GQUAL: Bringing Women to the Bench and to the Table for Beijing+20

Cindy Soohoo  introduces one of her CUNY students, who writes the following post:

By Katy Naples-Mitchell

This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women – a convening on women’s human rights that produced the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Recent press coverage of the anniversary has focused on the Beijing Declaration’s relationship to the new sustainable development goals. But a new campaign called GQUAL by the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) is taking a different tack by focusing on women’s representation in international positions of power.

What does Beijing+20 have to do with GQUAL?

Part G of the 1995 Beijing Declaration addressed “Women in Power and Decision-making,” focusing on the strategic objective to “Take measures to ensure women’s equal access to and full participation in power structures and decision-making.” Although the Declaration was primarily aimed at gender parity commitments within Member States, the Declaration also targeted obligations to bring women into the fold in the upper echelons of international decision-making. For example, in paragraph 193(a), the Declaration explicitly called on the UN to “achieve overall gender equality, particularly at the Professional level and above, by the year 2000….”

Fast-forward to today:

CEJIL’s new GQUAL campaign reveals the significant shortfalls in reaching these gender equality goals and frames the issue as a violation of states’ obligations to respect the principle of non-discrimination. According to the GQUAL campaign launch materials, as of June 2015, women occupied only 21% of all positions within the main international and regional tribunals. In most cases, member states are responsible for nominating and electing candidates for these positions. Not only are they falling short on their non-discrimination obligations, but states also continually fail to circulate transparent guidelines that respect gender parity to ensure equality in candidate nominations and voting processes.

GQUAL calls for bringing awareness to, and ultimately correcting, the severe gender imbalances in international tribunals and monitoring bodies – putting the onus on states to nominate qualified women judges to serve on international tribunals. The GQUAL campaign’s strategies will include:

Publicizing the current lack of gender parity within international mechanisms and tribunals

  • Growing grassroots support for gender parity
  • Disseminating information regarding available positions
  • Demanding transparency behind selection processes and enforcement guidelines

The campaign launch is timely, not only because of the Beijing+20 anniversary but also because of statements out of Geneva just this week. On Tuesday at the 30th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, UN High Commission for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein spoke about the lack of gender parity in UN human rights bodies and the “need to do better than our societies…to lead by example.” Mr. Al Hussein reminded Member States that at its 6th session in 2007, the Human Rights Council had encouraged states to nominate more women to human rights treaty bodies, mechanisms, and international courts and tribunals. He remarked that he pledged to undertake his own efforts to correct continuing imbalances, including refusal to take part in any panel that does not include women experts and to improve gender parity within his office, where “although women are 57% of staff graded ‘Professional’ and above, they still represented barely one-third of senior managers.”

Originally posted in Human Rights At Home Blog-A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2015/09/gqual-bringing-women-to-the-bench-and-to-the-table-for-beijing20.html