They're absolute rights that an individual can claim.
But governments will find a way of wriggling around that.
That's an example of how a government might have signed
the covenant and signed the international treaty against
torture, but might have introduced, say, a state of
emergency in their country.
So they're saying, well, we're under state of emergency.
And we need that information.
There's a ticking time bomb in our country.
Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural
Rights which is different.
These are derogable rights which a country promises to
introduce according to their capacity over time.
And, in fact, that's where many of the women's and
children's rights exist because they're the social
rights to health care, to housing, to medical care.
And a country says, well, we're going to roll it in
according to our capacity over time.
And that's where there's so much wriggle room that a
government can legitimately, under the international UN
infrastructure, say, well, we've signed the treaty.
But we haven't really got to it yet.
Or we're working towards it.
The big change in the last 15 years is that now not only are
countries required to report their progress to the UN
treaty system, NGOs can now put in parallel reports which
point out that whereas the government has written a
report that's glass half full, the international world really
needs to understand the glass is half empty.
And that there's been a highly selective concentration of
health care facilities in urban areas
rather than rural areas.
And this has particular impacts for rural women who
are unable to access maternal health care.
Because they simply can't make the trek, in a difficult
labor, five hours away to the capitol city, across a bumpy
road, in the back of a cart.
By that time, they have lost their child.
And the woman might also be dead.
So governments, by dint of being Members of the United
Nations and having signed on to these various treaties and
conventions, are required to report, you've noted, that
they may report--
Yes.
--In ways that benefit them.
And that NGOs can actually submit additional reports.
That's right.
Required just because of their membership, required because
they want to be good, or be seen, as good global citizens,
you're saying.
Yes.
Yeah.
Let's move to talking about the specific conventions that
relate to women.
The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
Discrimination Against Women.
And the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And there may be other conventions that you know
about that relate specifically to women and might relate more
directly to our concern with women's health.
They're main two.
I'll call them the CEDAW convention and CRC convention.
There are other treaties such as the treaty against child
trafficking.
CEDAW is a convention that was passed more recently than many
of the other conventions.
I think it's important to have a time line here of the
international system.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights came right
after World War II.
It was an attempt to incorporate all countries of
the world, then very few-- only 57 or so--
into an all encompassing world Global Compact that says every
human in the world has rights.
And it's the job of governments to give those
rights to its citizens.
A really noble document--
A wonderful document.
--For it's time.
Yeah, marvelous.
And were it not for Eleanor Roosevelt it really wouldn't
have come into being.
A noble document that then created 20 years later-- it
took 20 years because of the Cold War to have the two
international covenants.
And then in the '70s and the '80s, as the thaw of the Cold
War began very gradually, it became clear that the notion
of universal human rights was so structurally unable to deal
with the specific problems of demographics that had been so
discriminated against for centuries, if not millennia,
that those demographics needed particularized
human rights treaties.
And that's where CEDAW came along.
CEDAW came out of the movement in the '70s and the '80s of
the second wave of feminism which understood that the
structural discrimination against women was so deeply
embedded in historical systems that unless there was a
specific human rights treaty for women and girls, that the
structural disadvantage for women and girls would simply
continue to be invisible to us.
It's been taken for granted for millennia that women's
place is in the home.
It wasn't until the 20th century that universal
suffrage became an increasing norm, first of all, in the
countries in the West and then gradually around the world.
Because it was simply taken for granted that men were the
creators of the public space and the public sphere.
And that men would be in government.
And men would be the captains of industry.
It wasn't until the '70s and the '80s that the second wave
of feminism said, why would it be that if women are
considered good enough to vote, they shouldn't also be
gaining the same sort of secondary and tertiary
education that men have, and owning their own businesses,
and running for Congress and parliaments?
It's not the case that this is happening.
The data tells us it's not.
Women are still at home.
And women are undertaking the majority of child care and
running the home.
We need to address this in a full, frontal way.
And we need to address this in an international way.
And that's how CEDAW came into being.
It came out of the second wave of feminism.
And under CEDAW, whilst universal rights to education,
and health, and voting, and entry into the workplace all
existed between the end of the World War and the 1960s when
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two
covenants were brought into being.
Those international documents didn't really change the
structural reality that women's place was in the home.
And most of the harm to women occurs in the home.
It occurs through domestic violence.
It occurs because she's not allowed to leave
the home and vote.
It occurs because she stays at home once she's 12, or 14, or
16 to care for the family rather than
continuing her education.
It occurs in the home because she's not educated.
She then doesn't go out and get a job
in the public sphere.
She doesn't have access to her income.
Even if she does go out and earn outside income, she goes
home and she gives it to her father, or her
brother, or her husband.
So CEDAW draws a line in the sand and says women have the
right to vote, to have their own income, to choose their
own husband, to choose the spacing of their children, to
have access to health care.
