The petition, filed with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, was known as CEDAW. It diligently analyzed Hungarian law and court proceedings and concluded that available remedies both in A.T.'s case and in general were too weak, too slow, and too begrudgingly implemented.
Women living in the United States cannot appeal to CEDAW, though, when their rights are inadequately protected by US law. Why? Because the United States still, almost 30 years after it came into force, has not agreed to be bound by the provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which created the committee.
The Convention is a global treatise on women's equality. It reflects the consensus of the international community on what specific protections and actions states must take to ensure equality between men and women. The treaty has been ratified by 185 UN Member States, placing the United States in the dubious company of Iran, Nauru, Palau, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, and Tonga as the last states that have not ratified it. The convention was signed by President Carter in July 1980, but was not considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee till 1990. It was favorably voted out of the Foreign Relations Committee twice: once in 1994 and once in 2002. The convention has been awaiting comments from the Justice Department ever since. Senate rules require the treaty to be taken up in Committee again before it goes to full Senate vote.
Opponents of ratification cite a general opposition to international treaties as infringing upon national sovereignty. But they also contend that the convention includes provisions that are offensive to "American" culture. They contend that ratification would force the United States government to provide abortion on demand, to intrude in family situations and to legalize sex work.
The first argument is sometimes used to oppose the very concept of
international human rights. Such arguments maintain that every nation
is free to pursue whatever policies it wants, even slavery and
apartheid. Such arguments are hard to defend in the context of modern
international relations. Perhaps more to the point, the very act of
ratifying a treaty, and thereby agreeing to uphold universally
recognized standards, is a classic exercise of national sovereignty - a
declaration that a nation believes in and will uphold these standards.
With regard to the clash between US culture and the specific provisions of the Convention, the opposition is also wrong:
Abortion. The CEDAW Convention protects a woman's equal right to
life and health, and to decide on the number and spacing of her
children. The full protection of these rights will in some cases
require access to abortion services, and will also require the state to
provide such services to some. The United States is already bound by
international human rights commitments in this regard through its
ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, and through its membership of the Organization of American
States. The ratification of the CEDAW Convention would not
substantively alter existing obligations.
Intrusion of privacy. The CEDAW Convention requires the nations to end
practices based on the idea of the inferiority of either of the sexes.
This provision is key, and indeed Human Rights Watch research shows
that even the best policies are not effective if they are undermined by
existing prejudices. Moreover, US federal law on violence against
women, education, and other issues, already includes the need for
government oversight of what at some point was seen as private matters.
Sex work. The CEDAW Convention contains a provision requiring states to take all measures "to suppress exploitation of prostitution of women." Human Rights Watch's research on this issue indicates that the criminalization of women involved in sex work tends to expose them to specific types of exploitation--including extortion by police. Various countries have fulfilled this particular CEDAW obligation in many ways, including decriminalizing sex work while clamping down on trafficking, providing health care options for sex workers and investigating police abuse.
Back in Hungary, since A.T.'s case was filed in 2003, the government has both held awareness-raising sessions for police officers about domestic violence and developed a more stringent mandate for police to deal with domestic violence. Moreover, the CEDAW Committee's analysis and recommendations have provided much needed fuel to domestic groups seeking to reform the law. Women in the United States should be able to benefit from this kind of support too. The Obama administration and the US Senate should make ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women a priority. ]]>It became central to my life a couple of years back, when my primary physician refused my request to prescribe the morning-after-pill, citing medical reasons that made no sense to me. I was in a better position than most women in the United States. I was in a dual-income relationship and had a steady job that serendipitously afforded me all the information I needed to assess my situation.
I knew I had a number of options. I had the resources to seek out another health care provider, and I would be able to afford a safe abortion if it came to that. The only option I had ruled out was to carry a potential pregnancy to term: we simply would not be able to afford childcare and other expenses for a second child.
This, to me, is the real question of choice. As voters in California, Colorado, and South Dakota are asked to decide on proposals that would limit women's access to abortion and contraception, there is precious little public debate on whether actually having a child is necessarily a viable choice, financially and professionally.
For many, it is not. Federal law affords just 12 weeks of unpaid maternity or paternity leave, and only for those who are eligible, which excludes about 40 percent of American workers. There are no allowances for time off to breastfeed. There are few public child care options before primary school, and even private alternatives generally will not take children under 2.
