OUR WORK ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS       Students and faculty working with partners have produced:             Legal briefs mounting constitutional challenges to sex discriminatory laws; Human rights reports documenting abuses against women’s human rights; Proposed legislation to bring discriminatory laws into conformity with regional and international human rights law; and Submissions to international UN human rights monitoring bodies highlighting the state’s violation of its treaty obligations to protect and promote women’s human rights.    SUBMISSIONS TO INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS BODIES Submission and Advocacy with the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Fall 2008 student advocates and faculty, working with the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) – Kenya, submitted a “shadow” or supplemental report on Kenya’s compliance with its obligations to fulfill women’s human rights under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).  The report, submitted to the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR Committee), which oversees the implementation of the ICESCR, highlighted analysis from the Clinic’s Spring 2008 fact-finding investigation to Kenya on women’s property, land, and inheritance rights, as well as information gathered for Fall 2008 test case litigation on the adverse impact on women of laws criminalizing HIV transmission.                                                                                                                                   The joint submission, titled, Kenyan Laws and Harmful Customs Curtail Women's Equal Enjoyment of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, urged the Committee to call on Kenya to: Eliminate the claw-back provision of the Constitution which permits discrimination in matters of “personal law” and customary law, which most deeply and directly impact women’s lives; Pass legislation to harmonize and govern comprehensively marriage and divorce laws, in particular ensuring women’s equal rights to matrimonial property during marriage and at its dissolution; Abolish customary practices that degrade and harm widows, such as forced inheritance of widows by male relatives of the deceased’s husband, or sexual “cleansing” of widows from their dead husband’s spirits (for details, see the clinic student-prepared fact sheet, Compound Grief: Widows in Kenya); Amend the sections of the Sexual Offenses Act and the HIV Prevention and Control Act which broadly criminalize the transmission of HIV with no safeguards for potential adverse impact on women, especially those who lack equal bargaining power in negotiating safe sex practices. The full report is posted on the CESCR Committee’s U.N. website of its 41st Session (scroll down to Kenya; the report is listed among the “Information from other sources”), or click the following for a submission fact sheet. The CESCR Committee’s Concluding Observations, or recommendations for better compliance with the treaty, contained key recommendations and findings from the joint IWHRC and FIDA Kenya report.  Specifically, the Committee called on Kenya to repeal the clawback provision of the Constitution and “ensure that the new Constitution guarantees equal rights of women to matrimonial property during marriage and at its dissolution,” and recommended that Kenya “raise public awareness of the need to abolish laws and customs which discriminate against women.”   The Committee further echoed the clinic’s submission in its concern about “harmful customary practices such as, 'wife inheritance' and 'ritual cleansing' of widows by male relatives of the deceased husband,” and urged Kenya to “criminaliz[e] domestic violence, including spousal rape, and customary practices that degrade and harm women, including ritual 'cleansing' and forced 'inheritance' of widows” (see paragraphs 14 and 22). Partner lawyers from FIDA-Kenya pose with Clinic students and faculty at the CESCR review session of Kenya at U.N. headquarters in Geneva. To ensure due attention to women’s human rights by the CESCR Committee and Kenyan government officials present at the review, the Clinic, in collaboration with the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, participated in the session at the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.  Speaking on behalf of FIDA Kenya and the Clinic, Fall 2008 student advocate, Amber Suitt, delivered an oral intervention to the Committee highlighting the key concerns outlined in the joint submission, followed by a high-level Q&A with Committee experts. Pictured below, Clinic student Amber Suitt prepares to deliver an oral intervention on behalf of FIDA Kenya and the Clinic to the U.N. CESCR Committee. The oral intervention was noted in the official U.N. press release: AMBER SUITT, International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, in a joint report submitted with the Federation of Women Lawyers, said that to better comply with the guarantees under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Kenya must address sex-discriminatory provisions in its Constitution, statutes, and customary law. Although women constitute the vast majority of agricultural labour including 89 per cent of the subsistence-farming labour force, and over 70 per cent of labour in cash-crop production, Kenyan women often lacked any legal claim to the land on which they lived and laboured. Women only held one per cent of registered land titles and only 5 per cent of jointly registered titles. There was no legal requirement that women be consulted when land registered in their husband’s name was sold. Women could lose in a moment, without their knowledge—much less their consent—the home where they lived and toiled for decades. Under some customary laws, women were prohibited from managing or controlling land—a serious barrier to realizing their economic, social and cultural rights. Numerous statues relied on discriminatory customary laws to govern land disputes, especially disputes concerning trust land and agricultural land on which the majority of Kenyans lived.  - U.N. Press Release, NGOs Address Committee  On Economic, Social And                                               Cultural Rights Committee (Nov. 3, 2008). The Clinic, along with FIDA Kenya representatives, advocated directly with Committee experts, and international and local NGO representatives about the rights of women in Kenya, utilizing widely-distributed clinic-produced factsheets summarizing the alternative submission  and specific factsheets on violation of widows’ rights in Kenya. As a testament to the clinic’s effective advocacy, the closing press release of the Committee’s review of Kenya noted that “[a]mong issues raised by the Committee Experts were questions regarding . . . the applicability of the principle of non-discrimination in national policies . . . and the continuation of forced evictions; and measures taken to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence among the population, especially among women.” Submission to the U.N. Committee on Race Discrimination In July 2008, the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), the only public interest law group in Namibia, and IWHRC jointly compiled a “shadow” or supplementary letter to the UN Committee of experts which oversees the implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The letter aimed to inform the CERD Committee ahead of its review of Namibia’s compliance with the Convention on July 29-30, 2008. Based on the Clinic and LAC’s impact litigation work in Fall 2007, the letter outlined examples of the intersection of race and gender discrimination by providing recommendations and highlighting:

