CEDAW Committee Holds Elections; Pro-Abortion
Members Re-Elected
By Samantha Singson
(NEW YORK - C-FAM) States'
parties to the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) convened
at United Nations headquarters in New York this week to
elect new members to the 23-member CEDAW Committee. Nineteen
nominees vied for eleven vacancies. In a secret
ballot, private citizens from Cuba, India, France,
Finland, China, Brazil, Romania, Jamaica, Kenya, Spain
and Afghanistan were selected to fill the slots.
The CEDAW committee is charged
with monitoring governments on their compliance with the
treaty. According to the convention, committee members
are elected by States' Parties from among their
nationals, but serve in their personal capacity. Members
of the committee should be “independent” and “of
high moral standing and competence.”
CEDAW critics have become
increasingly concerned about the work and composition of
the committee. The committee has taken it upon itself to
question nations on their abortion laws, even though the
abortion is not mentioned in the treaty. The CEDAW
Committee created their own "general
recommendation" that reads abortion into the text,
and in recent years CEDAW committee members have
pressured more than 60 nations on their abortion
legislation.
Prior to this week’s
election, a survey of the committee revealed that half
of the CEDAW committee members are direct employees of
such radical non-governmental organizations as the Latin
America and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of
Women's Rights, the International Council of Women, the
Global Fund for Women and the and the International
Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW).
Radical feminists also ran
campaigns to get their colleagues elected to the
committee.
The International Gay and
Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) urged its
members to help reelect some of the CEDAW Committee’s
most outspoken pro-abortion members, Silvia Pimentel of
Brazil and Malaysia’s Maria Shanthi Dairiam.
IGLHRC’s action alert stated, “There is some concern
that conservative states might do their best to ensure
that partial experts are elected to the Committee
because they do not want the CEDAW Committee to be too
progressive, particularly regarding issues around
culture, religion and reproductive and sexual rights.”
While Shanthi Dairiam was
denied another term on the committee, Silvia Pimentel
will continue on for another four years. During the last
CEDAW committee session alone, Pimentel questioned a
number of states on the abortion laws, pushed wider
access to contraception, pressed Finland on “women of
sexual minorities’ access to health services,” took
issue with Slovakia’s concordat with the Holy See that
protects the right of health care workers to
conscientiously object to taking part in abortions, and
complained that heterosexual marriage perpetuated the
stereotype of women as childbearers.
The CEDAW Committee will next
meet again in Geneva in October to review the reports
from Bahrain, Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Myanmar,
Portugal, Slovenia and Uruguay.
The new members will fill the
vacancies that expire in December and they will serve a
four-year term beginning January 2009. Other members on
the CEDAW Committee include individuals from Bangladesh,
Algeria, Thailand, Ghana, Netherlands, Egypt, Israel,
Slovenia, Mauritius, Japan and Croatia.
Visit us at www.c-fam.org.
|
