Feminist Rights Agenda Storms UN

The UN was established out of the ruins of a world that had gone to war to avoid ideological domination by a 1000-year Reich. When we consider that, through forty of the UN’s first fifty years, the non-communist sovereign states steered a careful course through the Cold War shoals to defeat global communism, how ironic it seems that our world now stands poised on the cusp of a potentially disastrous surrender to the Western ideology of global feminism.

It is no coincidence that the 20th century, the century of mass education and mass media, has been also a century plagued by powerful, destructive ideologies. It is precisely because of unprecedented access to mass education and mass media that our societies have become so susceptible to the propaganda of new ideologies. Even those traditional bastions of truth and principle, our academia and judiciaries, have caved in to prevailing winds. The United Nations (UN), too, has not proved to be immune to these forces, and indeed has taken up the cause as its own.

Radical Feminism and the UN

Radical feminism, now deeply embedded in the UN Secretariat’s global agenda, is being imposed on countries through the prescriptive documents coming from the UN Conference circuit and from the UN treaty monitoring bodies, especially the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The objective is to bring the radical feminist directives in these documents from their current legally non-binding status into the arena of legally-binding international human rights law.

The basic plan is ingeniously simple. The idea is to couch the feminist agenda in the language of human rights. Under the guise of being obliged to honor a newly-coined set of counterfeit human rights called “reproductive and sexual health rights,” countries are to be constrained by the UN to adopt population control programs dictated by an unholy alliance of radical feminists and population control advocates.

Early population stabilization was the central goal set by the population control lobby at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development ( 1994), and to attain this goal, three major objectives have emerged:

1. To manipulate women into having fewer children than they may want;

2. To teach women and adolescent girls that their fertility threatens the sustainability of the world’s resources, and

3. To promote the sterility of homosexual relationships as ecologically responsible.

These objective have dovetailed nicely with the three major objectives of the feminist rights agenda:

• To make access to abortion a basic human right;

• To free adolescent sexuality from parental supervision by educating adolescents in the “new” human rights, a right to abortion services without parental notification, and

• To assign the same rights and privileges to homosexual relationships as to traditional marriage and the founding of the family.

Indeed this feminist agenda has benefited immensely from affiliation with the population programs devised by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the well-financed population control industry.

The Perfect Ecology?

It was in the unhappy genius of the Cairo Conference that radical feminism was able to find common ground with ecological utopianism. Eco-utopianism advanced the doctrine that governments must impose population programs on their peoples in order to reach the perfect ecology. In this perfect ecology, a small human elite would be sustained indefinitely amidst biological diversity (and gender equity). This elite few would thrive on an earth that would supposedly continue forever, provided that correct ecological (and gender) balance would be maintained.

The genius of this lay in the successful recasting of the population-control agenda as one primarily concerned with empowering women and girls to control their fertility, in the interests of improving their health, and of achieving equality with men in the public arena.

Feminist dogma insisted that women and adolescent girls could not control their own lives without unfettered access to abortion. The provision of “back-up abortion” was crucial to the success of population programs. The sterility of homosexual relationships was applauded by homosexual and feminist ideologues alike. The success of both agendas required the power of traditional families, cultures and communities to be broken, and the power of national sovereignty to protect traditional values to be revoked.

Feminist Rights Agenda

The stage for this was set with the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna which declared that human rights could override national sovereignty. In general, sovereign states agreed on this, since they understood human rights to be the bona fide universal human rights set down in the original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Controversy arose, however, when at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), the Draft Programme of Action put forward by the UN Secretariat tried to introduce abortion, sexual and reproductive autonomy for adolescents, and homosexual family formation as new human rights.

These new rights were rejected, but it was agreed that women and adolescents have a general right to sexual and reproductive health. A chapeau was added to the Programme of Action reassuring all sovereign states that implementation of the Programme was “the sovereign right of each country, consistent with national laws and development priorities, with full respect for various religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds of its people, and consistent with universally recognized international human rights” (Chapter II, “Principles”).

Feminism vs. Sovereignty

All this however was to change dramatically at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), where it was declared that all women’s rights are human rights. In the final throes of the Conference, in a masterly sleight of hand, women’s reproductive and sexual health rights were moved from the section on health in the Platform for Action to the section on human rights. Once these rights were moved into the human rights arena, the Vienna agreement was invoked. The result was that, ostensibly at least, national sovereignty could no longer be recognized as a legitimate reason for not complying with these new-fangled human rights masquerading as “health rights.”

There can be no denying that states have often abused the privileges of national sovereignty to cover up substantial human rights violations. Countries like China, North Korea and Burma, for example, have for many years successfully invoked national sovereignty to thwart investigation and castigation with regard to very real human rights abuses.

Yet respect for national sovereignty has continued to serve a very important purpose. Jeane Kirkpatrick, former US Ambassador to the UN, on the occasion last year of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, defended national sovereignty against those who insisted it was time for countries to give up some of their sovereignty. The UN Charter, she said, had been “planned and constructed by same hardheaded realists, actually clear-headed realists” who understood that a guarantee of the sovereignty of nations is absolutely essential to make the UN work.1

Certainly, it is national sovereignty that has made the concept of human rights work. It is national sovereignty that has enabled human rights to be defined as universal rights belonging to every human being. Human rights arc rights that are universally recognized. Universal agreement can only be a genuine credential of human rights if sovereign states have reached agreement freely and responsibly.