• An Apartheid era law, the Native Administration Proclamation of 1928, that still governs key issues of personal law based on a person’s race, and that has an adverse impact on black women, especially at the most vulnerable times of divorce or at the death of a husband or parent; and
• Select customary laws, which, by definition, apply only to black Namibians, and not only contain elements which discriminate against black women, but also exclude them from the protections of civil law, especially in the areas that most closely affect the majority of women, marriage and dissolution of marriage, by either divorce or death.

Fall 2007 Clinic students Virginia Anderson and Jennifer Marcovitz and acting director Tzili Mor compiled the letter.  The submission is available on the official UN CERD Committee website at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/cerds73.htm  (scroll down to Namibia).

Based on its review of Namibia’s compliance with the Convention Against Race Discrimination, on August 15, 2008, the CERD Committee issued Concluding Observations for the government drawing upon the suggested recommendations in the joint IWHRC and LAC submission addressing sex and race discriminatory customary laws on inheritance and marriage.

The CERD Committee of international experts officially reiterated that it “remains concerned about aspects of customary laws of certain ethnic groups on personal status that discriminate against women and girls, including laws pertaining to marriage and inheritance.”   In para. 11 of the Concluding Observations, the Committee recommended “in particular that the State party urgently ensure that its laws, especially on marriage and inheritance, do not discriminate against women and girls of certain ethnic groups. It invites the State party to consider introducing a system which allows individuals a choice between customary law systems and the national law while ensuring that the discriminatory aspects of customary laws are not applied.”

For the complete text of the Concluding Observations of the CERD Committee to Namibia, click here.

 

FACT-FINDING HUMAN RIGHTS REPORTS AND PROPOSED LEGISLATION

The Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) - Kenya, partnered with the IWHRC to produce, Women’s Land and Property Rights in Kenya: Promoting Gender Equality (2009). The human rights report and proposed Land Equality Bill has been hailed as one of the most comprehensive works on existing laws and practices concerning land and property rights in Kenya.  FIDA Kenya published and distributed the report and bill in country to ensure gender considerations inform ongoing land reform efforts in the wake of post-election violence in December 2008.

In summer 2009, the Georgetown Journal of International Law will publish on-line the Clinic’s fact-finding investigations and resultant reports and proposed bills on women’s inheritance, land, and property rights in Kenya and Swaziland.  The pieces provide a thematic comparison of key women’s rights in eastern and southern Africa, including the right to equality, property, housing, health, and to be free from gender-based violence and harmful customary practices.

Kenya
(The reports are based on Spring 2008 fact-finding investigation by the Clinic and partners)

• Empowering Women with Rights to Inheritance: A Report on Amendments to the Law of Succession Act Necessary to Ensure Women’s Human Rights
• Women’s Land and Property Rights in Kenya: Moving Forward Into a New Era of Equality

Swaziland
(The reports are based on Spring 2007 fact-finding investigation by the Clinic and partners)

• The Promise of a New Constitution: Achieving Equal Inheritance Rights for Women in Swaziland
• Women’s Equal Property and Land Rights Hold Key to Reversing Toll of Poverty and HIV/AIDS in Swaziland

To access these human rights reports and bills, please visit http://www.gjil.org/.

The Georgetown Journal on Gender and the Law has published several of the clinic’s fact finding human rights reports and proposed legislation.

International Women's Human Rights Clinic Report: Divorce Reform: Rights Protections In The New Swaziland
Tamar Ezer, Aisha Glasford, Elizabeth Hollander, Lakeisha Poole, Grant Rabenn, and Alexandria Tindall, published in 8 Georgetown Journal on Gender & Law 883 (2007).

