Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013

This article examines the impact and effectiveness of the process of state reporting under CEDAW in New Zealand. The particular focus is on the effectiveness of the Concluding Observations (COs) of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee). It concludes that the COs of the CEDAW Committee have not driven policy or legislative changes. This is attributed to the absence of domestic mobilisation in relation to the process of reporting and CEDAW in general, but also to the limited legitimacy and persuasiveness of the CEDAW Committee in the view of Government officials. The experience with several of the COs of the Children’s Rights Committee in New Zealand and some of the COs of the CEDAW Committee in the Netherlands, however, illustrates that COs can be useful. COs can provide additional legitimacy to the demands of domestic actors advocating for change and can, hence, push an issue forward by shifting the terms of the debate.

The complaints mechanism for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted in 1999. Since 2002, when the CEDAWCommittee received the first Communication submitting a claim of violations of rights protected under the Convention, 28 Communications have been dealt with. In twelve Communications the CEDAWCommittee found a violation of the plaintiff’s (officially the ‘author’s’) rights under the Convention. The Committee formulated specific recommendations to the State Party with respect to appropriate compensation for the author as well as to improve policies and/ or adapt legislation. Issues at stake include: – protection against violence against women; – ensure that gender stereotypes do not affect decision-making by judges, lawyers and law enforcement officers; – reproductive rights (involuntary sterilisation, therapeutic abortion, access to adequate, affordable obstetric care). In the four cases in which the followup procedure has been completed the Committee has achieved considerable improvements in the implementation of policies, often thanks to the suggestions of the authors and NGOs involved. The CEDAW’s complaints procedure thus seems to be a mechanism that can strengthen women’s human rights.

Over the last two decades the CEDAW Committee’s recognition of gender-based violence as a form of discrimination against women has made a major impact on how other international human rights organizations, including the Council of Europe and the European Union, approach this problem. As a result, the Council of Europe adopted the ‘Istanbul Convention’ on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, while the European Union strengthened the protection of victims of crimes in the Victims Directive. The CEDAW Committee’s views on the duty to eliminate wrongful gender stereotypes established by article 5 (a) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination confirmed the binding legal nature of this obligation. However, the existence of an independent ‘justiciable’ right not to be subject to gender stereotyping, which subordinates women to men and assigns them a fixed gender role, has not yet been fully ascertained. The article argues that the creation of parallel international regimes of human rights in the area of gender-based violence does not undermine the role of the CEDAW Convention as a Women’s Convention, but enhances the complementarity of various human rights instruments.

Rebecca Brown is a contemporary American lesbian author who has been working mainly in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. This essay grew out of an interview with the author, and it sheds light on the way in which Brown’s writings manage to defamiliarise gender roles and norms, and testify to the importance of writing from a female perspective. Brown’s work is sensitive to the feminisation of nurturing roles and the supposed incompatibility of queers with childcare (hence, with futurity). Other discussion topics included the public character of (homo)sexuality and the historical invisibility of lesbians that Brown’s work takes issue with. The current trend of ‘homonormalisation’, in turn, is crucial to understand the importance of Brown’s concerted attention to those early queer activists who tend to be disregarded nowadays, but whose work remains relevant and, as Brown explains, unfinished. Clearly Brown does not hesitate to address problems within the queer community, as is also exemplified by her refusal to gloss over the taboo topics of same-sex violence and power imbalances within the LGBT-community.

In the summer of 2011 a violent debate erupted in France over the meaning of the term gender. Catholics, parents and educators protested against a manual for biology students deemed to promote a ‘theory of gender’ that might endanger social order and corrupt young adults. The author traces the emergence of gender as a site for political strife in various context. As such the term seems to have replaced the term ‘women’ as a rallying cry for the mobilization of feminists. Gender has not only been a useful concept for feminist researchers and activists, Scott argues, but it has also been used in international politics. In the context of UN committees for policies on women, gender is used to plead for as well as against feminist policies. In addition to being used as an analytical concept, gender has become a contested political concept.

The biographies of two women who played a pioneering role in Dutch politics appeared in 2011: Marga Klompé (1912-1986) and Hilda Verwey-Jonker (1908-2004). That their lives coincided for pretty much the entire 20th century makes comparing their biographies an attractive and insightful venture. This article discusses areas of commonality between the two biographies, while also addressing the diversity of the issues at stake. This more meta-analytic sociological comparison examines the biographical methods employed and relevance of gender.