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Abstract
In the last thirty years, a process of global norm creation in the field of gender equality has taken place. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women marks a milestone in this process: it emerged as the first legally binding international instrument for the protection of women's rights. The 180 states that have ratified the Convention have interpreted their treaty obligations in diverse ways, ranging from reluctance to active incorporation. Beyond its original mandate, CEDAW has increased attention on gender issues within the UN human rights framework. Further, it has motivated transnational NGO activism that uses the Convention to connect local understandings of women's rights with global standards to influence national policy developments. Taking these global, national and transnational dynamics together, the article argues that CEDAW has been transformed from a ‘classical’ intergovernmental regime to a transnational network enforcing women's rights. Based on these findings, a theoretical view on global norm creation and enforcement is developed that stresses the reciprocal interrelation between global, national and local spheres. Instead of assuming a ‘trickle-down’ dynamic as a consequence of global agreements, it is argued that the legitimacy and authority of global norms depends on their active interpretation and appropriation within national and local contexts all over the world.
Acknowledgements
For thoughtful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article I would like to thank Millie Thayer, Elisabeth Prugl, Ilse Lenz, Ulrich Widmaier, Kasia Polanska, Danica Webb and, in particular, the two anonymous reviewers of IFjP. Further, I am grateful for the support I received while writing this article from the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, the APSA Special Fund for the Study of Women and Politics and the APSA Centennial Center for Visiting Scholars.
Notes
1. Between 2000 and 2002, over thirty expert interviews were conducted with persons who have been directly involved in the CEDAW procedure or have used the Convention in developing public polices or non-governmental strategies.
2. I use the terms intergovernmental, international, national and local/sub-national in the following sense: ‘intergovernmental’ refers to activism taking place predominantly between states, but also within international organizations; ‘international’ describes the dynamics within an international organization such as the United Nations as well as activism that is directed to the shaping of mechanisms of global governance; it is, thus, less influenced by governmental interests, but nevertheless connected to them. ‘National’ stands for governmental activism directed towards the domestic sphere and enshrines the understanding of different degrees of state sovereignty and agency. ‘Local/sub-national’ refers to a situated context of changing social relationships mostly shaped by civil society actors within the national sphere. The distinctions are made based on the understanding that the different categories are, in reality, not entirely separable from each other.
3. Some scholars have drawn attention to the high and probably increasing relevance of regional institutions and discourses for the realization of normative claims, e.g. in the context of the European Union (Liebert Citation2003) or of Africa (Tripp Citation2004). For reasons of space, this dimension cannot be considered here.
4. There were other disagreements in the drafting process, for example if the Convention should cover discrimination against women or gender-based discrimination, or if protective measures at the workplace were useful or harmful for women. As the opposing positions in those matters were not antagonistic, they could be settled in compromise provisions (Rehof Citation1993).
5. Apart from provisions such as adopting appropriate legislation, article 2 also obliges states to prevent discrimination against women ‘by any person, organization or enterprise’ (art. 2e) – thus, states have an explicit responsibility to prevent discrimination committed by private actors.
6. The entire text of the Convention can be found at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw.htm, April 2005.
7. Nonetheless, the vagueness of the Convention in defining ‘compatibility’ has led to a range of problematic reservations (Clark Citation1991).
8. In contrast, the influence of women's movements was minimal in the drafting process. It was ‘by and large, the work of member states, although established non-governmental organizations dedicated to issues of concern to women contributed’ (Connors Citation1996: 160–1).
9. In 1993, the Division for the Advancement of Women, as the administrative body is called today, moved to New York, where the CEDAW sessions have been held ever since.
10. There are six other human rights treaties that provide for monitoring procedures similar to CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (entered into force in 1969), the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976), the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976), the Convention against Torture (1987) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990); additionally, the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families entered into force in 2003 and its monitoring committee started working in March 2004. For further details see www.unhchr.ch, April 2005.
