The Second Statements in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/02

Article 2

States Parties condemn discrimination against women in all its forms, agree to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women and, to this end, undertake:

(a) To embody the principle of the equality of men and women in their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation if not yet incorporated therein and to ensure, through law and other appropriate means, the practical realization of this principle;

(b) To adopt appropriate legislative and other measures, including sanctions where appropriate, prohibiting all discrimination against women;

(c) To establish legal protection of the rights of women on an equal basis with men and to ensure through competent national tribunals and other public institutions the effective protection of women against any act of discrimination;

(d) To refrain from engaging in any act or practice of discrimination against women and to ensure that public authorities and institutions shall act in conformity with this obligation;

(e) To take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women by any person, organization or enterprise;

(f) To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices which constitute discrimination against women;

(g) To repeal all national penal provisions which constitute discrimination against women.

Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Now, of the documents covered in the last week or so including The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2), Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3 and Article 13, and the Istanbul Convention Article 38 and Article 39.

The purpose of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women is grounded around the Committeeon the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which is independent experts, as a body of them, who monitor the implementation of the convention.

There are 23 experts from around the world who have specializations in women’s rights. With the document, we find one of the more prominent documents devoted to the fundamental human rights and protections of the bodies of women. As stated in some other recent work, the documents around the world are integral to the maintenance of the increased equality and freedom for women.

In the opening section of Article 2, we find the statements about the condemnations by the relevant states, who sign onto it. Those states defy individuals or groups within their societies who would deny women equal status to the levers of the country in any form. It is about the prevention of discrimination against women. As stated:

States Parties condemn discrimination against women in all its forms, agree to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women and, to this end, undertake: 

Not the precision in the terminology about the condemnation of the discrimination of women in particular and all forms in general. Women.. in general… discrimination… and condemnation, these terms provide the thorough foundation for the equality of women in the world. Indeed, not only the condemnation of these discriminatory measures against women, which can be found in all areas of the world but also the means by which to do it.

“All appropriate means and without delay” meaning some flexibility of “appropriate” but any means in theory with haste as the operating time for the prevention of discrimination against women within the states who have signed onto the document. The purpose then, of course, lies in the matter of women as an equal of man, of men and women as equals insofar as the practice can reach the theoretical.

This leads to subsection (a), which states:

(a) To embody the principle of the equality of men and women in their national constitutions or other appropriate legislation if not yet incorporated therein and to ensure, through law and other appropriate means, the practical realization of this principle;

This section speaks into the international norms around the “principle” to be embodied, an embodied principle in which women and men are seen as equals. Some religious faiths speak of a spiritual equality. It seems abstract in the sense of this principle while also playing into an embodied sense of equality between the sexes.

If men and women within their particular nations signatories to this convention, then the efforts work within the ethical precept bounds of an embodied equality. This can come in the form of a legislation or of a national constitution, or, of course, both. The purpose of having the formal national documentation comes from the need for an ensured equality in actuality or in the reality of the state.

In Article 2(b), we find the following:

(b) To adopt appropriate legislative and other measures, including sanctions where appropriate, prohibiting all discrimination against women;

The principle as an ethic or moral precept set into the constitution of the state and in legislation for the prevention of discrimination and the assurance of equality of men with women forms the basis in theory for the practical realization spoken in Article 2(a). The next part of the practical realization of equality emerges in the form of a formal adoption in legislation and elsewhere in the country for women’s equality.

In other cases, there will need to be the sanction of practices deemed unequal for women with men or for giving power without merit of men over women. For the former, we can look into the practice of sati. In these cases, we find the women thrown onto the funeral pyre to die a horrific death on fire, where the encomium may be stated for the husband and then the wife is thrown on his funeral pyre.

If the wife dies first, insofar as I know, the husband is not burned to death. In fact, the issue for the women seems far more brutal and unfair. In the case of a practice where men have more power than the women, we can find the obvious case in the Guardianship laws. The woman must travel with a male relative as a guardian to protect her, in theory.

The purpose is to purportedly protect women with the assertion or tacit assumption, or premise, of women as men’s unequal and weaker with men as predators and, therefore, women need to be protected and, in its core manifestation, owned by the men in where they can go, with who, for how long, and why what means in their lives.

