By Marie Wilken

Most Americans—80%—believe women’s rights are guaranteed by the Constitution. Most would likely similarly assume that the U.S. is one of 189 countries to have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). But the United States neither constitutionally protects women’s rights nor is a state party to the treaty considered an international bill of rights for women. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and CEDAW share similar stories of failed ratification: both passed the initial stages of adoption in the 1970s but, despite decades of activism, have yet to be ratified, denying women in America access to rights they are entitled to and deserve.

The United States has a current set of laws protecting women’s individual rights, so why are CEDAW and the ERA necessary? Both serve as tools to advance gender equality by codifying women’s rights and providing stronger legal frameworks to combat discrimination. CEDAW is an international human rights treaty that pursues equality between men and women in all areas of life. The UN General Assembly adopted CEDAW in 1979, and a committee to ensure compliance was established in 1982. While Jimmy Carter signed the treaty in 1979, it did not get the necessary two-thirds vote from the Senate to ratify it. This puts the United States in the company of a small number of countries—Somalia, Iran, the Holy See, Sudan, Tonga and Palau—that have not ratified CEDAW.

Ratification would positively influence both policy and court case decisions. When the United States previously considered CEDAW and other human rights treaties, it watered them down with reservations, understandings, or declarations (RUDs)—conditions that limit the applications of the treaties by preventing them from being more stringent than standing domestic law. Assuming that the United States didn’t adopt prohibitive RUDs, CEDAW could significantly strengthen protections of women’s rights.

By ratifying CEDAW, the United States would agree to periodic reviews by the independent experts on the CEDAW Committee to evaluate its implementation of the treaty. Other countries’ reviews have prompted public debate, policy decisions and national equality action plans. CEDAW’s provisions cover many areas in which the U.S. is still lacking, such as equal pay, parental leave, domestic violence and healthcare access. In the courts of countries that have ratified CEDAW, it has been used to strike down a number of laws criminalizing abortion and other laws that contradict the Convention. CEDAW has also often been applied in domestic court cases (see the examples in GJC’s CEDAW Casebank).

Ratification of the ERA would similarly benefit women’s rights. The ERA was introduced by suffragette Alice Paul in 1923 after women won the right to vote. In 1972, pushed by the women’s movement, Congress passed the ERA, but it was three states short of the 38 states needed to ratify a constitutional amendment before the deadline (last year, 35 years past the deadline, Nevada ratified the ERA).

The ERA would constitutionally guarantee women’s equal rights. The main section of the short amendment simply states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Other than the right to vote, the Constitution currently does not explicitly guarantee equal rights for men and women. The 14^th Amendment, created to ensure freed slaves equality, is often interpreted as also including equal rights for women—but it hasn’t been and still isn’t always interpreted this way. The amendment was ratified in 1868, but it wasn’t until 70 years later that women won the right to vote and not until 1971—almost a hundred years after ratification—that the 14^th Amendment was applied against sex discrimination in Reed v. Reed. The 14^th Amendment does not provide the same uniform protections that the ERA would, and its ambiguity endangers women’s rights. The late Justice Antonin Scalia said explicitly that the Constitution does not prohibit sex discrimination. He applied this specifically to the 14^th Amendment, saying, “Nobody thought it was directed against sex discrimination.”

The ERA would defend advancements in women’s rights from such ambiguity in judicial interpretation and changes in legislation. While there are rights for women protected under individual laws, such as Title IX, the Equal Pay Act, etc., these could just as easily be reversed. Only by enshrining these rights in the Constitution will cases on sex discrimination be subject to strict scrutiny, the highest level of judicial review. This would shift the burden of proof to those charged with discrimination, and it would heighten the level of justification, making it equal to the level applied to cases related to race and religion.

Both CEDAW and the ERA remain viable options for women in the United States. Ratification of CEDAW would require the support of 66 senators, and there are two possible strategies for ratification of the ERA—restarting the traditional amendment process or extending the previous deadline to gain the support of the two additional states needed for ratification. In the meantime, progress has been made on both CEDAW and the ERA at the local level, with a Cities for CEDAW movement growing and many states adopting versions of the ERA in their constitutions. In a political climate where women’s rights are increasingly under threat, we should not leave them vulnerable to changes in legislation or judicial interpretation. It's time that the United States justified the majority of Americans' belief that women’s rights are guaranteed by making it true.

GJC's Comunications Intern, Marie Wilken wrote a piece for Ms. on the passing of the health care legislation and how it exemplifies the need for equal represenation of women in the US government.

