Law Commons^™

Bridging The Enforcement Gap? Evaluating The Inquiry Procedure Of The Cedaw Optional Protocol, Catherine O'Rourke

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Considerable optimism accompanied the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Optional Protocol. However, one of the Optional Protocol’s two enforcement measures, the inquiry procedure, appeared to languish for fourteen years and has, to date, resulted in only four inquiry reports. The article evaluates the inquiry procedure, finding largely unmet expectations in addressing CEDAW’s structural weaknesses, countering the privileging of civil and political rights, and redressing state noncompliance with CEDAW, but significant potential nonetheless. The findings of this Article vindicate the enduring salience of foundational feminist critiques of human rights. The Conclusion …

“Long Past Time”: Cedaw Ratification In The United States, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Amanda Martin

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Public Affairs

More than 70 years after Eleanor Roosevelt pioneered the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the US has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW or what is known as the global Bill of Rights for Women). The Trump administration is planning measures such as paid parental leave and child care legislation which are supported by the CEDAW. Despite the Trump administration's caution about human rights treaties, we argue that an enlightened self-interest on the part of the administration will draw it towards the CEDAW ratification despite the ratification being …

When Law Is Complicit In Gender Bias: Ending De Jure Discrimination Against Women As An Important Target Of Sustainable Development Goal 5, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

All Faculty Scholarship

Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. The very first target of Goal 5. 1.1 calls to end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere and the indicator for the goal is: “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex”. In many countries around the world the legal frameworks themselves allow for both direct (de jure) and indirect (de facto) discrimination against women. This essay identifies some areas …

Theorizing The Immigrant Child: The Case Of Married Minors, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Right To No: The Crime Of Marital Rape, Women's Human Rights, And International Law, Melanie Randall, Vasanthi Venkatesh

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

More than half of the world’s countries do not explicitly criminalize sexual assault in marriage. While sexual assault in general is criminalized in these countries, sexual assault perpetrated by a spouse is entirely legal. The human rights violations inhere in acts of violence against women are now well recognized. Yet somehow marital rape is a particular form of gendered violence that has escaped both criminal law sanctions and human rights approbation in a great number of the world’s nations.

This silence in the law creates legal impunity for men who sexually assault or rape the women who are their wives …

Glocalizing Law And Culture: Towards A Cross-Constitutive Paradigm, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

This lecture addresses the relationship between law and culture in three general parts. The first part consists of a brief review of the theories addressing the relationship of law and culture, mainly the mirror theory. But I will suggest that there is more to the relationship of law and culture than one being an inert reflection of the other; hence my proposal for what I call, as a working concept, a cross-constitutive paradigm of law and culture. The second part reviews the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ("CEDAW''), a law that seeks to effect …

An Analysis Of Structural Weaknesses In The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, Julie A. Minor

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Voiceless Victims: Sex Slavery And Trafficking Of African Women In Western Europe, Melanie R. Wallace

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Female Genital Mutilation And Female Genital Cutting, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Cutting (FGC) refers to a range of harmful traditional practices performed on infants, girls, and women in certain ethnic groups. This article, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (David Forsythe, et al, ed., Oxford University Press, 2009) discusses the practices in the context of international human rights law. FGM-FGC, violates a number of international human rights standards, including the right to bodily integrity, the right to life, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of children, and the rights of women and girls to equality and non-discrimination. Nevertheless, …

Deconstructing Cedaw's Article 14: Naming And Explaining Rural Difference, Lisa R. Pruitt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Child, Family, State, And Gender Equality In Religious Stances And Human Rights Instruments: A Preliminary Comparison, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recently began its third decade. Why has the United States still not ratified the CRC, celebrated as the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history? Once again, this question is on the table: Congressional resolutions that President Obama should not transmit the CRC to the Senate for advice and consent rapidly followed intimations that the Obama Administration had some qualms about the U.S. keeping company only with Somalia in not ratifying it. Some scholars contend that enlisting the unique resources of religions would help to ground a culture …

Migration, Development, And The Promise Of Cedaw For Rural Women, Lisa R. Pruitt

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I of this Essay provides an overview of the rural-to-urban migration phenomenon, a trend the author calls the urban juggernaut. This Part includes a discussion of forces compelling the migration, and it also considers consequences for those who are left behind when their family members and neighbors migrate to cities. Part II explores women's roles in food production in the developing world, and it considers the extent to which international development efforts encourage or entail urbanization. Part III attends to the potential of human rights for this population, analyzing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination …

Secondary Human Rights Law, Monica Hakimi

Articles

In recent years, the United States has appeared before four different treaty bodies to defend its human rights record. The process is part of the human rights enforcement structure: each of the major universal treaties has an expert body that reviews and comments on compliance reports that states must periodically submit. What's striking about the treaty bodies' dialogues with the United States is not that they criticized it or disagreed with it on the content of certain substantive rules. (That was all expected.) It's the extent to which the two sides talked past each other. Each presumed a different set …

