IDEOLOGY DISTORTS TREATY OBLIGATIONS

Feminist activists such as Hilary Charlesworth are stridently critical of Australia’s refusal to date to sign on to the new UN Convention for the Elimination of all Discrimination Against Women Protocol (CEDAW Protocol). The Protocol is an international complaints mechanism for individuals and possibly groups to bring their grievances against their governments (admissible only after domestic remedies have been exhausted) before the CEDAW ‘experts’ for judgment and resolution.

But our government’s refusal to sign so far may be more a matter of wily self-preservation than of isolationist recalcitrance.

Judging from Australia’s experience with the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Toonan and Edward Young cases), there is a real likelihood of finding that some years down the track the CEDAW Protocol will be used against the Australian government to force upon the Australian people ideologically driven social change that could not be effected domestically through the ballot box and parliamentary law processes.

The very real danger in signing on to the Protocol is that the CEDAW Convention will be reinterpreted by CEDAW Treaty Monitoring Committee to advance pet radical feminist causes like mandatory decriminalization of abortion, mandatory removal of conscience rights for doctors who refuse to provide abortion ‘services’, IVF for single and lesbian women, and mandatory legalization of same-sex ‘marriage’ for lesbians.

My own experience of many UN drafting sessions is that consensus documents are never reached easily—there is no such thing as a laissez-faire treaty-making process. On the contrary, the wording of treaty documents is always painstakingly negotiated. The intention is to reach universal agreement for what are understood to be universal principles.

Real problems arise, however, when committees, exceeding their mandate, try to invent and enforce additional new obligations they claim to be able to read into the original treaty. Some international lawyers such as Hilary Charlesworth and Justice Kirby favour such “creative new interpretations”. But other jurists such as Heribert Golsong have cautioned UN committees against too broad an interpretation of treaties. He slams expansive readings as acts “of usurpation of overreaching power” beyond the confines of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969): “A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty…”

The UN CEDAW Committee, which monitors the elimination of discrimination against women, has made an art form of extrapolating dubious new obligations from those already recognized. For example:

v The Committee has interpreted an innocuous agreement (Article 12 CEDAW) that provides women with health care and adequate nutrition during pregnancy and lactation as requiring Croatia and Italy to override the conscientious objections of doctors who do not want to perform abortions;
v The Committee reprimanded Belarus for celebrating Mothers’ Day, declaring that it was in breach of the Convention because it encouraged women’s traditional roles;
v The Committee condemned China for “perpetuating the identification of women with children” by naming the central policy-making bureau “The National Working Committee on Women and Children”. China was also chastised for labour laws that “overemphasize the protection of women”;
v China was directed to increase the number of men’s vasectomies to achieve numerical equality with women’s tubal ligations.

Increasingly ludicrous pronouncements by UN committees are bringing the treaty-monitoring system into disrepute, and dissipating the international respect initially earned. Is it any wonder that countries like Australia might approach signing another Protocol with some scepticism?

Certainly Australia would be wise not to sign on to the CEDAW Protocol until the CEDAW Committee is reformed.

We want a more equitable representation of the mix of all the major philosophical and legal approaches among the UN member countries in accordance with Article 17(1) of CEDAW’s founding charter.
We want the Committee to reform the totalitarian Soviet-style interrogation/indoctrination tone and the laboured, ideologically-correct language (feminist claptrap) in which it conducts its sessions.
We want the Committee to stick to the most serious and urgent abuses of those rights which have been universally agreed by member countries to be genuine human rights to be protected by the Convention.
We want the Committee to concentrate on the massive abuses of women’s human rights around the world and to quit getting side-tracked into advancing radical feminist social-engineering projects.
We want the Committee to recognise and respect the fact that it has no mandate to take on a judicial activist role to define and promote “new” human rights for women, nor to force onto UN members new interpretations of the Convention that have never been agreed upon by UN members, who have in good faith signed on to the Convention.

It is a mockery of genuine human rights that the CEDAW Committee wastes valuable time and resources dealing with vexatious complaints fabricated by pampered, highly articulate, well-financed radical feminists trying to impose radical policy from on high, rather than through the tedious democratic process of convincing the electorate of the need for change.