11. The inquiry procedure in Mexico concerns the murder of more than 300 young women in the state of Chihuahua since 1993 and the failure of government investigation to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice (Stern Citation2004). In the case of Germany, the NGO Ban Ying filed an inquiry regarding the working conditions of female domestic workers in the households of foreign diplomats (Ban Ying Citation2004).
12. As of April 2005, 71 out of 180 states parties to CEDAW have ratified the Optional Protocol.
13. Disaggregated by world region, the states that are not party to CEDAW are: Somalia and Sudan from Africa; Brunei Darussalam, Iran, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Oman, Palau, Qatar and Tonga from Asia and the Pacific; and the USA from Western Europe and Other Developed Regions. Latin America and the Caribbean have achieved universal ratification. The United States signed the Convention in the early 1980s, yet the Senate has been refusing ratification to date. For the domestic debate on the issue see Zierler Citation(2004).
14. ‘State Party’ is the correct legal term referring to any state that has ratified the Convention and thus, has become a party to it.
15. For example, Austria and Germany entered reservations to article 7 on gender equality in political and public life, because their constitutions prohibited women to serve in the armed forces; both states recently withdrew their reservation (in 2000 and 2001 respectively, UN-Doc. CEDAW/SP/2002/2).
16. Generally speaking, cultural affinity with the Convention varies across the world regions. The Latin American continent has universal ratification of CEDAW. Western Europe and Other Developed Regions and Latin America and the Caribbean display a high affinity, which is expressed in a low number of reservations. In the case of Asia and the Pacific, a high number of reservations indicates the difficulty of many states in reconciling the principles of the Convention with their national understandings of women's status. Africa has also expressed ideological differences with the Convention in a considerable number of reservations based on culture or religion.
17. The literature on cases of CEDAW implementation has been growing in the last years and shows that a considerable number of states have tried to put their international obligations regarding women's rights into practice (UNIFEM Citation1998; Afsharipour Citation1999; McPhedran et al. Citation2000; Weiss Citation2003).
18. There are other examples of governmental use of CEDAW, e.g. in South Africa, the Department of Justice developed a Gender Policy within the broader transformation of the post-apartheid justice system which was guided by the principles of CEDAW (UNIFEM Citation1998: 32–3).
19. In many cases, both governmental institutions and NGOs make use of CEDAW: sometimes they co-operate, such as in the Constitution building processes in Colombia and Brazil (UNIFEM Citation1998: 10–16), or in developing policies to put the committee's recommendations into action, as in Bangladesh (Afsharipour Citation1999); sometimes NGOs use the Concluding Comments of the committee to monitor the Government and to pressure it to fulfil its obligations (e.g. Zimbabwe, UNIFEM Citation1998: 35–6).
20. Until 2001, a woman could only undergo a sterilization after the age of 32, being the mother of four children and with her husband's consent (La Morada et al. Citation1999). After the amendment of the law in 2001, these conditions have ceased to apply.
21. In most states, the judiciary has remained rather inactive in using CEDAW despite its legally binding character. One reason for this is the widespread unawareness of international law development within domestic legal systems (United Nations/Division for the Advancement of Women Citation2000).
22. For an illustration of this point, see the debate on the compatibility of CEDAW with Islam as interpreted in the context of Pakistan (Weiss Citation2003).
23. Both organizations have extended their activism towards other instruments, especially towards the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
24. Different approaches are subsumed under the catch-all category ‘constructivism’; Locher and Prügl Citation(2001) observe that in US-American debates, it is understood as an alternative to rationalist approaches, whereas in the European context, constructivism stands for a ‘middle ground’ position between rationalism and postmodernism.
25. For example the Convention on the political rights of women of 1952, the Convention on the nationality of married women of 1957, the Convention on consent to marriage, minimum age for marriage and registration of marriages of 1962 (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, www.unhchr.ch/html/intlinst.htm, April 2005).