All of the taken for granted assumptions of universal human
rights, but taken for granted in a way that was historically
skewed, that it was taken for granted for men but not taken
for granted for women and girls.
So--
And we might note that it was taken for granted for some
kinds of men.
Indigenous people were left out.
HELEN STACY: Right.
And other needs or rights that people with disabilities might
need were also not take into account.
Indeed.
It was taken for granted in the West for
white propertied males.
So in the United States, until the civil rights
movement came along--
and the civil rights movement came along just before the
second wave of feminism.
There's a deep interconnectedness in the
United States between the civil rights movement and the
second wave of feminism and then women's rights.
But around the world, remember until the '70s and the '80s
the post-colonial world was busy replicating the
structures of Western misogyny.
It was putting men into parliaments.
It was putting men as the captains of industries.
And it was keeping women at home.
So the line in the sand from CEDAW was when?
Countries started to sign it needed a certain number of
signatures from countries to be passed as a
human rights treaty.
But it didn't really take off as an international movement
until the Beijing Women's Conference which was when all
of the women's NGOs of the world came to Beijing
ironically.
1994, the conference in Cairo on population and
development--
You're exactly right.
--There was a major human rights effort by women's
groups at that conference.
That's right.
And language was developed in that declaration.
Yes.
And then in 1995 was--
Beijing.
--The actual United Nations conference on women.
Let's focus even more on the conventions and the human
rights instruments that relate to women.
Can we assume that if someone has signed on to CEDAW-- and
have all government signed on to CEDAW?
No.
No.
We might talk a little bit about that and why.
And let's also take a moment to talk about the Convention
on the Rights of the Child.
Because I think it's really important, again, for all
children but particularly relating to young girls.
That came after the CEDAW convention.
And any student of human rights notices the cascade of
human rights that are increasingly going from the
understanding that universal human rights
don't provide the fix.
And then there's been a progressive fragmentation of
attention to demographics that aren't served by
the universal language.
CEDAW convention, the rights of the child, then we've had
the rights for the disabled after that.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child came after CEDAW
because it was very clear, from CEDAW, that it was
necessary--
urgent--
to really address violations against children, human rights
violations against children.
And these occur around the world.
There isn't a country in the world that is
that doesn't do this.
But it is particularly bad in countries that have a
perception of a child as a guarantee for parental
stability in the future because
of their work capacity.
And it's particularly bad in countries where girl children
are considered to be fungible.
Girl children are either considered to be an asset to
the family only if she can provide labor, first of all,
when she's young.
Possibly also provide sex either for her family or for
those outside the family to bring satisfaction to family
members or income into the family by selling her outside
the family.
And then as she reaches puberty, she then has
potential asset value as sale, as a bride outside the family.
In societies where there's a bride price, where the bride
is supposed to bring assets to another family, she can then
be a disability in a family which has
too many girl children.
So girl children are particularly vulnerable.
Children are vulnerable anyway because
they make good workers.
Whether that's workers in a factory, they can't put up an
argument about a 15 hour work day.
And they also make very good soldiers, by the way.
They're very good at taking direction.
It they're Isolated, it's the same occurs in factories.
If boys or girls are isolated from their family, and their
moral structures, or anybody else who will protect them,
they're very good laborers, and very good soldiers.
And they're very good concubines.
So how has the Convention on the Rights of the Child
affected some of these outrages?
When governments sign on to CRC, they undertake to
institute programs of health, education, housing, a criminal
justice system that will prosecute
those who hurt children.
They promise to divert their public funds into systems that
will watch, rectify, and if necessary prosecute the
violators of that system.
The way it has helped--
and in case you think I'm pessimistic
about this, I'm not.
No, I was about to ask that actually.
I'm optimistic about this.
Although I'm a long-term optimist.
I'm not a short-term optimist.
The way the CRC helps is that it, first of all, raises
awareness of governments that they are supposed to be doing
these things they've undertaken, in front of the
whole international community, that they should do this.
But the fact is that it's not until they pass legislation at
home that it's going to have any effect on their
instructions at home.
What happens at home is that community groups whether
they're registered as non-government organizations
or not, community groups galvanize around this.
When women and children learn that these are their rights,
then they start to expect them.
They expect them from their family.
They expect them from their community.
They expect them from their government.
And they galvanize around it politically.
There's been some fascinating studies done by Stanford
researchers that shows that the simple act of rights
language be incorporated into school curricula, through the
dissemination of international groups that go in and assist
the construction of school curricula, around the rights
of the child that give the language and pictures that say
it's inappropriate for a father to cuff his children
for infraction in the home.
That that child sees a depiction in their school book
which says, I have a right not to be hit.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the father will stop
hitting the child.
But it does mean that, in schools, children are learning
about rights language.
And that in community centers, women are hearing about rights
language when they go together and they talk.
