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CEDAW ( the Convention on the Elimination of ALL Forms of Discrimination Against Women) is the international human rights treaty for women. During the 54th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the ACLU hosted a roundtable discussion.
Lenora: CEDAW now has been ratified by 186 countries. The U.S. is the only industrialized
democracy in the world and only one of 7 countries that has not yet ratified CEDAW. We stand
with the other countries: Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan and Tonga. It is time for the
U.S. to get on board and ratify CEDAW. It's been 30 years since the convention was drafted
and the U.S. played an important role in helping draft the treaty. Now it's time that the U.S.
finally ratify it. Karen: CEDAW is real. There was a time when
it was perceived as an aspirational document, words on paper, but what difference does this
make to women around the world? 30 years later we can really see that it has an enormous
impact. For those that aren't actively engaging with it, it's in fact an opportunity lost,
I feel. Charlotte: I have watched women throughout
the world use the CEDAW committee as an important arena for monitoring and challenging their
government's polices and I have thought so often if we could have the U.S. there in the
same way that we do with some of the other human rights treaties where we could be saying,
"These are the things that are working and these are the areas that are not" it would
again give us the power of the international movement that we are a part of, behind us.
It is really important that we understand that we as women in the United States also
have a lot to gain from this treaty, from the ratification of this treaty, that we have
many areas in our own lives in which discrimination is certainly still a factor.
Gouri: In the U.S., the rate is astonishingly high as well. 3-4 women die every single day,
3-4 women will have died today, just giving birth to a child. For a country that spends
more on health care than any other country in the world, for a country that spends more
on maternal health than any other portion of health care, it's really unacceptable for
this to be the case. If the U.S. does ratify CEDAW, CEDAW contains within its framework
what we call the basic tenets around which we could prevent issues like maternal mortality
being a reality here. It provides really specific guidelines around what women's health, particularly
maternal health and children's health, should be guaranteed around because it recognizes
special groups of people that need special attention.
Radhika: One more concrete example: when we look at the stimulus money and what kind of
industries it's going to, how is it helping women's employment? Because one of the things
that CEDAW says is that we have the right to non-discrimination in the right to work.
So here we are in a moment of crisis where there's huge levels of unemployment across
the country but where the money is going to, is it helping women's employment? We talked
about Rosie the Riveter but now it's sort of, if you want stimulus money, you have to
be Rosie the Insulator, right, because that's where the jobs are going. So how much money
is going, for example, into daycare? That will give huge numbers of women jobs in the
daycare industry and allow a whole group of other women to go join the labor force. I
mean there's very specific ways we can look at CEDAW as a way to effect the macro economic
policy. Zarizana: I just want to say the U.S. has
lots of good laws but if you study them there is a need to actually tweak those laws with
CEDAW and there is a need to bring the national standards into play and to bring the U.S.
more in-line with international human rights. Radhika: I think ratifying CEDAW will galvanize
a different kind of activism coming on women's issues that we haven't seen in the U.S. in
a long time. Charlotte: ... and that's what, to me, a global
women's movement is about, which is that we understand our fate is intertwined with the
fate of women around the world and it's about both of us.