The Circle of empowerment: twenty-five years of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

Abstract

This book marks the 25th anniversary of the work of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The job of this Committee is to oversee the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimina tion against Women, which is sometimes confusingly also known as CEDAW and which I will call the Women's Convention. The work of the Committee, which comprises 23 members who are experts in issues affecting women, involves receiving reports from states that have agreed to be bound by the Convention, detailing what they have done to improve the situation of women in their countries. In 1999 an Optional Protocol (an addition to the Convention) was adopted. This meant that complaints from citizens of those states that have agreed to be bound by this addition to the Women's Convention could be brought directly before the Committee. An individual is only allowed to do this once she has used up all the available avenues of redress in her country. Under the Optional Protocol, the Committee is also able to undertake enquiries to investigate reports of grave and systematic violations of women's rights in a country. Additionally, the Committee is able to make statements about how it thinks the Women's Convention should be interpreted and implemented. These statements are known as general recommendations. (Other UN treaty bodies call them general comments.) All of these aspects of the Committee's work are covered in the book. The book, which is edited by two sitting committee members, and which comprises chapters written by both former and current committee members as well as those in the UN who have worked with the Committee, is very informative. It starts with a foreword by the last Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan, in which he calls the Women's Convention 'a landmark, because it aims to secure... rights for women in practice.'It then moves on to look at the Convention 'as a living instrument', providing an overview of the Convention and the manner in which some of its provisions have been interpreted by the Committee. Also considered within this first part, is the impact that the Convention has had on the work of UN agencies and conferences. Following that is a section on 'overarching challenges'. Not surprising in light of the reservations' to the Women's Convention, the two major barriers to the successful implementation of the Convention have been religion and the ill-defined 'culture'. These two excuses,