They hear the nomenclature domestic violence.
And they hear the nomenclature assault.
And they hear the nomenclature violation of your human rights
to bodily integrity.
And over time, groups themselves in countries that
are experiencing forms of violation--
I'll take the United States or Australia, my own country as
an example.
When women hear the message that their husbands may not
hit them, may not rape them, may not force them to stay at
home if they don't want to, and they talk with one
another, they galvanize.
And they galvanize in such a way that the different pieces
of our social and public fabric start
to connect the dots.
Women's NGOs form.
Women's community groups, health groups start to report
the cases of harm--
sexual violence, domestic violence, up the chain.
Government agencies start to see statistics floating up.
And then before you know it, you have a whole map where
dots have connected.
And it starts to become a public outrage.
Actually with this course, there are many people watching
right now who, being able to use computer, can go online
and find out what their government is doing.
Right.
In other words, has the government signed on to CEDAW?
And most governments have.
Though we'll speak a little bit about why one in
particular hasn't.
But you can go online and find out whether your government
has signed and ratified CEDAW or the Convention on the
Rights of the Child.
And one of the things that we hope students enrolled in this
class will do, and this will be laid out on the web page,
will be to go into your community and see if you can
find an NGO, a group that is working on some of the issues
we're talking about and learn what they're doing.
And then post that on a forum on this course.
A couple more things I'd like to return to.
One, the United States is not signed on, or ratified CEDAW
or the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Why is that?
People wonder why can that be.
And women from around the world have asked me about this
because though their countries, their governments
may have signed on, they find it difficult to advocate for
change when, in fact, one of the largest country, leading
countries in the world perhaps--
the United States-- has not signed on.
So I the real question is what's the group within the
United States?
What's the demographic within the United States that has
resisted signing the treaty?
And what is it about the United States participation in
all matters international that make it difficult for the
United States to sign any treaty?
And I'll look at that second question first.
Because it's the precondition, if you like, for the CEDAW and
the CRC negligence of the United States.
The United States has its own constitution.
I think now every country in the world has its own
constitution.
But it's a very old constitution.
It's one of the two oldest.
The French Constitution and the United States Constitution
are the oldest in the world, framed at a time, over 200
years ago, when civil and political rights were the only
game in town.
And when white propertied men were considered to be the
quintessential citizen of the nation state.
That excluded everybody else.
It excluded women.
It excluded indigenous people.
It certain excluded anybody who didn't own property.
It's an old constitution.
And it's an old framing of the world.
Over time, the US has gradually amended its
constitution to allow African American people to vote, and
to allow women to vote.
It's changed.
What hasn't changed is a United States ambivalence to
surrender its own sovereignty to the international system.
Because it believes that the US Supreme Court is the
apogee, the very tippy top, of what law should pertain in the
United States.
And depending on the state of international affairs, this is
a feeling that is dominant at times more than other times.
It's been very dominant in the United States during the Cold
War which was the time when the CEDAW convention first
bobbed up, you might recollect.
And continues to be a strong feeling at times when the US
has either international troops abroad or
peacekeepers abroad.
The concern is that no country in the world should have the
right to tell the US military, or its personnel, or the US as
a country in its foreign policy what it ought to be
doing abroad, offshore.
And it certainly shouldn't be telling the US what it should
be doing at home.
The US takes the view that it has the best legislation in
the world, the best justice system in the world.
And it doesn't need the rest of the world
telling it what to do.
To put that into one word, it's about sovereignty.
It's about a feeling of national sovereignty and a
sense that the US is the best and better than the rest.
The way that's cashed out on the CEDAW convention is to
say, well first of all, this allergy to signing
international human rights treaties.
But the specific allergy against signing on to the
CEDAW treaty comes out of a feeling of the far right in
the United States that takes a very old-fashioned view of
family values.
It takes a view that women's place is in the home.
And that that's a happy place for a man and woman to have a
nuclear family, a very specific nuclear family headed
by a man who's married to a woman.
And that the very best way a family can grow is with the
man in the workforce and the woman
looking after the children.
That's the gloss.
The dirty underbelly to that is that there is a strong
anti-abortion, pro-life movement in the United States
which the conservative arm of politics dares not offend.
And that particular pro-life movement has taken exception
to the CEDAW treaty because it reads that part of the CEDAW
treaty that says a woman has the right to choose how to
space her children, and a woman has a right to access to
health care to mean that it is pro-abortion.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
There is nothing in the CEDAW treaty that
uses the word abortion.
It simply gives a woman choice about how she spaces the
children that she chooses to have and provides her with
access to health care.
It's interesting that the language in the international
conventions, to a great extent, is broader, more
inclusive than the language in most national governments or
regulations.
We have to bring this to an end, unfortunately.
But I want to thank you so very much for being here.
Thanks for taking the time.
You're very welcome.
Yeah.