Perhaps most disturbing in terms of lack of support, 8.7 million children in the United States currently have no health insurance. In the eyes of the law, it would seem, physically giving birth is the only consideration: you are afforded a short time to regain your strength after the delivery, but are otherwise on your own.
Some -- even advocates for choice -- would say that if you plan to depend on the government, you shouldn't have a child in the first place. But this argument also presumes that if there were public health care and childcare, and provisions for family support, birth rates would shoot through the roof, draining government coffers. Experience from countries with much better maternity and child protections shows otherwise. In my own country, Denmark, there are provisions that are generous by American standards - 52 weeks of paid parental leave, child care and public health care. But the birth rate also is quite low, 1.74 per woman in her lifetime, compared with 2.1 in the United States.
Support services are not the only factor in making a choice about parenthood, but clearly in the United States, from a purely economic point of view, fertility is not a matter of choice for everyone.
In the United States the lack of support for child care and parental benefits also coexists with serious legal or financial obstacles to accessing safe abortion services and even, at times, contraception. Since 1973, both state and federal legislators have limited access to legal abortion through burdensome regulation. Women with limited economic resources face additional obstacles because abortion services have been subject to a federal funding freeze since 1977 except in cases of rape, or incest or where the mother's life is in danger. Furthermore, the majority of states do not provide health care funding for abortion services that fall outside these exceptions.
In fact, fertility (and, by extension, choice) often comes down to a class issue. While the overall fertility rate has stayed the same, the number of children living in low-income families has steadily increased since 2000. The point is not that poor women shouldn't have children, but that all women should have a real choice - and that means access to information about contraception and abortion, and the support they need to raise children.
In my case, I ended up finding an alternative health care provider, who prescribed me the morning-after-pill.
For me, this is more than a personal issue. I have made a commitment to press for a real opportunity for choice for all women, including access to safe abortion services for poor, adolescent, or otherwise vulnerable women.
But choice also requires science-based sex education, contraception, maternity and paternity benefits, and access to child care and health care. The rationale behind polices such as Denmark's is that rearing a child is a service to all: reproduction, at its most basic, is the reproduction of society. Both the personal and the collective nature of that choice need to be protected by law and defended by the next president.
That's right. After
decades of reports on vicious sexual violence in conflicts across the
globe, the highest decision-making body
of the United Nations has decided that it is time to act. In fact, no other international
actor has as much power to do something about rape in war, and as disappointing
a record, as the United Nations Security Council.
It is not that the Security Council hasn't talked about the issue before. In 2000, the Security Council -- under intense pressure from women's groups and UN field personnel -- established a link between the Council's mandate and the way in which women and girls are affected differently by conflict than men and boys. This link is contained in a resolution, known mostly by its number (1325/2000), which includes an urgent call to end impunity for sexual violence and for the United Nations system to gather information on issues related to women and girls in conflict and report these to the Security Council.
Action to back up these good
intentions has, however, been scarce. Every year in October since
2000, the Council has celebrated the anniversary of resolution 1325
by announcing the importance of the gender perspective in its work,
and then proceeded to largely ignore it for the rest of the year.
Up until last Thursday, that
is. On Thursday, the Security Council declared its readiness to act
on sexual violence in a resolution that contains three key components:
Thursday's debate and the
resulting resolution also added a new word to the Council's sometimes
dusty vocabulary: never before has a Security Council resolution called
on parties to "debunk" myths that fuel sexual violence. But
the historic contribution of Thursday's debate was to "debunk"
the Council's own and self-perpetuating myth that sexual violence
in conflict simply didn't happen because it didn't feature prominently
in UN reports to the Council -- which, in turn, had been commissioned without seeking to elicit any information or insights on rape in war.
