Monitoring the Monitors
As reported in last week’s Friday Fax, Alliance Defending Freedom took the floor recently at a General Assembly forum on how to reform United Nations Treaty Bodies, calling on the Treaty Bodies not to usurp functions that do not rightfully belong to them. These treaty monitoring bodies, also called “Compliance Committees,” are generally empowered to [...]
Former Prostituted Woman to Speak on UN Panel
Within the CEDAW Committee’s hall of shame, telling China to decriminalize prostitution holds a prize spot. In a promising turn of events, UN Women, the two-year old agency tasked with handling all-things-women at the UN, will highlight a woman who escaped from prostitution. The “Survivors Forum” is a panel discussion hosted by UN Women this [...]
New Zealand Not Interested in Liberalizing Its Abortion Laws
During the CEDAW Committee’s review of New Zealand this afternoon, the country’s delegate stated that the New Zealand government has no interest in expanding its abortion laws. This was in response to being told twice that the country needs to modernize its abortion laws. New Zealand currently allows for abortion in the case of endangerment [...]
Prevalence of Contraceptives in Bulgaria Due to Lack of Church Presence
This afternoon when answering questions asked by the CEDAW committee experts on the accessibility of contraceptives in Bulgaria, the delegate explained that it is very easy to gain access to contraceptives in the country. And why are contraceptives so freely available? He explained that non-state actors are very limited and that the church is not [...]
CEDAW Committee Expert Grills Indonesian Delegation about Abortion and Maternal Mortality
One of the CEDAW Committee experts bombarded the Indonesian Delegation about what the country is doing to prevent maternal mortality and about the limited situations in which abortion is legal. Indonesian laws only allow abortion in cases when there is an emergency situation in the first 6 weeks of pregnancy and the mother’s life and [...]
Guyana Delegation Agrees: Maternal Mortality Not Linked to Unsafe Abortions
As the Chilean study found, the reduction in the maternal mortality rate is NOT related to the legal status of abortion. The CEDAW Committee once again tried to show that there is a link between the number of unsafe abortions and the high rate of maternal mortality. One of the Committee experts asked the Guyana [...]
Kicking Off 30 Years of Women’s Rights
The 30th Anniversary session of the CEDAW Committee kicked off yesterday in New York at UN Headquarters. After listening to Ms. Silvia Pimentel (Chair of the CEDAW Committee) and Mr. Jan Eliasson (Deputy Secretary-General of the UN) praise the work of CEDAW, the speeches discussing the necessity of advancing women’s political participation around the [...]
Maternal Mortality Hijacked by Abortion Advocates
An inaugural conference on “Global Health, Gender and Human Rights” was recently held at American University Washington Center for Law (WCL) and co-sponsored by PAHO/WHO and Royal Norwegian Embassy in Guatemala, which promoted the use of international human rights treaties as tools to “improve health policies” including advancing legalized abortion under the guise of reducing [...]
US Ratification of CEDAW Focus at World Bank Event
To commemorate International Women’s Day the World Bank in collaboration with the Nordic Trust Fund, the Leadership Conference Education Fund and the UN Foundation, hosted an event on CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) and women’s rights to focus on the success of CEDAW in advancing gender equality in [...]
From Russia with Love: 126 non-governmental Organisations in Russia and Ukraine condemn UN attempts to manufacure false “human rights”
On 24 November 2011, representatives from 126 non-governmental organisations in Russia and Ukraine have adopted an impressive statement called the Saint-Petersburg-Resolution, calling the UN and its various organisations to order. The Resolution, which in unconpromising language condemns the “anti-family tendencies prevailing in the UN and various of its committees”, is built on the model of [...]
No…Ratifying CEDAW is not about unisex bathrooms and ending Mothers’ Day
I just read an op-ed by Linda Tarr-Whelan, calling for the U.S. to ratify CEDAW. Whelan is a former U.S. ambassador to U.N. Commission on the Status of Women during the Clinton administration. Whelan used a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said America must be “the best possible mirror of democracy” since “the people of [...]
CRR Donation Solicitation Falsely Claims UN Decision “Requires” Peru to Liberalize Abortion
In a fundraising appeal email to their subscribers the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) falsely claimed that a recent decision by the CEDAW committee “requires” Peru to change their abortion laws. CRR brought this case to the UN committee on behalf of a teenage girl, claiming she is now a quadriplegic due to doctors refusing [...]
Arabs spring for U.S. support of CEDAW?
Campaigners for CEDAW ratification in the U.S. are using Arab Spring inspired rhetoric to secure new support for their initiative. They claim that US ratification of CEDAW would not only provide meaningful support to women’s rights activists living under these newly formed governments but that it would also encourage governments to implement and institutionalize the [...]
The 50th Session of the CEDAW Committee is Concluded
The 50th Session of the CEDAW Committee conluded last week in Geneva. The Committee issued its Final Observations to Chad, Côte d’ Ivoire, Kuwait, Lesotho, Mauritius, Montenegro, Oman, Paraguay. The obligations the Committee has been imposing on the countries reporting to CEDAW during the 50th session include: access to abortion and mandatory sexual education at [...]
CEDAW Pushes Radical Abortion Agenda on Costa Rica
The CEDAW Committee Continues to Misrepresent the Convention on Discrimination Against Women and continues to impose its reproductive rights agenda on signatories.
Columbus Day Shenanigans at the UN
CEDAW Committee Remains Silent on Sex Selection
The CEDAW Committee finished its 49th meeting last week in New York, issuing recommendations to the states parties that are unsurprising to observers: advocating for increased access to legal abortion, contraceptives, fertility treatments, in vitro fertilization, and comprehensive sexuality education for girls and boys (both in and out of school). Also unsurprising is the Committee’s [...]
Provenance of a treaty and its archaic ideas
Here is Christina Sommer’s new article in Policy Review about the fight over CEDAW ratification in the US. Sommers gets to the heart of the debate about treaties: once ratified, who decides how it is interpreted? A corollary: what power if any do reservations really have? Sommers rightly notes that this is one of the [...]
Making the Connection: UNICEF and UNFPA
What brings UNICEF and UNFPA together? Providing sexual and reproductive health services- especially to adolescent girls. UNICEF and UNFPA sponsored an event last week during the Commission on the Status of Women, entitled “Women or Children: Whose Rights Come First?” The panelists explored the strong existing ties between UNICEF and UNFPA, and called for the [...]