Female Genital Mutilation And Female Genital Cutting, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Cutting (FGC) refers to a range of harmful traditional practices performed on infants, girls, and women in certain ethnic groups. This article, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (David Forsythe, et al, ed., Oxford University Press, 2009) discusses the practices in the context of international human rights law. FGM-FGC, violates a number of international human rights standards, including the right to bodily integrity, the right to life, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of children, and the rights of women and girls to equality and non-discrimination. Nevertheless, …

Pornography As Trafficking, Catharine A. Mackinnon

Michigan Journal of International Law

In material reality, pornography is one way women and children are trafficked for sex. To make visual pornography, the bulk of the industry's products, real women and children, and some men, are rented out for use in commercial sex acts. In the resulting materials, these people are then conveyed and sold for a buyer's sexual use. Obscenity laws, the traditional legal approach to the problem, do not care about these realities at all. The morality of what is said and shown remains their focus and concern. The injuries inflicted on real people to make the materials, or because they are …

Statement Of Jeanne M. Woods And Hope Lewis Prepared For The Hearings Of The United Nations Special Rapporteur On Extreme Poverty, Dr. Arjun Sengupta On The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, Hope Lewis, Jeanne Woods

Hope Lewis

This Statement was submitted to the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, Dr. Arjun Sengupta in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005. The Statement, submitted during the Independent Expert’s fact-finding visit, expresses concern about the extensive and alarming human rights implications of United States federal, state and local government policy and activities before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. The Statement argues that the inadequate response of government officials at all levels reflects the impact of “globalization in miniature” on the poor and other vulnerable and subordinated …

Glocalizing Law And Culture: Towards A Cross-Constitutive Paradigm, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This lecture addresses the relationship between law and culture in three general parts. The first part consists of a brief review of the theories addressing the relationship of law and culture, mainly the mirror theory. But I will suggest that there is more to the relationship of law and culture than one being an inert reflection of the other; hence my proposal for what I call, as a working concept, a cross-constitutive paradigm of law and culture. The second part reviews the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ("CEDAW''), a law that seeks to effect …

Embracing Complexity : Human Rights In Critical Race Feminist Perspective, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Although the voices of "women of all colors" have furthered the goals and norms of feminist human rights scholarship, the voices of women of color and Third World women have often been rejected, ignored, or otherwise made invisible. Critical Race Feminist and other multicultural approaches to legal scholarship attempt to unite such voices and reveal their experiences and perspectives in feminist human rights discourse. This Article hypothesizes that Critical Race Feminist will make important contributions to the overall international human rights agenda. It identifies four common themes in a feminist multicultural approach to human rights scholarship: (1) the recognition that …

The Cedaw As A Collective Approach To Women's Rights, Brad R. Roth

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article will identify the individualist paradigm with the main current of contemporary liberal-individualist political thought, and more specifically with the approach to women's rights reflected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which can be read most straightforwardly as reflecting a liberal-individualist conception of how the individual, society, and the State interrelate. This approach, dominant in the international human rights system as well as in the legal systems of some of the most influential States, can usefully be identified as that of the political Center.

Global Intersections : Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Although there have been great strides in feminist human rights efforts in developing methods to prevent domestic violence and other forms of "private" violence against women, feminists still have far to go. For instance, feminists have only recently begun to acknowledge that physical, social, and economic violence against women, especially poor women of color, is perpetuated in part by top-down globalization. This Article demonstrates how Critical Race Feminist analysis, a set of approaches to legal scholarship rooted in feminist and anti-racist critical traditions, reconceptualizes the human rights problems facing Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. Like …

The United Nations Convention Of The Rights Of The Child: A Feminist Landmark, Cynthia Price Cohen

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,1 adopted by the General Assembly on November 20, 1989, is a ground-breaking human rights treaty for many reasons. It had the largest number of signatories on the day that it was opened for signature.2 It went into force more quickly than any other human rights treaty;3 it reached near-universal ratification by mid-1996;4 and it protects the entire range of human rights: civilpolitical, economic-social-cultural, and humanitarian.5 In addition, the Convention's monitoring mechanism gives unique powers to its monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child.6 Unfortunately, these achievements have …

Reservations To The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women And The Convention On The Rights Of The Child, William A. Schabas

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Lionheart Gals Facing The Dragon : The Human Rights Of Inter/National Black Women In The United States, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

This Article commands a more explicit engagement of critical race scholarship with feminist international human rights strategies. It focuses on Jamaican-American women. Part I discusses key aspects of the historical and sociological context in which the migration of Jamaican women to the New York City area has occurred. It also discusses trends in their participation in the paid labor force since the migratory patterns of Jamaican women are strongly linked to their employment opportunities. Part II describes and analyzes significant survival strategies used by working-class Jamaican-American women to escape from, reshape, or resist the exploitative conditions they face. The strategies …

U.S. Ratification Of The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, Julia Ernst

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The purpose of this article is to highlight the need for ratification of the Convention by the United States, and to address arguments against ratification. Various concerns have been raised with respect to CEAFDAW, both specific to the United States and more international in scope. Some problems pertain to United States ratification generally, other issues concern potential conflicts between specific articles of the Convention and U.S. law, and broader problems have been raised with respect to international implementation. Most of these issues are not uncommon in international agreements, and may therefore be remedied through conventional mechanisms, including implementing legislation, reservations, …