Credit: UN Women

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis and Melanne Verveer
NEW YORK, Sep 7 2021 (IPS)

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), rendering it “strange bedfellows” with Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Tonga, and Palau.

Twenty years ago, after Harold Koh*, made a clear foreign policy case for ratification, we develop three more reasons as to why now—during the Biden Administration— the U.S. is at a critical moment to finally ratify the CEDAW.

1) A New Public Reckoning: Advancing our Domestic Policy on Gender and Race Intersectionality

For four decades, Congress failed to rally enough votes to ratify the CEDAW, but today, social justice movements are building new momentum like never before.

At a time of a public reckoning spawned by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #MeToo Movements, the Convention represents an important vehicle to address institutional and structural sexism through an intersectional lens.

As Harold Koh argued in 2002, “a country’s ratification of the CEDAW is one of the surest indicators of the strength of its commitment to internalize the universal norm of gender equality into its domestic laws.”

The potential for the CEDAW to inspire necessary change in the US directly relates to some of the United States’ current policy objectives.

The National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness (2021) illustrates the Administration’s commitment to place women and girls at the center of global recovery. The Rescue Plan recognizes that COVID-19 has exacerbated domestic violence and sexual assault, thereby creating a “shadow pandemic.”

As the Biden Administration looks toward the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA), it must now look to the horizon—to the ratification of the CEDAW. Ratifying the Convention will give the Biden Administration significantly more legitimacy in its effort to end violence against women and would demonstrate the solidarity needed to achieve this goal.

As President Biden himself stated, the renewal of the VAWA “should not be a Democratic or Republican issue—it’s about standing up against the abuse of power and preventing violence.”

Our data analysis of the State Party Reports to the CEDAW Committee from 2016 to 2020 reveals a significant focus by the CEDAW Committee on two issues that are central to the Biden Administration and to the United States’ national security and foreign policy in general: (1) violence against women; and (2) an intersectional focus on gender.

In every Concluding Observation across all five years between 2016 and 2020 (107 countries reported to the CEDAW Committee during this period), the CEDAW Committee mentioned intersectionality and gender-based violence 100 percent of the time.

2) Ratification of the CEDAW is part of the U.S.’s Transformative Power Arsenal: From Soft Power, Smart Power, to Transformative Power

In response to global challenges, CEDAW continues to be one of the standard-setting policy tools to advance gender and intersectional equality and we address this in our analysis of CEDAW’s impact on drafting domestic legislation, national constitutions, judicial decision making and in changing the national conversations and public discourse in countries in the Arab region.

As Ambassador Melanne Verveer, one of the authors, testified before Congress in 2010: “[I]t is true many countries do not live up to that treaty, but we know how effectively that lever is for rights advocates to seize and to use effectively to bring about the kind of consistent application of the principles of the treaty to their own lives.”

3) The Women Peace and Security and its Linkages to CEDAW

The Women, Peace, and Security (“WPS”) agenda is one gender issue that has near total bipartisan support, as demonstrated by over a decade of concerted legislative efforts by both Democrats and Republicans.

We explore how the United States’ strong bipartisan commitment to the WPS agenda and how its global security goals can be advanced by ratifying the CEDAW. From the United Kingdom to Afghanistan, the CEDAW has played a role in strengthening commitments to the WPS agenda.

The United States has emerged as a global leader in WPS, both by spearheading U.N. Security Council Resolutions to condemn sexual violence against women and girls in armed conflict, and by codifying its commitment to pursuing the WPS agenda in domestic law.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced what later became Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008). In proposing this Resolution, Secretary Rice confirmed that sexual violence against women in conflict was an imperative which the U.N. Security Council was charged to address.

A year later, Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1888, introduced by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reaffirmed Secretary Rice’s premise, acknowledged that the CEDAW is inextricably connected to women’s security.

The U.S. needs to leverage the bipartisan support for the WPS agenda to piggyback support for the Convention. After all, global security is in our best national interest.

In 2020, during the 75th Anniversary of the U.N., the CEDAW Concluding Observations for Afghanistan, the Congo, and Zimbabwe had sections dedicated specifically to WPS, providing substantial suggestions for improvement in state action in this issue area.

For instance, the CEDAW Committee observed in detail that “Afghan women are systematically excluded from formal peace negotiations, such as the 2018 Kabul Process and the negotiations that followed the conference held in Geneva in 2018.”