Of course, any UN resolution is only as good as its follow-up. In fact, it is possible that the Security Council's until now tepid attention to sexual violence in conflict-affected situations is a symptom of a more onerous problem: a deep-seated reluctance to address rape at all, mirroring the failure of national governments to prosecute and address violence against women more generally. Moreover, the UN system cannot change overnight: while it is now legally empowered to provide information on sexual violence in conflict situations, it still needs to be appropriately structured and resourced to do so. This requires investment in training and service-provision, and it requires the prioritization of this issue at the highest level: field missions, UN agencies, and peacekeeping troops should be evaluated, amongst other things, on the effectiveness and ethics of their approach to sexual violence. It is incumbent upon UN members states, Security Council members, UN agencies, and civil society to make sure this happens. The road was paved last Thursday. Now it's time to see if the United Nations can walk the walk.
]]>Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
I am now in Los Angeles, on the last leg of my road-trip through the United States and Canada with Verónica Cruz, founder and director of the Mexican grassroots advocacy group, Las Libres (The Free Women). Las Libres works for access to safe and legal abortion in the conservative Mexican state of Guanajuato, so it is not surprising that social change - how to create and sustain it - is high on Verónica's agenda.
What might be surprising is that her reflections are universally applicable. Also to the groups that try to generate this change.
"You can't ever afford to get complacent with your work," Verónica told me Tuesday as we left a meeting with community based women's organizations in East Los Angeles. "We must all evaluate the impact our work has on creating durable social change - that's the key factor for doing things right."
In fact, setting priorities and planning for real change has been our main conversation topic throughout the week, from the panel discussion with Verónica and Dolores Huerta (the legendary founder of United Farm Workers) at the Feminist Majority's offices, over our visit to a model Rape Crisis Center in Santa Monica, to our lunch-time strategy session with latina and chicana women in East Los Angeles.
And we have come to a few conclusions.
]]>Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
I am now in Los Angeles, on the last leg of my road-trip through the United States and Canada with Verónica Cruz, founder and director of the Mexican grassroots advocacy group, Las Libres (The Free Women). Las Libres works for access to safe and legal abortion in the conservative Mexican state of Guanajuato, so it is not surprising that social change - how to create and sustain it - is high on Verónica's agenda.
What might be surprising is that her reflections are universally applicable. Also to the groups that try to generate this change.
"You can't ever afford to get complacent with your work," Verónica told me Tuesday as we left a meeting with community based women's organizations in East Los Angeles. "We must all evaluate the impact our work has on creating durable social change - that's the key factor for doing things right."
In fact, setting priorities and planning for real change has been our main conversation topic throughout the week, from the panel discussion with Verónica and Dolores Huerta (the legendary founder of United Farm Workers) at the Feminist Majority's offices, over our visit to a model Rape Crisis Center in Santa Monica, to our lunch-time strategy session with latina and chicana women in East Los Angeles.
And we have come to a few conclusions.
First, we agreed, change happens through three main vehicles: conviction, financial incentives, or political pressure.
In the case of ensuring access to safe abortion for all women, an example of each of these three arguments would be something like this:
Secondly, we also had to admit, we, as a movement, often are trying too hard to convince the wrong people with the wrong arguments.
Few decision-makers agree to push for social change because we convinced them of the rightness of our cause - most respond better to financial or political pressure. But to build a durable movement, the logic is inverse: if you try to pressure or buy people to join your cause, your movement will disappear as soon as the incentives subside.
And yet so many groups we know - including political parties - do just the opposite: they use energy trying to convince decision-makers and resources trying to buy or pressure grassroots.
Third, change can be almost instantaneous if you start by really listening.
"We call it listening with all five senses," said Verónica. "That's what we try to do when we talk to women in the marginalized communities we work with. We say to them: let's see what problems you have, and what resources you have to overcome them. And that way, together, we can figure out a solution that is made possible by the women themselves."
No money, no enhanced infrastructure, not even access to any other education than just a basic understanding that women are human beings and that human being have certain inalienable rights.
Finally, durable social change can only come about through a movement.
Law and political changes are important and can create an impetus for deeper social change. But they can never be enough on their own. With regard to the issue of abortion, this - perhaps quite naïve - realization cuts both ways.
In South Dakota, for example, the movement behind the referendum to defeat the proposal to criminalize most abortions made it clear that a large group of convinced people can overcome a smaller group of decision-makers motivated by financial or political incentives. The legal change was not enough to change the mentality of the people of South Dakota, who knew that criminalizing abortion does not eliminate the need for it.