In 2006, The Georgetown Journal on Gender and the Law published a special issue commemorating five years of joint fact-finding projects between the IWHRC and its partners LAWA-Ghana, LAW-Uganda, WLAC-Tanzania, and Swaziland’s SWAGAA.  With articles and essays by past and present Clinic faculty, partners, and students, the issue includes:

Fact-Finding as a Lawmaking Tool for Advancing Women's Human Rights
Tamar Ezer and Susan Deller Ross

Reflections on the Contribution of Georgetown's International Women's Human Rights Clinic to Advancing the Protection of Women's Human Rights in Uganda & Tanzania
Esther Kisaakye

Using Fact-Finding to Combat Violence Against Women in Ghana, Uganda, and the United States: Lessons Learned as a Clinic Student, Clinic Supervisor, and Practitioner
Lisa Vollendorf Martin

Child Marriage and Guardianship in Tanzania: Robbing Girls of their Childhood and Infantilizing Women
Tamar Ezer, Kate Kerr, Kara Major, Aparna Polavarapu and Tina Tolentino

Inheritance Law in Uganda: The Plight of Widows and Children
Valerie Bennett, Ginger Faulk, Anna Kovina and Tatjana Eres

Domestic Violence in Ghana: The Open Secret
Nancy Cantalupo, Lisa Vollendorf Martin, Kay Pak and Sue Shin

Inheritance Law in Tanzania: The Impoverishment of Widows and Daughters
Tamar Ezer

The special issue is available for purchase online.

A human rights report entitled, "A Capital Offense: The Gender Dimensions of Washington D.C.'s HIV/AIDS Crisis" higlights the findings in a joint mission between the Women's Collective and the IWHR Clinic.

The executive summary and full report are available here.

SCHOLARSHIP & TEXTBOOKS

Selected other publications by past and present IWHRC staff include:

Susan Deller Ross, Women's Human Rights:  The International and Comparative Law Casebook (Univ. of Pa. Press, 2008)

Barbara Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Susan Deller Ross, Wendy Webster Williams, Rhonda Copelon, Deborah Rhode, and Nadine Taub, Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice & Theory (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2d ed. 1996).

Johanna Bond, ed., Voices of African Women:  Women’s Rights in Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania (Carolina Academic Press, 2005).

Susan Deller Ross, Polygyny as a Violation of Women’s Right to Equality in Marriage: An Historical, Comparative and International Overview, 24 Delhi Law Review 22 (2002).

Johanna Bond, Intersecting Identities and Human Rights: The Example of Romani Women’s Reproductive Rights, 5 Georgetown Journal of Gender & the Law 897 (2004).

Johanna Bond, The Legal System of Nepal, in Legal Systems of the World, Abc-Clio Publications (Herbert M. Kritzer, ed., 2002).

Johanna Bond, International Intersectionality:  A Theoretical and Pragmatic Exploration of International Women’s Human Rights Violations, 25 Emory Law Journal 71 (2003).

Johanna Bond, The Global Classroom:  International Human Rights Factfinding as Clinical Method, 28 William Mitchell Law Review 317 (2001).

Courtney W. Howland, ed., Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women (New York: St. Martin's Press/London: MacMillan Press, 1999).

Courtney W. Howland, The Challenge of Religious Fundamentalism to the Liberty and Equality Rights of Women: An Analysis Under the UN Charter, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 231 (1997).

Courtney W. Howland, The Hands-Off Policy and Intramilitary Torts, 71 Iowa Law Review 93 (1985).

Tamar Ezer, A Positive Right to Protection for Children, 7 Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal 1 (2004).

Tamar Ezer, Delivery of Legal Services to Children in the Boston Area, 8 U.C. Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy 95 (2004).  

Tamar Ezer, Children's Rights in Israel: An End to Corporal Punishment?, 5 Oregon Review of International Law 139 (2003).

Shannon M. Roesler, Women's Human Rights Abuses in the Name of Religion: An Overview, in The Handbook of Women, Psychology, and the Law (Andrea Barnes, ed.) (2005).

Nancy Kaymar Stafford, International Legal Developments in Review: 2004, International Human Rights, 39 International Lawyer 517 (2005) (co-authored with Lawrence G. Albrecht, Benjamin L. Apt, Myra Frazier, Gloria Jean Garland, Sara Ibrahim, Crispian Kirk, Anne Massagee, Cheryl McLandrich, Mary Milano, Kaoru Okuizumi, Anita Raman, Meredith Rathbone, and Anamika Samanta).

Nancy Kaymar Stafford, A Model War Crimes Court:  Sierra Leone, 10 ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law 117 (2003).