US Foreign Policy
The acceptance and implementation of international equality standards in the United States would be a significant advance in promoting the international human rights regime and U.S. legitimacy abroad, while at the same time being transformational in the protection of the rights of women at home. No one questions that Americans in general and American women in particular enjoy a higher standard of rights and freedoms than do most people in the world. However, over the last thirty years there have been seismic changes in the global legal landscape, not the least of which is the increasing implementation of international law domestically and the growing consensus that human rights laws are an integral component of international law.
The growth of treaty based and other human rights laws globally means that the US Constitution is no longer the singular "aspirational model" to protect women's rights. There are currently in place longstanding U.S. policies and laws which impede the development of legally enforceable rights to gender equality. These include: the U.S. Supreme Court definition of gender equality, which excludes pregnancy related laws; the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act; the Mexico City "gag rule" on USAID funding; and the bad legal precedents in place due to the corrupting legislative history of both the unratified federal ERA and by the Senate's 1994 and 2002 political concessions on the unratified CEDAW.
Since the Global Justice Center is a legal organization focused on enforcing international law, we are uniquely positioned to ensure that equality jurisprudence requires an examination of the "effect" that even neutral laws have on women's access to other rights, thus ensuring review of laws which restrict reproductive choices. The GJC's United States Foreign Policy work includes:
- Developing strategic international legal arguments and an advocacy plan through a White Paper Series, "New Visions for International Law and U.S. Foreign Policy," which analyzes various challenges and opportunities for the new administration to advance international human rights law at home and abroad.
- Providing legal materials - such the as African protocol on the rights of women, as well as model constitutions or legal analyses of gender rights under various international instruments or domestic transitional justice laws - to demonstrate the transnational development of international law on gender equality.
- Analyzing international law in the judiciary, looking to recent developments in U.S. jurisprudence, such as the recent Supreme Court decision in Medellin v. Texas, and how the ratification of a CEDAW without reservations would impact equality jurisprudence under these precedents.
- Changing the public and private dialogue from one which stresses gender mainstreaming as a policy alternative to one which argues for gender equality as a matter of enforceable and binding international law.