The UN and UNESCO spend enormous energy and resources in promulgating declarations of rights that are so abstract as to have little purchase on real social inequities. The declarations regularly fail to criticize the structures of discrimination that perpetuate the political, economic, and social subjection of women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women allows States to sign “with reservations.” Multiple signatories take exception to articles guaranteeing women’s freedom of movement, equality before the law, or equal rights in marriage. Saudi Arabia, where women can neither drive, nor vote, and are legally treated as minors, is a signatory. Does the document protect women or sanitize regimes where women do not enjoy even basic freedoms?
Women gather to see a community health worker in Bhaishahi village, Bardiya, western Nepal, June 2012. Photograph: Suzanne Lee for the Guardian
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Attempts to include explicit reference to women’s rights in UN documents are regularly met with charges of Western imperialism and impassioned defenses of “local values.” Bioethics needs to develop a more robust defense of truly universal values, like freedom of speech and movement, as well as a better articulation of human values that emerge out of women’s experience to meet the backlash reported here.
Gotta disagree.
Firstly, I am aware of no country that automatically translates international treaties into local law (though when it comes to trade treaties it can *seem* that way). Even signed and ratified treaties must be drafted into local law (or regulation) equivalents and passed by local legislature (some of which are even democratically elected). IMHO this is as it should be. To do otherwise would be to seriously undermine sovereignty and probably render all international treaties unsignable.
Secondly, what you seem to be suggesting *would* be a form of imperialism (or ethical colonialism) that would not only disempower – even infantalise – local political groups and activists but would almost certainly create a counterproductive backlash that would be more effective in real terms – particularly cultural – than any futile attempt to impose treaty provisions. Unless you backed it with force, as per the Western attempts to bomb Afghanistan into gender enlightenment – and even taking measures as extreme as that don’t seem to be very effective.
Finally I would like to point out that not all bioethicists are universalists. Some of us actually respect the rights of other cultures to find their own moral path without having a foreign template imposed upon them from above.
Overall I think this proposal is as ill advised as the FEMEN campaign to ‘liberate’ Muslim women by ripping their tops off and spouting Islamophobia in the face of widespread objections from Muslim feminists.
International treaties can be used as examples, debating points and opinion levers by the local activists who ultimately are the ones who have to do the real work of liberation. They are not an effective tool for force feeding morality to societies who are not ready to adopt it and nor should they be.
I speak as an Australian Aborigine who would love to see some of the anti-racist provisions of treaties ratified by Australia translated into enforceable local law. But my decades of experience in anti-racist activism convinces me that will never happen until the Australian people are ready for it – and when they are, the treaties will be unnecessary.
We have to liberate ourselves. The UN can’t do it for us even if it really had the will.