Today as we bear witness to the fall of Afghanistan, history will judge us on how we protect the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.

As we fight the forces of a pandemic, the global and domestic recovery will be measured by whether it created greater gender and racial equity.

Ultimately, the arc of American engagement, both in foreign and domestic policy, must bend toward ratifying the CEDAW. After decades of lawmakers failing to muster the political will for ratification, the demand for change has now reached a fever pitch both nationally and globally.

The Biden administration must rally bipartisan support to ratify the CEDAW as a tool to advancing the human rights of women around the world. In then- Senator Biden’s words in 2002, “Time is a Wasting” for the U.S. ratification of the CEDAW.

This summary is excerpted from the article by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, faculty at Penn Law and Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow on Gender Equity at GIWPS, Georgetown (2020-2021); and Ambassador Melanne Verveer, the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues. Rangita thanks Dean Theodore Ruger, Dean of Penn Law for his support in writing the paper.

*Footnote: On September 10th, Columbia Law School’s Journal of Transnational Law will convene a High Level Roundtable highlighting “Time Is A-Wasting”: Making the Case for CEDAW Ratification by the United States by Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis and Ambassador Melanne Verveer to be published in Volume 60 of the Columbia Law School’s Journal of Transnational Law. The goal of the High-Level Roundtable is to raise national attention to elevate the importance of the CEDAW ratification ahead of the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly.

The Roundtable will be opened with a welcome by Dean Gillian Lester, Dean of Columbia Law School. More information on remote participation in the Roundtable can be found here: Roundtable landing page

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Protesters gather at a candlelight vigil in New Delhi. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 19 2018 (IPS)

“From the tuk tuk drivers in Cambodia… to the school children in South Africa, women and men and girls and boys are taking a stand to prevent violence against women,” says Executive Director of UN Women and Under Secretary General Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

On November 19, the UN marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women at the Trusteeship Council Chambers at the UN Headquarters. It also commemorates the UN Secretary-General’s UNiTE Campaign to End Violence against Women.

One of the unique features of the commemoration is the UN’s commitment to the role of law enforcement in ending violence against women and girls in private and public spaces. This local-to-global focus at the UN will bring critical perspectives from the UN, Member States, and including for the first time, a local law enforcement agency – the New York Police Department (NYPD).

The “violence against women” movement is perhaps the greatest success story of international mobilization. However over 35 percent of women across the world face violence during their life in what the World Health Organization (WHO) calls a “global health problem of epidemic proportions.”

Over one billion women experience gender – based violence in the world. Under Secretary General Mlambo-Ngcuka has pointed out that given the magnitude of this pandemic, if it was a disease, governments and scientists would be marshalling every resource to address it.

According to research led by a group of scholars at Stanford and Oxford universities, domestic violence costs 25 times more than conflict and violent extremism and exhausts 5.2 percent of global GDP.

Despite the stark and unyielding statistics, around the world, a new energy is bringing renewed commitments from heads of state and government leaders to address the different faces of violence against women.

Eighteen years ago, when I partnered with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on a study on domestic violence in the outskirts of Beijing, violence against women in the domestic sphere was recognized only in terms of loss of limb or eyesight.

The broadening categories of domestic violence including the recognition of economic abuse as a category of violence is part of a second generation of domestic violence laws and is in full compliance with international norms such as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW).

Earlier in the year, Theresa May wrote to the Guardian, “Not all abusive behavior is physical. Controlling, manipulative and verbally abusive behavior ruins lives and means thousands end up isolated, living in fear. So, for the first time, the bill will provide a statutory definition of domestic abuse that includes economic abuse, alongside other non-physical abuse.”

While older laws on gender -based violence focused on punishment, the new crop of laws focus broadly on punishment and prevention.

For example, the newly passed “anti-violence against women” law in Tunisia (2017) makes it easier to prosecute domestic abuse, and it imposes penalties for sexual harassment in public spaces. Most importantly it calls for children to be educated in schools about human rights.

Another phenomenon of this “second generation” of gender-based violence laws is a heightened recognition of a victim- centered approach and the costs of violence on the survivor, in terms of physical, economic, psychological, social and familial.