Hence, it cannot be universally agreed that “the sexual and reproductive rights of adolescents are the same as those of adults”2 when the vast majority of the world’s communities recognize that adolescents, by virtue of their immaturity, have a prior right to be protected from premature sexual initiation and from exploitation. Abortion cannot be acclaimed as a universally agreed human right as long as some sovereign states believe abortion is an act of violence against the child in the womb; or as long as some states continue to provide “appropriate legal protection for the child before, as well as after, birth”, in accordance with the grave human rights obligations undertaken in the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nor can it be universally agreed that the special protection for motherhood and childhood and special support tor families proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should now be condemned as discriminatory towards homosexual couples.

Indeed, the concept of national sovereignty was designed to provide checks and balances on the power of the UN to impose such anomalies. Certainly there is nothing in the founding UN Charter that would seem to even remotely endorse the imposition of a single ideology on the peoples of the world.3 Today, only national sovereignty prevents the whole UN human rights enterprise from being hijacked by a contemporary ideological force.

Hijacking Human Rights

The manipulative nature of the UN Secretariat’s agenda is made clear in the recently released Round Table of Human Rights Treaty Bodies on Human Rights Approaches to Women’s health, with a Focus on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (1998). It is, quite frankly, a UN blueprint for hijacking human rights to serve an ideological agenda. Its recommendations? Basically, the treaty bodies are to examine each article in the transforming light of the new “gender perspective.” These reinterpretations are to be translated into binding international human rights law which, in turn, will override not only national sovereignty but individual rights and freedoms relating to conscience and religion as well. Non-governmental organizations are to be funded to assist the treaty bodies by monitoring the new human rights in their countries, and by submitting accusatory shadow reports on alleged violations, and by gathering pertinent statistics (such as suicide rates for pregnant adolescents, or homosexuals) to “justify” the need for “effective remedies” such as legalizing abortion and legitimizing homosexual marriages through legislation. Once a country has been found in violation of these “rights”, there can be no immunity from legally binding obligation to provide effective remedies.

Even now the UN Secretariat, together with the UN treaty monitoring bodies, are proceeding to enforce these pseudo-rights by reinterpreting “recognized rights, to which the States are already committed.”4 See, for example,

• The Human Rights Committees reinterpretation of Articles 3, 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to require repeal of abortion laws. in the Committee’s Concluding Observations on the Periodic Reports (1997/8) of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Zambia, the Sudan and Senegal;5

• The Human Rights Committee’s reinterpretation of Article 24 of the ICCPR to intimate that denying suicidal pregnant minors legal abortion is a serious abuse of their rights, in the Concluding Observations on Ecuador’s Report (August 1998), and,

• The CEDAW Committees reinterpretation of Article 12 of CEDAW to require that governments remove discriminatory laws against abortion services, in the Concluding Observations on Colombia’s Report (February, 1999).

Besides these Concluding Observations, the treaty monitoring bodies have near-absolute authority6 to issue Recommendations and General Comments about how treaty provisions must be interpreted. Increasingly, these Recommendations and General Comments — along with individual cases such as Toonen (re: Tasmania’s law against sodomy), under the First Optional Protocols — are being used to develop a jurisprudence of international legal standards crafted by radical feminism.

Gender Mainstreaming

This constitutes a disturbing move away from the truly universal human rights of the original UN Universal Declaration towards non-universal pseudo-human rights which are defined by a particular ideology. Gender mainstreaming — the ethically dubious feminist tool for ideological indoctrination — asserts that all human rights are relative, culturally constructed, and in need reinterpretation over time.7 “Old male rights,” such as religious and conscientious objection, recede as “new women’s rights,” such as the right to abortion, emerge.

Naive uncritical adoption by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 52/100 December 12, 1997) of the gender mainstreaming concept has in effect offered radical feminism carte blanche authority to revamp the values and goals of the entire UN system, and the entire world.

So what can be done?

The Human Rights Committee (HRC) needs to be challenged on its adoption of gender mainstreaming, on the grounds that adoption of any particular ideology is in direct contradiction of the founding rules for composition of the Committee. Of special relevance to the adoption of a gender perspective (or of any particular ideological perspective) is Article 31(2) of the Rules governing the formation of the Human Rights Committee: In the election of the Committee, “consideration shall be given to equitable geographical distribution of membership and to the representation of the different forms of civilization and of the principal legal systems.” This has been generally interpreted to mean that “various ideological and legal approaches” are actually “mandated in the HRC’s membership.”8

Another possible challenge to the current ideological reinterpretation of treaties might consist in pointing out that the treaty monitoring bodies are now infringing the international rules governing treaty interpretation, viz., the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969). The Vienna Convention provides that: “A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose” (Article 31, “General Rule of Interpretation 1”).

The new pseudo-human rights being read into the human rights treaties are not within “the ordinary meaning.” They are quite extraordinary, and should therefore be rejected.

Rita M. Joseph is a Canberra-based writer and activist on population issues, and a founding member of Australians for Population Justice.