Linking women’s organizing worldwide to the United Nations meant, for many activists, a new language, culture, and tradition, often bewildering to outsiders. At the United Nations, activism is centered on “working sessions” to produce consensual documents through an almost interminable process of negotiating word choice (Merry 2006a, ch. 2). Ostensibly about such questions as whether to add qualifying language (e. g., “as soon as possible”) to documents obligating state commitments, these debates are also about the ways in which different states understand and commit to women’s equality. This “wordsmithing” was situated within other U. N. traditions. Importantly, in the 1970s, resistance was divided into three distinct international movements: national liberation, human rights, and women’s rights (Fraser 1987, 6). Within this context, women’s issues were framed as about equality and discrimination, such as in the first and only women’s convention, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which was passed in 1979 but had been drafted a decade earlier (Keck and Sikkink 1998).
Violence against women was different from the typical women’s issues raised at the United Nations because the concept’s central assertion was women’s right to bodily integrity. In this way, violence against women could be connected to human rights (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 721). Despite the inclusion of slavery and racial discrimination, which “also occur in the private sphere at the hands of private actors” (Bunch 1995, 14), when it came to including women, human rights had been argued to be only “state-sanctioned or — condoned oppression.” The U. N. venue and the new solidarity among transnational feminists facilitated a critique of international human rights law as “gendered” because of its “artificial distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres” (Peters and Wolper 1995, 2, 7). Gender violence, they argued, should not be excluded just because it was often committed by private actors in intimate and domestic contexts; states should be held accountable for preventing or at least addressing such violence. Organizing in the Global South against torture and rape of political prisoners further illuminated the link between gender violence and human rights (Friedman 1995, 22). By the 1990s, both human rights and women’s rights activists were declaring that “women’s rights are human rights,” a shift in thinking so significant that it is now almost impossible to talk about women’s issues in any other way at the United Nations.
This new way of thinking and organizing allowed violence against women to move onto the intergovernmental agenda. While CEDAW made no mention of the concept of “violence against women,” women’s human rights activists scored a big coup when the governments at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights agreed to include violence against women in the Vienna Declaration and Programme for Action (see appendix 1). The same year, the United Nations passed the (nonbinding) U. N. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, elaborating forms of gender violence, including rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and trafficking in women. In 1995, at the next major U. N. women’s conference, the Beijing governmental conference and parallel Huairou NGO forum, violence against women was central, and the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) established violence against women, including trafficking in women, as one of the twelve areas of central concern. Violence against women had become important for both women’s rights and human rights activists, bringing unprecedented attention to this so-called women’s issue and related activism.
Aligning violence against women with human rights also extended the U. N.’s modes of intervention (Merry 2006a, 48—50). The creation of international documents creates global norms—the U. N.’s policy—and the new salience of gender violence gave more power to these norms. In addition, the United Nations has complaint mechanisms in which NGOs can send representatives to lobby government representatives, including through the Commission on the Status of Women, CEDAW (as of 2000), and the Commission on Human Rights. Endowed with the power to investigate complaints, the High Commission on Human Rights can also appoint an expert—or special rapporteur—to travel to particular countries to follow up on charges of human rights abuses. In 1994, as mandated by the Vienna Declaration, the commission appointed a special rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, whose personal strengths brought even more attention to gender violence. In 2004, the commission appointed a special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children.
Finally, the United Nations can regulate treaty compliance, such as the compliance to CEDAW, through periodic hearings on country reports to the treaty committee. In contrast to the commissions, the treaty committees are constituted not by government representatives, but by experts who are not supposed to represent their respective governments. Although violence against women was not originally a part of CEDAW, the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendations 12 (1989) and 19 (1992) requested that gender violence be included in countries’ reports.
Unfortunately, none of these U. N. mechanisms has been very powerful at enforcing human rights, not to mention women’s rights. The Commission on Human Rights has been highly troubled, undermined by members such as Sudan, Libya, and Zimbabwe, which not only are gross human rights violators, but used membership as a way of protecting themselves from condemnation. In 2006, in an attempt at reform, the commission was replaced with a new body, the Human Rights Council, but its first few years suggested little improvement. In 2007, a proposal was even circulated to eliminate most of the rapporteurs. The Commission on the Status of Women has been weakened by the predominance of conservative governments in the world. In this context, CEDAW hearings may be the most effective U. N. mechanism for monitoring women’s rights because they are still under the radar.1