In Nicaragua, the financial and political incentives won out, at least for the moment. Despite a massive movement against the criminalization of abortion; despite countless letters and petitions to the Nicaraguan Congress; despite women already dying in hospitals because they cannot get access to a therapeutic abortion; despite all of this, Nicaraguan politicians virtually fell over each over to demonstrate that they were tougher then the next guy on sending women to prison for abortion. Why? Because in Nicaragua, it seems that it is more important to have the church and the commercial interests on your side in an election, than to do the right thing. (Money and pressure weigh out conviction).
Fortunately, this legal change will not create social change. The people of Nicaragua are likely to continue to protest the unjustness of the law. And through their mobilization and work, they will create the real, the durable, social change that women everywhere deserve.
"As long as people mobilize for social justice, there is hope. Then you know you are doing the right thing," Verónica said to this morning. Indeed.
]]>Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
In French they have a saying: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (It means something like: "The more things change, the more it's all the same.")
This is the feeling I have as I travel with Verónica Cruz - my Mexican colleague who helps rape victims get access to legal abortion - from New York over Washington D.C., Ottawa and Toronto to Chicago. Women everywhere - and in particular poor, uneducated, young, or non-white women - are ignored and abused. The justice and health service providers charged with helping them, instead insult and mistreat them.
]]>Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
In French they have a saying: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (It means something like: "The more things change, the more it's all the same.")
This is the feeling I have as I travel with Verónica Cruz - my Mexican colleague who helps rape victims get access to legal abortion - from New York over Washington D.C., Ottawa and Toronto to Chicago. Women everywhere - and in particular poor, uneducated, young, or non-white women - are ignored and abused. The justice and health service providers charged with helping them, instead insult and mistreat them.
In Ottawa, for example, we spoke with a researcher from Canadians for Choice. The researcher had called public hospitals all over Canada, posing as a young woman with a crisis pregnancy who was looking for information on how to get a safe abortion. In Canada, abortion is, by law, considered a medical procedure the state has to provide. Even so, some hospital receptionists treated the researcher with cruelty and disdain ("No one will want to talk with you or help you!"); others referred her to anti-choice organizations that lied to her ("Virtually all young women miscarry anyway"); and still others simply hung up.
And in Chicago, Verónica only had to present her work briefly to grassroots groups working on access to health care and justice for women, before it became clear that situations were so similar in Chicago and Guanajuato that it made sense to set up an exchange program to share ideas, strategies, and work-methods in both directions.
Everywhere, women are beaten, abused, and raped. Family members and public officials ignore them, or worse: they convince women that the women themselves are to blame for the crimes committed against them.
"Women are seen as things, not as human beings," Verónica said to a local journalist this morning. "So much so, that I don't know one single woman who has not at one point or another in her life been sexually harassed, grabbed, or fondled. This happens on the street, at her work, in her home, or at school."
Me either. Including myself.
And for me, this really is the key issue when we talk about access to abortion. It is not only about abortion per se, though it is also about that. It is about choosing who we are, as women, and deciding who and what we allow to touch our bodies. It is about controlling how we want to live our lives, and if, when, how often, and with whom we want to have children. It is about the fact that women are human beings. It is about fundamental dignity.
And perhaps this is what makes abortion such a threatening topic to so many people in Mexico, in Canada, and in the United States. Many of those who oppose equitable and legal access to abortion explicitly or implicitly argue that access to abortion on demand (and free for all) will unleash women's irresponsible nature. Some say - as if it is a bad thing - that such a policy reform might convert women into the equals of men. "It's not conscious," Verónica said to me. "And that's perhaps the worst part of it: many are inherently afraid to let women make choices over their bodies because they sense this would change power and control structures. And as a consequence it would change the world as we know it."
Indeed it would. But change is not a bad thing when what's changing is women being beaten, abused, and raped.
Plus ça change...
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It's easy to get discouraged if you support women's right to decide over their bodies and choices, what with the blanket ban on abortion in Nicaragua passed last week, the imposition of demonstrably harmful "abstinence-only" sexual education in the United States and elsewhere, and the lack of access to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care for women generally. But this month I am getting a much-needed injection of "it's possible."
I am not talking about the U.S. elections, though some electoral campaigns have given me hope that not all politicians have sold out to focus group research.
I am talking about Verónica Cruz.