Earlier in the year, New Zealand passed legislation granting victims of domestic violence 10 days paid leave to allow them to leave their partners, find new homes and protect themselves and their children. Family violence in New Zealand is estimated to cost the country between NZ$4.1bn and $7bn a year.

One of the critical components of the UNiTe campaign is the recognition that violence against women does not take place in a vacuum. As Secretary General Antonio Gutteres has confirmed: “Violence against women is fundamentally about power. It will only end when gender equality and the full empowerment of women will be a reality.”

Mlambo- Ngcuka harnesses the full panoply of international commitments in their full majestic entirety, including the recognition that gender parity and women’s leadership is critical to UNiTe campaign to end violence against women.

In doing so she marshals international norms, from General Recommendation 12 and 19 of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the DEVAW and the Security Council Resolution 1325 and its progeny as normative and constitutive in combating violence against women.

From the HeforShe movement, which calls for male leadership in advancing women’s equality, Mlambo-Ngcuka is putting in motion a broader bedrock of structures to combat violence against women in order to address the root causes of gender inequality.

On November 19, we come together at an extraordinary moment of unprecedented momentum built by the #MeToo movement towards empowering women and achieving gender equality across the board and across the globe.

As envisioned 70 years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) recognized that “contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…” More must be done to recognize that these barbarous acts take place not only battlefields, but within hallowed halls of power, in the classrooms, in workplaces, including the paddy fields, and in our homes.

As stated in the UDHR, the commitment to end violence against women is a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. This common standard transcends culture, tradition, power or politics.

*Along with Richard Liu of MSNBC, Rangita de Silva de Alwis will be moderating the UN’s Commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women at the UN Trusteeship Council on November 19.

Excerpt:

Women protest on the streets of Rabat to demand equal rights. Credit: Abderrahim El Ouali/IPS.

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 2018 (IPS)

Recent developments around the world give support to the idea of the #MeToo movement’s transformative potential. A postmodernist claim was that the feminist movement was essentialist and that no one expression of feminism can be applicable to women of different ethnicity, cultural, or class identity. The #Me Too movement has found expression in different cultural traditions and helped to challenge this theory. 

China’s #我也是; Latin America’s #YoTambien; the Middle East’s and the United States’ #MeToo have sparked a mini revolution for women.  However, the data on the laws remain disappointing.

The newly released IFC Report on Women, Business and the Law (2018) reveal that 104 economies still prevent women from working in certain jobs, because of their gender.  In 59 economies there are no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace.

In 18 economies, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working. A tour- de- force of Penn Law’s newly released first phase of the family law data base show that legalized discrimination remains enshrined in the law.  See: http://www.law.upenn.libguides.com/globalwomensleadership

Constructing ‘Honor” and “Shame” in the Law:

Notions of a woman’s “honor,” “shame,” and “obedience” are intimately tied to the way in which the law constructs those concepts. The Algerian Family Code in Article 39 (1) legalizes a woman’s obedience not only to her husband but to his relatives:

Despite much remaining legalized discrimination, the year 2017 was a watershed year for women. Although it is difficult to prove causation, it could be argued that the #MeToo movement has helped to spark some policy change and debate in different parts of the world

“The wife is required to obey her husband and grant him respect as the head of the family. The wife is required to “respect the parents of her husband and relatives.”

In Gabon too, according to Article 178 of the Family Law, “the spouses may, during the marriage, renounce the option of monogamy.” In Gabon, women still need the permission of a guardian or husband to open a bank account.

According to Article 257 of the Civil Code although a woman may, on her own signature, open a special current account to deposit or withdraw funds reserved for the household, the opening of this account must be notified by the custodian to the husband.

The law’s power to construct marriage relations and shape women’s inferior status in the family can be both subtle or direct. In Tanzania, Marriage Act. Section 63(a) states that it shall be the duty of every husband to maintain his wife or wives and to provide them with such support as to his means and station in life.  However, the duty of support is not mutual.

Polygamous marriages are recognized in several legal systems and reduces women’s status in the marriage and family. In Tanzania according to the Marriage Act. Section 10, monogamous marriages can be converted to polygamous unions at any time during the marriage.

Several countries also call for four adult witnesses of good moral conduct to bear witness to a crime of rape making it almost impossible for a victim of rape to meet this evidentiary requirement.  Moreover, these provisions render a woman’s evidence worth half that of a male witness. For example, The Iranian Penal Code states:

“Article 74: Adultery, whether punishable by flogging or stoning, may be proven by the testimony of four just men or that of three just men and two just women.”

