{"id":1824,"date":"2015-09-16T21:48:27","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T21:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/?p=1824"},"modified":"2015-09-17T01:54:08","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T01:54:08","slug":"why-so-few-women-on-international-courts-its-time-for-a-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/why-so-few-women-on-international-courts-its-time-for-a-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Why so few women on international courts? It\u2019s time for a change. Nienke Grossman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why so few women on international courts? It\u2019s time for a change<\/span><\/h1>\n

Nienke Grossman<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The second article in International Law Grrls Gqual series features Nienke Grossman, Associate Professor of Law & Deputy Director, Center for International and Comparative Law for the University of Baltimore, who speaks about the staggering lag of women on international monitoring bodies:<\/h4>\n

You may have heard about the launch of the Gqual campaign to increase gender parity on international law bodies including international courts and tribunals, taking place at the UN on September 17. Here\u2019s a link to the Facebook page if you\u2019d like more information:\u00a0https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/GqualCampaign<\/a>. The point of the campaign is to get states to nominate and vote for more women for these important positions. The campaign is timely and significant because women continue to lag far behind men in decision-making positions on these bodies. Did you know only one woman is serving on the 7 member benches of the WTO Appellate Body, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights? And only one woman sits on the 21-member bench of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea? She also happens to be the only woman ever to serve on that court, in almost two decades.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just written a paper documenting the paucity of women judges on twelve international courts and tribunals in mid-2015 and historically, explaining why there are so few women being elected and proposing solutions. It\u2019s forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law. If you\u2019d like a preview, please download it at\u00a0http:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2472054<\/a>.\u00a0 The article argues, in part, that a limited pool of qualified women is an unpersuasive explanation for the paucity of women on international court benches.\u00a0\u00a0 Proponents of this view argue that women are found in lower numbers in the highest echelons of the legal profession domestically, and therefore, it\u2019s not surprising that they serve in low numbers on prestigious international court benches.<\/p>\n

But if\u00a0the limited pool argument is right, wouldn\u2019t we expect the pool to grow over time, as more women join the legal profession and advance within its ranks? Yet eight of the twelve courts surveyed had fewer women on the bench in mid-2015 than in previous years. Also, states with higher percentages of women lawyers would appoint them in greater numbers than states with fewer women lawyers. The data, however,\u00a0appears to point to a different conclusion.<\/p>\n

It is estimated that half of France\u2019s lawyers are women, yet it has never had a female permanent judge on the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia or Rwanda, the European Court of Justice, the Law of the Sea Tribunal, the International Court of Justice, or the European Court of Human Rights, although French men have served on all of them. (One French woman served as an\u00a0ad litem<\/em>\u00a0judge for the ICTY.) About half of the UK\u2019s lawyers are women, yet no British woman has ever served on the European Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, or the Yugoslav tribunal, although British men have. The UK did nominate Rosalynn Higgins, though, as the first woman ever to serve on the International Court of Justice, in 1995. (Only three more women have been elected to the 15-member ICJ bench in the intervening 20 years.) Although Russian women consist of about half of that country\u2019s lawyers, no Russian woman has ever served on the five international courts where its men have served. On the other hand, China, where women are estimated to hold 20% of legal degrees, has successfully elected Chinese women to the International Court of Justice and the World Trade Organization\u2019s Appellate Body.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to remember that there are not\u00a0that many<\/em>\u00a0international judge positions out there. We are not talking about filling 10,000 judicial seats. On the twelve courts surveyed, there are 195 judicial slots available, and they turn over every few years, depending on the court. You don\u2019t need a very large pool to fill these slots. And there must be more than one woman in a world of 7 billion people who is qualified to serve on ITLOS and the WTO\u2019s Appellate Body, and in the entire populations of the states parties to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the ECOWAS Court.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s a problematic side effect to relying on the pool argument. The pool for international judges could itself be limited due to discrimination and exclusion at the domestic level. So using it to justify lower numbers of women at the international level simply replicates and exacerbates exclusion at the domestic one.<\/p>\n

I hope you\u2019ll check out Gqual in the days to come. It\u2019s time for a change!<\/p>\n

The point of the campaign is to get states to nominate and vote for more women for these important positions. The campaign is timely and significant because women continue to lag far behind men in decision-making positions on these bodies. Did you know only one woman is serving on the 7 member benches of the WTO Appellate Body, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights? And only one woman sits on the 21-member bench of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea? She also happens to be the only woman ever to serve on that court, in almost two decades.<\/p>\n

\u00a0you can find the full original post her<\/strong>e<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why so few women on international courts? It\u2019s time for a change Nienke Grossman The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1824"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1883,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1824\/revisions\/1883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gqualcampaign.org\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}