The ending of these laws would provide further equality for women in terms of the unequal nature of the relations between men and women. We do not know the full capacities of women; indeed, we do not know the full capacities of men until the relations of the sexes comes to its realization, not by some inevitable force of the world but by the hard work of individuals with a hoped-for tomorrow.

(c) stated:

(c) To establish legal protection of the rights of women on an equal basis with men and to ensure through competent national tribunals and other public institutions the effective protection of women against any act of discrimination;

With the national constitution and the legislation, and then the adoption of said, the development of the legal protection of women on an equal footing or basis with men can better be maintained or if violated then prosecuted as discrimination against women under Article 2 of the convention. This creates furtherance of a strong foundation for the legal equality of women.

In my own country, women did not have the equal right to vote for a very, very long time. It took several decades since the formal founding of the full country for the suffragists to win some ground and have women garner the right to vote. In a democracy, as far as I am concerned, if you do not have the right to vote, then you do not count as a legal person because a democracy amounts to, in more updated and modern parlance, one person one vote.

The state or national tribunals should remain competent. This seems in direct alignment and isomorphism with the idealized stance of an embodied principle or ethical precept inhered in the conceptualization of an equal stance of women and men. In order to maintain this and judge the validity or invalidity of purported injustices or justices, a competent arbiter or set of them needs to stand in the place of judge or judges to make these principles as realized in the world as possible.

Other public institutions can be used in this manner to protect women against unequal treatment, for feminists and allies, and other interested parties; the use of the public institutions and the need for a competent set of national tribunals seems necessary for the implementation of an equal society. In Canada, we can see movements to have those social and political movements attack themselves through the framing of the debates and public discussions.

If we take the phrase “radical left,” we can see the stance there. When, in fact, the right acts in radical ways through general assaults on the public whether the sexual education programs, the healthcare system, efforts to imbue public institutions and health programs with distrust, and to marginalize the dissident voices and demonize the poor and beatdown as the real criminals when others with power and influence and wealth can smoke crack in public office, work to dismantle the sexual education program consulted to and implemented with the assent of the general public and others.

This tangles the debates and shifts focus on real efforts to undermine the poor and marginalized from mobilizing to act in their best interests rather than the interests of the wealthy. We can see this in stoking of Cold War fears of communists, Marxists, and multiculturalists and efforts to reinstantiate magical thinking through vague definitions of terms and sloppy interdisciplinarity to formulate narratives to redirect attention from the undergirding problems in the society with attempts to attack women’s rights and the livelihood of poor children in this country.

This also shows in the work of the human rights tribunals and the demonization of them and then the work to take any partial mistake and blowing this particular out of proportion to derogate the class enemy. The academics and intellectuals work in line with this at times because this benefits them. All around, we see these attacks to distract attention, attempt to undermine coalition building between poorer peoples, and work to disenfranchise these people further and remove their sole methodologies for better lives and protection of their rights and interests.

If these people can be distracted through religious fundamentalism and magical thinking, this becomes the basis for the further marginalization of the general population that serves to disempower them. That would amount, in all this, to an attack on the general population from multiple angles, but the public is catching on and rejecting the institutional narratives fed through these channels that amount to lies.

The basis for the equality of women must come from these conventions and documents on an international stage to provide a higher-order mechanism to protect the least among us. The competent tribunals form one basis of this, for an “effective protection” of the rights and privileges of women.

Which then leads into Article 2 (d), as follows:

(d) To refrain from engaging in any act or practice of discrimination against women and to ensure that public authorities and institutions shall act in conformity with this obligation;

Within this particular article, we the “refrain” of an engagement in discrimination. Again, the term “any” is used, oft-used in the document, here to mean all. It amounts to a statement like “any and all” or “under any circumstance” found in other documents. The point is to keep on with the theme of the highest possible ideals, which does seem to imply a utilitarian ethic of a form.

In fact, John Stuart Mill, no doubt in conjunction with the help of Harriet Taylor Mill, mentioned the “Nazarene” (Jesus Christ) as another individual who developed an isomorphic ethic with him, similar morality, with the Golden Rule formulated in the New Testament Gospel accounts of the sayings of Christ.

Utilitarianism amounts to the Christian ethic. The ideals for non-discrimination against women become Abrahamic in religious tone and Utilitarian in secular garb. It seems interesting to note the similarities noted by the founder of one faith, or one claimed by many to found a faith, and another who founded an ethic and started much of the philosophical grounding for the modern women’s equality movement.