Virginity testing is sanctioned by law and is meant to control a woman’s sexuality and the notions of a woman’s chastity is tied to a family’s honor. The South African Children’s Act 12(3) allows for virginity testing of girls over the age of 16.

A woman’s so-called honor plays a role in regulating abortion too. For example, in Chile, according to Article 344 of the Penal Code, the punishment shall be reduced if the abortion was done in order to hide a woman’s “dishonor.”

An estimated 93 percent of women of reproductive age in Africa live in countries with restrictive abortion laws. The Ugandan and Zambian Penal Code carry a similar penalty of a seven-year imprisonment for any woman who tries to voluntarily miscarry. In Namibia, the prison sentence could be extended up to 14 years.

A demonstration in support of legal abortion in Argentina. Credit: Demian Marchi/Amnesty International

Second Class Citizenship in the Law

Nationality laws in over twenty countries (The Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Brunei, Burundi, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Nepal, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Togo, United Arab Emirates) worldwide exclude mothers from passing their nationality to their children on an equal basis with fathers.

This creates a category of second class citizens and when children are unable to acquire their parents’ nationality; it leads to statelessness. Gender discrimination in nationality laws impede a child’s access to public education and health care.  Unequal nationality laws also curtail access to driver’s licenses, bank accounts and access to social welfare programs and employment.

Unexamined assumptions in the law such as overprotection of women or exclusion of women from certain categories of work reinforce stereotypes that women are fragile and do more harm than good to a woman’s ability to care for her family and community.

Russia excludes women from 400 categories of employment, and the Nigerian Labor Act in Section 57 provides the Minister of Labor a blanket authorization for the exclusion of women from categories of employment as he/she thinks fit: “The Minister may make regulations prohibiting or restricting, subject to such conditions as may be specified in the regulations, the employment of women in any particular type or types of industrial or other undertakings or in any process or work carried on by such undertakings.”

Protest march of women workers for higher wages, and against male domination in trade union politics in tea plantations at Munnar in southern Indian state of Kerala. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

Are Laws Changing?

A longitudinal mapping of the alterations in the laws that regulate the status of women will reveal whether there are changes in the law and how and where these changes occur.

Despite much remaining legalized discrimination, the year 2017 was a watershed year for women.  Although it is difficult to prove causation, it could be argued that the #MeToo movement has helped to spark some policy change and debate in different parts of the world.

In Tunisia, Jordan, and Lebanon, parliaments repealed provisions in their penal codes that allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims. In 2017, the Tunisian parliament repealed Article 227 of the penal code exonerating the rapist if he married his victim.

The recent domestic violence law approved by the Tunisian parliament in 2017 was a long time coming and was preceded by a decade long struggle by women to create a normative and legal framework to address violence against women.

However, it could be argued that the global forces unleashed by the #MeToo movement was the final nudge to see it through parliament. The law also criminalizes sexual harassment in public spaces.

After years of mobilizing by women, in 2017, Lebanon’s parliament rolled back Article 522 of the Penal Code, which had allowed rapists to escape prosecution by marrying the victim. However, the legislative body retained a loophole relating to sex with children between the ages 15-17 and seducing a “virgin” girl into having sex with the promise of marriage.

Again in 2017, India’s Supreme Court banned the controversial Islamic divorce practice known as “triple talaq” or instant divorce in a landmark ruling. The practice allowed a husband to divorce his wife simply saying the Arabic word for divorce, talaq three times.

Even when laws failed to pass, it seems that the #MeToo movement helped spark otherwise long suppressed debate. Just this month, in the Pope’s home country, the Argentinian senate narrowly rejected a Bill that would allow elective abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy.

In Brazil, home to the largest Catholic population, where abortion carries a punishment of three years, both supporters and opposers discussed a bill to decriminalize abortion.

More than 25 years ago Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was Secretary General Kofi Annan’s  First Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Under Secretary General, gave me a copy of the 1985 case of Sha Bano. Shah Bano, a sixty-five year old woman living deep in the byzantine confines of the old royal state of Madhya Pradesh, was divorced after forty-five years of marriage by her husband by the triple talaq method.