Read here

Thursday, the UK government released its “Repeal Bill”—the Brexit legislation that converts EU law into domestic law—and it’s missing the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. Inclusion of the Charter was one of the Labour Party’s six requirements for support of the bill. The Charter guarantees a number of economic and social rights such as healthcare and the protection of personal data. Excluding the Charter could limit the ability to appeal bills that threaten those rights in court.

Monday, The Guardian showed “Why Donald Trump is bad for the health of the world – in five charts.” Most of these charts tie back to the Global Gag Rule, which will raise the abortion rate in sub-Saharan Africa, help triple Uganda’s population in 30 years by decreasing access to contraception, hurt funding to more than 60 countries and increase the number of unsafe abortions and maternal deaths. Trump’s 2018 budget also makes deeper cuts to global healthcare funding than ever before.

Wednesday, the United States eliminated its war crimes bureau, the Office of Global Criminal Justice. In Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s restructuring of the State Department, he is downgrading the office to a section of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. The demotion will make it more difficult to shed light on war crimes and prosecute war criminals. Three former U.S. Ambassadors-at-Large for War Crimes Issues condemned the decision in an op-ed, writing, “In effectively closing this office and eliminating the ambassadorial position, this administration removes the most potent diplomatic weapon in its arsenal and sends an unequivocal signal these are no longer priorities for the United States.”

Wednesday, Chile’s senate passed a bill legalizing abortion in some cases: when the pregnancy is a result of rape, when the fetus is unviable and when the mother’s life is at risk. Abortion had previously been illegal under all circumstances. The senate narrowly approved the bill, and it now proceeds to the house. President Michelle Bachelet, former Executive Director of UN Women, campaigned on changing the strict abortion law when she was re-elected in 2014.

Photo credit: UK Department for International Development Flickr (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

By Marie Wilken

After the Holocaust, the world said “never again.” The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, and 142 countries have ratified it since. But we have not fulfilled that promise to prevent and punish. Through genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Darfur and more, millions have died because the international community failed to act sooner. History views this inaction with regret and shame. We hope that we would’ve done better, cared more, acted faster. But we are not.

Right now, ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidi, a religious and ethnic minority in Syria and Iraq. This genocide began with ISIS’s 2014 attack on Sinjar. They killed men and boys and kidnapped, trafficked and raped women and girls. Over 3,000 women and girls remain in captivity. ISIS’s enslavement and rape of these women is prosecutable as genocide under international humanitarian law. In fact, there is evidence that ISIS has committed all five genocidal crimes. The UN recognized it as genocide and urged stronger international action. Last year, the Obama administration also acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide.

Yet little has been done about it. Today is the World Day for International Justice, which celebrates the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the international criminal justice system. However, this system has been underutilized. To prove that the international criminal justice system can be a force for justice, not merely a hollow ideal, the ICC needs to investigate atrocities like the Yazidi genocide.

While showing good intentions is easy, it’s difficult to take action. Political interests often interfere, and the method of prosecution raises numerous questions and challenges. Counter-terrorism concerns are often conflated with or prioritized over action on ISIS’s genocide—but it is important to combat ISIS’s genocide as well as, or along with, terrorism. We do not have to choose between pursuing justice for the Yazidi and security for the rest of the world. Experts discussed this in GJC’s Brain Trust, Reconciling International Laws on Genocide and Counter-Terrorism, last month. Participants agreed that the counterterrorism framework fits today’s model of international cooperation better than the framework of the Genocide Conventions, and it is easier for prosecutors to use a terrorism lens. However, this can ignore the gendered impact of the genocide. In addition to providing justice for the Yazidi community, genocide prosecution would help delegitimize ISIS and combat its terrorism.

The World Day for International Justice should be a reminder that we need to not only recognize ISIS’s treatment of the Yazidi as genocide but also treat it as such. Inaction not only hurts the Yazidi today, but it could also worsen situations in the future. Brain Trust participants discussed how impunity could encourage future discrimination against communities like the Yazidi. It widens the gap between law and action on genocide, and sending a message that the international community can or will not act on genocide could spur similar tragedies in the future.

We are all bystanders to this genocide, and we determine whether this will go down in history as another failure to meet the legal and moral obligation to prevent genocide. Genocide is not a problem of the past; it is our problem and our opportunity to do better.

To celebrate the World Day for International Justice, GJC released a podcast on prosecuting genocide. We interviewed Stephen Rapp, a lawyer who has helped prosecute genocide, including in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and served as the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice. Listen to this episode of That’s Illegal! on iTunes or Soundcloud, and read outcomes document from our Brain Trust here.

Photo credit: OSeveno (CC BY-SA 4.0)