HUMAN RIGHTS

Human Rights

Human Rights

Introduction

The past few decades have seen a vast increase in the engagement of local organisations with intergovernmental institutions. Mainly prominent has been efforts by women's organisations to engage in and help shape United Nations' (U.N.) agreements. Over the past ten years, while the era of major world conferences has waned, women's groups have increasingly looked toward the legal human rights bodies like the U.N.'s human rights treaty body system as a place to engage the international system for the purposes of changing their own governments. In this study, I explore this general trend by focusing on the processes surrounding and the work of the U.N. women's human rights treaty body the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (hereafter referred to as the “CEDAW Committee” or simply “the Committee”).

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, is the premier international human rights agreement focusing on women's issues with 1821 States parties. The Convention explicitly acknowledges that despite calls to end discrimination, extensive discrimination against women continues to exist (CEDAW, Preamble) and as such lays out a process for monitoring the work of States parties toward implementing the Convention's principles. The CEDAW Convention requires State parties submit a report and then appear before the Committee of 23 independent experts every four years to review their progress toward implementing the Convention. In the past ten years, women's rights advocates in the global south (and some in the global north) have increasingly turned to CEDAW as a key international tool for redressing gender-based inequalities.

Recent Trends

More recently, the pace of this trend has increased as activists confront challenging political realities that, for instance, make other global venues like the ten year follow up to the 1995 Beijing U.N. World Conference on Women (and other world conference processes) less hospitable to feminist advocacy and advocates than were the U.N. world conferences of the 1990's. Whereas tens of thousands of women's rights activists from all over the world mobilised to participate in the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995, many of the same individuals and organisations worked against having the U.N. hold a large-scale review of women's rights in 2005. The increasing importance of the CEDAW Committee as a venue for women's rights advocates interested in achieving domestic political change means that the work of this Committee merits analysis.

At the same moment that the participation of and attention by non-governmental organisations to the work of the CEDAW Committee has reached new heights, the entire U.N. treaty body system—CEDAW included—has come under significant critical scrutiny and has become a focal point for discussions about, and proposals for, United Nations' reform. While most scholars and activists agree that the U.N. human rights treaty body system is in need of reform if it is to be a useful political tool, many of the current reform proposals raise nearly as many concerns as they ...