Shah Bano filed an action in court seeking a small subsistence from her wealthy lawyer husband under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973, a colonial piece of legislation intended to prevent “vagrancy” of wives. The Indian Supreme Court’s decision to award Sha Bano maintenance of five dollars a month polarized the Hindu and Muslim communities and created fissures in the Muslim community.

A year later, Martha Minow, now the 300th Anniversary Professor at Harvard University gave me a copy of her article, “Forming Underneath Everything that Grows: Toward a History of Family Law.” She argues that family law grows “underneath” other legal fields in the sense that its “rules about roles and duties between men and women, parents and children, families and strangers historically and conceptually underlie other rules about employment and commerce, education and welfare, and perhaps the governance of the state.”

Both Coomaraswamy and Minow hoped that my generation would address the contested nature of family law reform. It seems that it is the next generation- the #Me Too generation that will propel these changes.

Catharine MacKinon argues that #MeToo has done what the law could not.  I argue that the #MeToo movement has the power and potential to mobilize political and social forces to influence debate and to contribute to law and social reform.

At a moment when the traditional liberal world order as we know is floundering, the global women’s movement and the #MeToo movement offer potentially transformative ways to translate women’s experiences into lawmaking in areas where the law itself is complicit in the unequal status of women. The mapping of laws will allow us to see how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

Footnote: I thank the Council on Foreign Relations and Rachel Vogelstein, Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and Director of Women and Foreign Policy Program for hosting a discussion on Family Law Reform and Women’s Rights on September 5th. I am grateful to Under Secretary Gender Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Head of UN Women for inspiring the Mapping of Family Law and Dean Theodore W. Ruger, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School for making the first phase of the Mapping possible. I also thank Dr. Paula Johnson, President of Wellesley College for setting the standard for the reexamination of ways in which gender differentials in different systems, whether in the global legal systems or in health care, impact women.       

This is excerpted from an article to be published on the “SDG Goal 5 and de Jure Discrimination in the Law” by the UN SDG Fund.

Excerpt:

Rashmi Hamal is a local heroine who helped to save her friend from an early marriage. She campaigns actively against child marriages in the Far Western Region of Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 22 2018 (IPS)

Something historic was initiated at the European Development Days (EDD) in early June: the EDD placed women and girls at the forefront of Sustainable Development. Since its inception in 2006, EDD has become a barometer for ideas in global development.

Ever since then, the EDDs have developed into the Davos of Development and shapes how the European Union constructs its development policies. In 2018, the EU development agenda was transformed and shaped by a gender equality agenda.

This year’s speakers included the Norwegian Prime Minister, the director-general of the World Health Organization, the Crown Princess of Denmark, and Head of UN Women and Under Secretary General Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Along with H.R.H Princess Mabel of Oranje-Nassau of Netherlands, the chair of Girls not Brides; Aichatou Boulama Kane, the Minister of Planning of the Republic of Niger; and Linda McAvan,Labour MEP for Yorkshire & The Humber, Chair of European Parliament Committee on Development, I served on the panel on child marriage to examine closely the Draft Resolution “Toward an EU external strategy against early and forced marriage” introduced before the European parliament by Member of the EU Parliament, Charles Goerens who moderated the panel at EDD on June 6.

The Resolution was unique in the way in which it called on European Union, in the context of its foreign policy and its development cooperation policy, to offer a strategic pact to its partners and to that end require that all its partner countries prohibit early and forced marriage in law and practice.

The Resolution points out that in order to comprehensively tackle early and forced marriage, the European Union, as a major actor in global development, must play a leading role.

The Resolution was drafted at an important political moment and captured the extraordinary global shifts and crises as a stated goal: “…whereas during the recent migrant crises, many parents, seeking to protect their daughters from sexual aggression, chose to have them marry before the age of 18.”

The Resolution also took into consideration of girls all over the world, including Yazidi girls and Chibok girls who are forced into marriage: “…calls for the act of forcing a child to enter into a marriage and that of luring a child abroad with the purpose of forcing her or him to enter into a marriage to be criminalized.”

The bedrock of the Resolution is that it calls upon all Member States to include a ban on early and forced marriage in their legislation. In a remarkable use of development cooperation, the Resolution sets out that: “The level of public development aid is made dependent on the recipient country’s commitment to complying with the requirements in the fight against early and forced marriage.”

