the upkeep of public forces and for administrative expenses, the contribution of woman and man are equal; a woman shares in all the labours required by law, in the painful tasks; she must therefore have an equal share in the distribution of offices, employments, trusts, dignities and work.
Afterword. Women, wake up! The alarm bell of reason is making itself heard throughout the universe; recognize your rights. ... The enslaved man multiplied his forces but has had to resort to yours to break his chains. Once free he became unjust to his female companion. O women! women, when will you stop being blind? What advantages have you received from the revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked contempt? During the centuries of corruption, your only power was over the weaknesses of men. Your empire is destroyed, what then is left to you?

Gouges' exhortations were dismissed out of hand, according to Lucy Moore's Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Indeed, Gouges died on the guillotine in 1793. Of the women profiled, Judith Warner wrote in review of Moore's "marvelous new book," only 1 "escaped the revolution more or less unscathed." "The revolution," Warner writes, "brought women many tributes to their maternal graces, their high-minded morals, their 'natural' homebound virtues. Yet veneration of Woman and hatred of real women were one and the same." Her review concludes with a quote about men that, though from Lucile Duplessis (left), another Revolutionary woman, could well have come from Gouges' pen: "'That they would worship us less and set us free!'"