Ethics relates to how we deal with one another and not as individual atomized units. It does have a metaphysical quality about it. The obligation of acting in accordance with this highest good for all, in particular women in this case, through the reduction in harm via decreases in discrimination against women. Duly note, the public authorities and institutions have an obligation to act in accordance or conformity with the obligations set out in the convention.

(e) follows in this pattern for Article 2, stating:

(e) To take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women by any person, organization or enterprise;

No individual or collective entity may discriminate against women. It is one of the most efficient statements of a Golden Rule ethic in the document with the individual and collective levels of responsibility to women writ large, as a category. Again, the echoing of the sentiment with the “appropriate measures.”

Whether persons, organizations, or enterprises – public or private, individual or collective, everyone remains answerable to rules of equality.

In Article 2(f) of the convention, it states:

(f) To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices which constitute discrimination against women;

The activism can take effect more thoroughly with further gravitas than otherwise. Because the emphasis is on the ability of the or the right of individuals, whether women or men, in a society bound to the convention to implement changes to the legislation. This could be in the modification of the current laws, which may need some form of alteration to make them better suited to the times.

Others may be completed outdated including Guardianship laws or the bans on abortion, where the abolishment of either would provide a stronger ability for women to exercise their rights to life and bodily autonomy. Often, women are denied those rights and privileges even when they are provided for men. It becomes an unbalanced equation unsuited to the modern world.

A world, probably, heading towards either authoritarianism or further freedom and autonomy of individual persons. The individual ability without precedent in the history of the world except insofar as that developed in some of the anarchist traditions of the Indigenous peoples around the world but with the caveat of a cleanliness and quality of life in abundance never before seen in the history of the world; while at the same time, we destroy many of the prospects for decent human existence in other forms and the abundance and diversity of life extant, organisms other than ourselves.

No custom or practice may be the basis for the discrimination against women. In addition, the customs of a culture standing in place to restrict the capacities and livelihood of women. The legal and social-cultural frameworks for the historic and present discrimination against women become untenable in the light of updated standards.

In a way, these do not by necessity reject the Golden Rule ethics found in religious traditions. With a recognition of a serious lack of women in the stories of the religious traditions and narratives, the religious traditions and narratives could inculcate an updated version of themselves with an expansion of the moral and ethical sphere to women as full person through the natural extension of the Golden Rule into heretofore unrecognized areas, especially in popular consciousness.

These decades-old documents represent some of it. They show work to expand the moral sphere to the other sex as others work to expand the same to children, labor, minorities, Indigenous peoples, and others, even artificial constructs or replicative intellects (“artilects”) in the future. The culture and the law can begin to change with the creation and adoption of the provisions necessary for women’s equality.

That leads to Article 2(g):

(g) To repeal all national penal provisions which constitute discrimination against women.

Any across-the-country provision for the discrimination against women forms the basis for something with the need for repeal. The world will take years and decades to do this. However, we see the news cycle with the provisions for women and then the restriction or retraction of those provisions for women.

The continual drawing of the lines here represents or indicates the shifts in the modern world with the third wave or fourth waves of feminism. The waves of the women’s movement devoted to the further shifts in the landscape with ownership to one’s body. The first wave came with the recognition of one’s identity as an equal in a democratic system with universal suffrage.

The next was in the workplace and the home for the ability to work and so on. The newer ones fragment far more than others as the distinctions become greater than the prior generations and, hence, the inability to cope with the complexity of the varieties of women’s rights movements throughout history in the social commentary and in the confusion of third wave and fourth wave.

The battle lines here will continue for some time, as the nations throughout the world with penal provisions constituting discrimination against women seem palpable and sex-distinct with the representation of women as one loose marker for the equality of women around the country. The lack of provisions for equitable and safe access to abortion, for example, amounts to one failure.

The repeal of the discriminations against women throughout the world continue apace and Article 2 represents an important historical document with modern relevance for the equality of women with men and, in turn, the ability for men to become more full human beings with the freedom provided for women and, thus, for themselves, where both sexes win.

—

One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
• Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3 and Article 13.
• The Istanbul Convention Article 38 and Article 39.
• Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
• The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
• Beijing Declaration(1995).
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
• Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
• The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.