Verónica Cruz is the co-founder and leader of the organization "Las Libres" (The Free Women) in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. She is also one of only three recipients of this year's Human Rights Watch annual award for exceptional human rights activists. Part of the prize is a three-week speaking tour of the United States and Canada, where I, as her Human Rights Watch host, get to accompany her. Our trip only started Monday, but I am already energized by her enthusiasm and inherent belief that justice is possible. Even for women. Even for poor women. Even for poor, indigenous, illiterate women.
]]>
It's easy to get discouraged if you support women's right to decide over their bodies and choices, what with the blanket ban on abortion in Nicaragua passed last week, the imposition of demonstrably harmful "abstinence-only" sexual education in the United States and elsewhere, and the lack of access to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care for women generally. But this month I am getting a much-needed injection of "it's possible."
I am not talking about the U.S. elections, though some electoral campaigns have given me hope that not all politicians have sold out to focus group research.
I am talking about Verónica Cruz.
Verónica Cruz is the co-founder and leader of the organization "Las Libres" (The Free Women) in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. She is also one of only three recipients of this year's Human Rights Watch annual award for exceptional human rights activists. Part of the prize is a three-week speaking tour of the United States and Canada, where I, as her Human Rights Watch host, get to accompany her. Our trip only started Monday, but I am already energized by her enthusiasm and inherent belief that justice is possible. Even for women. Even for poor women. Even for poor, indigenous, illiterate women.
And even though Verónica and Las Libres work in a hostile environment, their results are as up-lifting as their cause is depressing.
Las Libres is the only organization in the state of Guanajuato that provides legal aid and integral health services for victims of sexual violence. In Guanajuato, as elsewhere in Mexico, sexual violence is rampant and mostly unchecked. By the government's own conservative estimates, a woman or girl is raped every four minutes in Mexico, and more than 90 percent of rape victims don't ever report the crime committed against them to the authorities.
Many women and girls know from experience that they are likely to be aggressively questioned if they go to the police or to the public prosecutors. When I investigated this issue in Mexico last year, I found appalling cases of public officials actively mistreating or summarily dismissing rape victims, even before a claim was filed. Moreover, of the 10 percent rape cases that do get reported, few get properly investigated, and even fewer end with a conviction of the perpetrator. This impunity is a further reason for rape victims not to want to report a crime: if there is no final conviction, what is the point of exposing yourself to abusive police officers and prosecutors?
But it's even worse. Rape victims who have gotten pregnant as a result of the rape bear the brunt of the mistreatment and distrust. This is closely linked with the politically touchy issue of abortion. Abortion is generally illegal in Mexico, and some states still prosecute women for having had abortions. At the same time, all 32 state penal codes include exceptions to that general criminalization. The only exception that is valid in all of Mexico is legal abortion for rape victims. This means that rape victims in theory have a right to a safe, legal, and free abortion. However, pregnant rape victims who ask authorities for help to obtain such an abortion meet with multiple obstacles, both in the justice and health systems, ultimately impeding access.
In fact, in the state of Guanajuato, not one single rape victims has been granted access to a legal abortion by the authorities during the 30 years the penal code exception has been on the books.
Luckily, rape victims in Guanajuato now have somewhere else to go with their plight: Verónica Cruz and Las Libres. Las Libres provides the mental and physical health services the state should be providing but doesn't. Las Libres convinces women, through sustained support and consciousness-raising, that impunity is fought with the law: if rape victims agree to report the rape, Las Libres will provide them with the necessary legal aid. And if rape victims are pregnant and find they want to terminate the pregnancy, they are given the choice they are legally entitled to.
I have seen Verónica's presence in a rape victim's home change almost tangible despair to hope in a matter of minutes, just from Verónica's compassionate support and direct assistance. "Women, and in particular poor women, are used to thinking that they don't have a right to justice," Verónica told me today. "We show them it's not true. Justice is a human right. And it is possible."
Of course, victims of sexual assault still face a number of obstacles in accessing justice and health services in Guanajuato as elsewhere in Mexico. But with Verónica's and Las Libres' sustained pressure, the government can no longer ignore their obligation to improve this situation. And this is already a big step forward.
Over the next three weeks, I'll be blogging from the road with Verónica Cruz. For more information on Verónica, please click here.
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