On February 15

On this day in ...

... 1989 (20 years ago today), Soviet troops began leaving Afghanistan, 9 years after they'd entered the country. The retreat was seen as a victory for the mujahideen, whom the BBC described as "Afghan Islamic fighters," and a defeat for the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul. Today President Barack Obama mulls stepping up military involvement in an effort to combat the guerrilla movement founded by a man whom the United States has backed when he fought Soviets years ago, Osama bin Laden. But many commentators are wary of this proposal; among those recently expressing concern is our colleague Rosa Brooks. (Associated Press photo credit)

... 1930, Cairine Wilson (right), a social worker and "fluently bilingual mother of eight," was appointed to Canada's Senate soon after the judgment in the Persons case, which established women's right to serve in that body. Wilson was Canada's 1st woman U.N. delegate as well as its 1st Senator. She served in the latter post for 3 decades; no other woman was appointed to join her there for 23 years. Wilson (1885-1962) was known for supporting the rights of refugees, women, and children, Medicare, and reform of divorce laws.

(Prior February 15 posts are here and here.)

Welcoming IntLawGrrl Karima Bennoune

It's IntLawGrrls' great honor to welcome our newest member, Karima Bennoune.

Professor of Law and Arthur L. Dickson Scholar at Rutgers School of Law, Newark, New Jersey, Karima (left; photo credit) is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, from which she earned, simultaneously, her J.D. cum laude, an M.A. in Middle Eastern and North African studies, and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. She is a noted expert in human rights, having taken part in human rights field missions in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Korea, southern Thailand, and Tunisia. In 1995 Karima served as a Center for Women's Global Leadership delegate to the NGO Forum at the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing; for the next 4 years, she was a London-based legal adviser at Amnesty International. A member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights, she also served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.

Karima is the first Arab-American to win the Derrick Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. Her publications concentrate on issue's of women's rights, religion and secularism, human rights and humanitarian law, and counterterrorism. In keeping with today's 7th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Karima discusses her latest article, Terror/Torture, in her 1st post below.
Karima dedicates her work on the blog to Nadia Younes (below left), an Egyptian who served as Chief of Staff to Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq. Younes, 57, and de Mello, 55, were among the 22 persons killed in the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. Before her secondment to Baghdad, Younes had served in the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and as Executive Director for External Relations and Governing Bodies at the World Health Organization. Today Younes joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

The Search for a True African Renaissance

I want to thank IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute a guest post to this extraordinary forum.
In a few months, I will participate in a conference on African Customary law hosted by Fordham's Leitner Center for International Law and Justice. My paper will address Africa’s all-too familiar problems in a new way. The Black Continent’s current woes resemble Europe’s experience during the Middle Ages: civil wars, famine, diseases, epidemics, raging fundamentalism, and rampant illiteracy. But these are merely causes and effects. One cannot continue doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. Outside intervention in the form of evaluations, analyses, solutions, aid, and loans have been tried, all to no avail. Maybe it is time for Africa to try something “new.” Maybe it is time to look to ancient African laws and institutions for a solution. (photo credit)
Political leaders who speak of an “African Renaissance” overlook the true meaning of the word. The term “renaissance” was used by historians to describe the period marking the emergence of Europe out of the Dark Ages into a new era of great discoveries and of economic, intellectual and technical development. That feat was achieved thanks to the move back to Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and art created by the great artists and thinkers of the early 15th to the late 16th centuries. These men and women leaped more than a thousand years back in time in order to learn from the great scientists, artists, lawmakers, and geniuses of the Greek and Latin civilizations. From that experience, Europe created a better future for itself. And it is not the only continent to have benefited from taking a look back at how things were done “way back when”. In Asia, a true cultural renaissance paved the way for that continent’s spectacular economic development.
Africa also needs a true renaissance. It stands to reason that if Africa is to efficiently utilize the concept of renaissance, it must rediscover the ideas of the great African civilizations, which were dismantled during the slave trade and colonization, and adapt them to modern times. Collecting and identifying all of our indigenous rules is of the greatest importance to Africa. We must take stock of our past laws if we want to implement much-needed culturally based sociolegal reforms. The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate that far from being a useless enterprise, researching ancient and pre-colonial African laws is Africa’s key to a true renaissance.
The research methodology proposed in this paper consists of identifying the rules and values different African communities have in common, going as far back in time as the available data allow. By focusing on the rules that can be traced back to the earliest times of African civilization, the aim is to develop researchers’ capacity to correctly identify and interpret, and ultimately to nurture, Africa’s cultural heritage. It is equally important to restore women's power in African society. If Africa’s history shows one thing, it is that empowerment of women at all levels of society—social, familial, economical, political and religious—leads to respect for the basic human rights of all. There is abundant historical evidence of that fact from Ancient Egypt to precolonial Africa. There is equally abundant historical and modern evidence, however, that male supremacy goes hand in hand with women’s subordination. A true renaissance must include a bright future for all. (photo credit)

