Beware of big sister: Charmaine Yoest exposes a troubling treaty with a teflon title. Get ready for more shenanigans at the UN

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2002 by Charmaine Yoest

AN OBSCURE TRIBUNAL known as The Committee has urged China and Mexico to decriminalize prostitution, chided the tiny nation of Belarus for reintroducing Mother's Day--the holiday promotes a "sexual stereotype"--prodded the U.K. to begin sex education in primary school, and informed the Irish that "the time had come" to revise their restrictive abortion law.

Although The Committee can express displeasure with any U.S. policy that strikes its fancy; it currently has little impact in this country. But that may soon change. Its mission is to assess the status of women in countries that have ratified the UN's Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, known as CEDAW Iraq, Cuba, and other global model citizens have ratified the convention, but the United States hasn't--at least not yet.

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Joseph Biden (D-DE), member and chairman respectively of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are trying to change this. They have held hearings aimed at ratifying the convention. Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN, described CEDAW as a "key pillar of international human rights law," which stands as a milestone" in the quest to define "the universal norms of gender equality." The United States is the only western industrialized democracy that has nor ratified.

The pressure to ratify is mounting. Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey (DCA) alleges that CEDAW opponents simply want women "barefoot and pregnant." The treaty is, in fact, a classic Trojan Horse--it is presented as an elevated document enshrining principles of timeless truth, similar to the Declaration of Independence, but the guts of the document are a utopian wish list: government wage-setting embodied in comparable worth, government-run child care, gender-blind military service, and quota-determined political parity for women.

Stereotyping will be eliminated primarily through "the revision of textbooks and school programs and the adaptation of teaching methods." (No maternal images, please.) Indeed, The Committee told Ireland's representatives that their report was "disturbing" because it stated that "child care was primarily the responsibility of parents." Iceland, on the other hand, reassured The Committee that indeed they did require "gender sensitivity training" for "day mothers," the government workers in Iceland's day care and kindergarten for all two- to six-year-olds.

As this is being written, the margin for passage appears quite close. In February of this year, the State Department wrote to Biden and Boxer saying that the treaty is "generally desirable" and that it should be approved. They restated this position in June, just before the hearings on the treaty, but did not send a representative to testify. Apparently, the Justice Department is giving the treaty close examination. Nevertheless, the Stare Department's website includes information about the treaty under the banner headline, "America's Commitment to Women!"

Biden and Boxer assert that ratification "would not impose a single new requirement in our laws." This might be true. Technically, maybe--in a static, apolitical world. In the real world, the treaty's mandate for viewing anything less than a statistically verifiable equivalence in the home, workplace, and political arena as discrimination, enforced by affirmative action, quotas, and comparable worth formulas is a somewhat pesky detail. Supporters of the treaty respond that "States Parties" to the Convention may ratify with "reservations, understandings, and declarations" which allow them to abstain from provisions that contradict national norms.

This, however, patently ignores Article 28, which states that "a reservation incompatible with the object and purpose of the present Convention shall not be permitted." The description of the legal ramifications of the treaty varies with the audience. Those documents aimed at persuading the uncommitted emphasize the nonbinding nature of the treaty. Articles written for the initiated sound a different note. Witness Annan's "key pillar of international law" description. CEDAW commitments, writes Marilou McPhedran, a lawyer at the International Women's Rights Project, are "legal obligations" that endure even through regime changes. In other words: Signing the treaty might impinge on our national sovereignty.

But even beyond questions of legality is this issue of "universal norms. With a concept that aspires to universality in play, echoing moral theorist Alasdair Maclntyre, we have to ask: Whose gender? Which equality? One member of The Committee, legal scholar Savitri Goonesekere, has written in "A Rights-Based Approach to Realizing Gender Equality" that redefining gender equality with the language of human rights elevates their claims "to a level of legal entitlement requiring national and international response. Concerns, when conceived of as claims of human rights, become fundamental, immutable, and priority claims."

Who, then, is doing the defining of these immutable, legal entitlements? The Committee, if you read the fine print. As it turns out, the "experts in human rights," who are given the job of overseeing implementation of the treaty, don't take too kindly to reservations about any aspect of the treaty. And they are not shy about saying so. Their General Recommendation in 1987 stated that The Committee "suggests that all States Parties concerned reconsider such reservations with a view to withdrawing them." At least a third of "States Parties" have lodged reservations, some related to the treaty's provisions on equality in nationality and citizenship, others to family property issues, and many related to the treaty's statements on equality in marriage and family. By 1994, The Committee had become even more assertive, asking states to "indicate the stage that has been reached in the country's progress to removal of all reservations to the Convention." In other words, ratifring with reservations is just a "stage," like adolescence, on the path to "transformation" (a favored word).