Volume 2, Number 9

December 11, 1998

UN Feminists Plot to Enforce Radical Agendas Through An Optional Protocol to CEDAW

By Austin Ruse

     (NEW YORK — C-FAM) A paper presented three weeks ago to "The Canadian CEDAW Strategies Meeting," sponsored by the International Women's Rights Project at Toronto's York University, detailed the strategies by which radical-feminist lobbyists hope to advance their agendas through the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In particular, it highlights the importance radical feminists place on securing a new Optional Protocol to CEDAW.

     The paper was written by Shelagh Day, a homosexual lawyer who served as the head of the NGO "Lesbian Caucus" at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. According to Day, "This is an important moment for women's human rights, an important time to develop our capacity to work at the international, as well, as the domestic level. Women, in future, may need to rely more on international human rights instruments and agencies for the protection and promotion of their human rights."

     Day stressed the importance of re-interpreting CEDAW to give it a "substantive equality" content, thereby allowing it to be used to coerce national governments into implementing the anti-life and anti-family agendas that lie at the core of the international radical-feminist platform.  "We must continually be the inventors of the tool we are using," Day commented about CEDAW.

     Radical-feminist lobbyists launched a concerted campaign at last March's Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meetings in New York to obtain a new Optional Protocol as the chief vehicle for enforcing this re-invented understanding of CEDAW. Such "optional protocols," which have already been created in the context of some other UN human rights conventions, bind states who sign the protocols to implementing the decisions made by the international Committees that monitor state compliance with UN conventions. In the absence of such protocols, by contrast, the Committees can only issue non-binding recommendations to national governments.

     Last year's feminist bid to win an Optional Protocol for CEDAW ultimately failed, due to  resistance from a number of UN member states who were unwilling to cede sovereignty to an instrument that is clearly intended to advance radical social agendas.  "Because the model for decision-making in the UN working groups is consensus," Day complained in her paper, "a lot of power rests in the hands of a nay-saying minority of countries who, apparently, wish to delay and narrow the provisions of the Protocol as much as possible."

     Day identified the countries expected to support most strongly the radical feminists' bid to secure an Optional Protocol at the 1999 CSW meetings. They include South Africa, Ghana, Chile, Columbia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Sweden and Liechtenstein. Other prominent but less vigorous supporters are Canada, Austria, Germany, the U.K., France, Italy and Australia. Opposed to this western-dominated coalition of radical-feminist sympathizers will be "a group of active problem-creators-Egypt, China, Cuba, India, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco," Day predicted.

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