In short, the CEDAW Committee is not to be trusted to administer the powers of the Protocol while it continues to be dominated by ideologues with the zeal of Silvia Pimentel who put their own radical feminist stamp on the CEDAW Committee’s consideration of abortion “rights”, lesbian “rights” and sexual autonomy “rights” for adolescents.

An example of how an international Convention (CEDAW) subverted domestic democratic processes

In July 2000, Justice Sundberg of the Federal Court handed down one of the most controversial decisions of recent times in McBain v Victoria. Sundberg J decided that certain provisions of the Infertility Treatment Act 1995 (Vic) that restricted access to assisted reproductive services to married women or women in heterosexual relationships were inconsistent with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Commonwealth) and thus inoperative. The Sex Discrimination Act was enacted by the Hawke government to implement the signing and ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) signed in 1980 by the Fraser government and ratified by Hawke in 1983.

The State of Victoria did not appeal the Sundberg decision, indeed, Victoria had not presented any argument to the Court on the question of validity. In the absence of an active respondent, Sundberg J had granted the application of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (the Bishops) and the Australian Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church (the Episcopal Conference) to appear as amicus curiae, (friends of the Court) but this of course did not permit the Bishops or the Episcopal Conference to appeal the decision. In the absence of any appeal, the Bishops sought to challenge the decision in a different way — by seeking certiorari (intervention by prerogative writ) in the original jurisdiction of the High Court. The High Court unanimously dismissed the Bishops application in 2002 on the basis that they had no standing.

The Howard government had indicated it would introduce legislation to amend the SDA and override the Federal Court's decision, but had done nothing by the time it lost government in 2007. This is how a seemingly innocuous Convention, CEDAW, which was "sold" to the Australian public in 1980 as a means of eliminating discrimination against women in employment and the provision of goods and services, led directly to the "rights" of single and lesbian women to IVF and Assisted Reproductive Technology. It also leads directly to the elimination of the role of men as fathers for these children manufactured for single and lesbian women.

Needless to say there is nothing in CEDAW to establish abortion or lesbian rights, but this is how activist judges can interpret international Conventions and make them customary domestic law.

The sex-selective abortion of unborn female children is one of the worst aspects of the abortion culture of death.

And the silence from feminists, those ardent defenders of “women’s rights” is deafening. Here’s an account of an attempted sex-selection abortion in India, my country of birth, reported by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews editor:

Muzaffar Nagar, India -- A woman in India has been killed who refused requests from her husband and his family to undergo a sex-selection abortion on her unborn baby girl. Neelam Kumar, who lived in Samaspur village in northern India, was allegedly strangled to death by her in-laws.

The victim's brother, Sushil Kumar, filed a complaint with police and alleged that his sister was killed yesterday (August 24th) after refusing the abortion.

According to a UPI report, Kumar said Neelam's body was cremated and that her husband’s family informed no one of her death and cremation. Police are apparently searching for Neelam's in-laws, who are reportedly on the lam.

Sex-selection abortions and forced abortions are a significant problem in India, where cultural mores favor the birth of boys and parents are forced to pay huge dowries for a woman's marriage.

In April, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called sex-selection abortions, and the gender ratio problems they have produced, a "national shame" and said the laws need better enforcement. Singh noted that the sex-selection abortion problem is causing an "alarming" change in the nation's male-female ratio, with 927 girls born in 2001 for every 1,000 boys. That's down from a 962-1,000 split in 1981.

"This indicates that growing economic prosperity and education levels have not led to a corresponding mitigation in this acute problem," Singh said, according to an International Herald Tribune report.

"No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilized world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women," the Prime Minister said. He described sex-selection abortions as "inhuman, uncivilized and reprehensible."

In Isaiah 49:15 it is written: "Can a woman forget her child that she not have compassion on the fruit of her womb?...” Neelam Kumar was a mother who paid with her life because she could not abandon her unborn daughter.

Rita Joseph is a veteran of UN international human rights conferences including the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Cairo, 1994 and the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, 1995. She was on the Australian government’s delegation to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development + 5 in New York (1999), and served as adviser to Australian Senator Harradine at the United Nation’s General Assembly Special Session on Children (Children’s Summit) in 2002. She has participated in many of the UN Commission for the Status of Women (CSW) sessions in New York, and in some of the preliminary meetings to the drafting of the CEDAW Protocol.