Gender & identity: some anniversary musings

As I’ve struggled to find an appropriate contribution for the first anniversary of IntLawGrrls, what keeps resurfacing for me in various guises are gender’s complexities. With the hours ticking before Ohio and Texas vote, the nuanced—and not so nuanced—dialogues in many fora continue about how race and gender have impacted the Democratic primary season. On the issue that consumes much of my professional energy, climate change, it is almost impossible to assess how gender matters, because so little of the data is disaggregated for gender. The few studies that exist suggest that women and men may have different emissions patterns and vulnerabilities, but that the details of those variations depend on context.
Over the last five years in legal academia, I’ve watched and participated as my cohort group of IntLawGrrls has navigated its professional positionality—as we've attempted to balance that with our personal lives. I am never quite sure what elements of these complex mosaics come from our being “'Grrls,” though gender seems to surface in so many moments of our stories. As a daughter of the feminist movement—my parents were active early participants, with my dad serving as the first man on the Executive Board of NOW—I sometimes muse with my parents about how the path of my cohort group varies from that of the ones that came before us.
I don’t have pat answers on any of these issues, certainly not ones that could be packaged for a short blog post. But it seems appropriate on this anniversary to raise them while appreciating that this space exists. Congratulations, IntLawGrrls—I look forward to many more years of exciting dialogue on international legal issues and of continuing to navigate these nuances.

"Women, Peace, Security"

Check out this ASIL Insight on the recent U.N. open debate on issues close to IntLawGrrls' hearts, "Women, Peace, and Security."
The occasion for the debate was the 7th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 1325 on that subject, Harvard Law Lecturer Cora True-Frost (left) writes. Adopted unanimously in October 2000, the resolution

recognizes women's role in preventing and resolving conflict, and calls for the equal participation and full involvement of women in efforts to maintain and promote peace and security.

Among the resolution's good effects:

► [T]he Council’s situation-specific resolutions increasingly address issues relating to women’s involvement in conflict and peace operations.
► [S]ome UN Member States have developed national action plans to monitor implementation ... including by tying aid delivery to the goals of 1325.

As might be expected, though, implementation has not been 100%. True-Frost suggests that "new 'soft law' norms regarding women in armed conflict may be developing," but that that development's "likely to remain controversial."

On November 8, ...

... 1897 (110 years ago today), Dorothy Day (left) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She and her family lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, then moved to Chicago. At age 19, after having studied 2 years at the University of Illinois, Day moved to New York, where she began writing for socialist newspapers. Active in antiwar and other "hot-button issues of the day," "women's rights, free love, and birth control," in her early years Day terminated a pregnancy by abortion, married and divorced, and gave birth to a child outside of marriage. She had the child baptized Catholic, an indicator of her movement toward working for social change within that religion. In 1933 Day cofounded a social movement and newspaper, both known as Catholic Worker. To this day Workers, sworn to poverty, work with and among America's poorest inner-city neighborhoods.
... 2002 (5 years ago today), U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 won unanimous approval. Invoking coercive powers granted it by Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, the Council declared Iraq, and thereby its President, Saddam Hussein, in "material breach" of prior weapons inspections mandates, and gave Iraq a "final opportunity" to submit to intensified weapons inspections.

'Nuff said

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes.)
Many women, Los Angeles comptroller Laura Chick told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci last week, are

tired of hearing about women's issues -- because I believe our issues are human issues, universal issues. Half of the kids we bear are boys. Women's issues are everybody's issues.

"Our issues"

Legal Times, sponsor of a discussion of U.S. Supreme Court trends and decisions on school desegregation, criminal justice, business, and abortion, just posted the transcript. (Thanks to SCOTUSblog for the head's up.)
Take a wild guess: Which of the 4 panelists, each of whom argued in the 2006-2007 Term, was invited to talk about the last of those topics?
(a) Michael Dreeben
(b) Eve Gartner
(c) Thomas Goldstein
(d) Jeffrey Lamken
The answer's (b), of course.
Legal Times deserves credit for avoiding an all-male panel (something, as posted before, we continue to see at IntLaw conferences). But did it have to limit invitation to 1 woman, and did she have to be the designated abortion discussant?
The problem is not that Gonzalez v. Carhart got mention; to the contrary, that April 2007 decision also received IntLawGrrls' attention. The problem is that having the woman speak about abortion, while the men's talks covered the rest of society's concerns, reinforced the notion that abortion is the women's issue before the Court. Gartner, senior staff attorney at Planned Parenthood, might've unintentionally contributed to this notion by concluding:

[M]y bet is that the Court is not going to touch any abortion cases for a few years. I don't think they want to get involved with it again. So I don't think there will be anything on our issues.

Beg to differ.
► 1stly, the abortion jurisprudence, though it affects women most directly, implicates questions of privacy, of the proper role of government, of federalism, and of separation of powers, each of which has profound importance for all in persons in society. It is thus "our issue" only if "our" means all of us.
► 2dly, if "our issues" means issues of concern to women, our issues cover a gamut far broader than this matter alone, and many surface regularly in the high courts of our world. IntLawGrrls demonstrates this day in and day out: our posts've included "women's issues" like abortion and gender equality, of course, but also, and more often, issues of concern to all humanity. Examples include: reversing environmental degradation, improving the health of poor and rich alike, promoting peace and individual security as well as national security, enforcing fair wages and safety for all workers, bringing perpetrators to justice before fair tribunals. These are our issues.
What might Legal Times have done? An obvious answer seems to invite more than 1 woman, so that at least 1 speaks on matters not coded as "a woman's issue." Not possible, because too few women argued before the Court on other issues? If so, that raises a question of diversity of the bar that needs as much attention as this excellent roundtable properly paid to diversity among the Court's law clerks.