My recommendation addressed the fact that around the world, even when the law is changed, the loopholes in the law remain. For example, I cited the recent Bangladesh Child Marriage Restraint Act of 2017 signed into law by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last year. The law significantly increased the punishment for contracting or conducting child marriage.

However, it includes a provision in Section 2(10) of the law that undermines the spirit of the law reform: “Within the definition of the law will not be considered an offense if the marriage takes place in special circumstances in the best interest of the underage woman in question.”

Co-opting the primacy of the best interest of the child principle as set out in the Convention of the Rights of the Child helps the government to legitimize child marriage in a way that the principle was never envisioned.

General Comment 14 issued by the Committee of the Rights of the Child recognizes that the best interest standard is vulnerable to manipulation of governments and obliges states parties to ensure the full rights recognized by the Convention.

“The best interest of the standard is rendered meaningless if not seen in the context of all the rights in the Convention. The right to education, access to health care services and protection from physical, and mental violence are in no way promoted and are in fact impeded by child marriage. ”

The EU has a critical role to play in influencing policy reform both in the EU member states and outside. The EU and many of its member states contribute significant amounts of development cooperation to countries with high rates of child marriage. However, it is important for the EU to acknowledge that law reform itself can be complicit in undermining the prevention of child or forced marriage.

Development cooperation must be aimed not only at addressing legislative reform but also on closing the loopholes in the law that render law reform meaningless. This calls for aligning development cooperation not only with changes in law and practice but with the transformation of political will.

Excerpt:

Argentina's Mothers of the Disappeared in protest march.

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, May 2 2018 (IPS)

At the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Robert Jackson, the Chief Prosecutor, charged the world that submitting the enemy to the judgment of the law is “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

Any effort to address missing persons during and after conflict takes this one step forward. It attempts to provide justice after death. However, what constitutes “Reason” must be seen through the lenses of both women and men.

In a fractured and divisive community post-conflict, the nature of “ Reason” is a complex and elusive concept. But how we restore dignity to a disappeared victim and the family and promote “ Reason” and psychological healing is far less contested and helps a broader reconciliation agenda that helps address structural sources of injustice.

The Offices of Missing Persons legislation and institutions set up after conflict can play a particularly important role in reaffirming the right of relatives of those disappeared. However, it is important that we develop new ways of conceiving of accountability mechanisms that provide a more gender sensitive experience of justice.

We need to stretch our moral imagination in order to develop syncretic approaches to transitional justice that are both borrowed from other jurisdictions but deeply rooted in context. A feminist perspective can enrich the construction of the transitional justice field on missing persons. Women’s contributions and experiences and women’s activism must be reflected in framing the initiatives.

In many countries in conflict and post- conflict, the presence of women, from the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina to the Mothers Front in Sri Lanka, women have altered the contours of transition justice. The Offices set up to address the missing must expose the harms to women as women, mother, wife and grandmother- thereby ignoring the specific harms shared by women or the specific economic and social status of women.

Often, gender crimes are seen only in terms of violence against women but there are other forms of atrocity that impact women in unalterable ways such as the disappearances of family members. A Cypriot member of the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) Paul-Henri Arni sums up the importance of the committee’s work thus:. “The worst wound of war… the only wound that gets worse with time is when a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a husband or a wife does not come for dinner and simply vanishes. We humans are not designed to resist such mental torture.”

In Argentina, among the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the “Dirty War” were an estimated 500 pregnant women and young children. Argentina has taken steps passing legislation to regulate the situation of the disappeared and their families. In 1994, Law No. 24.321 defined enforced disappearances and regulated the process for obtaining a judicial declaration of disappearances Law No. 24.411 established the right to pecuniary reparation for families of the disappeared.

Very early on, as disappearances increased and fear permeated the country, a small group of grandmothers banded together. In April 1977, at the peak of the disappearances, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, wore white head scarves embroidered with the names of their missing relatives, and marched to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.

The mothers now grown to be grandmothers remain a public presence as they march along with other relatives of the disappeared in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace, to search for their disappeared children who were kidnapped by the military dictatorship.

The mothers and grandmothers or the Las Abuelas lobbied nationally to develop legal precedent to establish the use of DNA in establishing biological identity and pressured the government to support the development of a national genetic database that would allow all relatives of missing children to submit a blood sample for genetic testing. Established in 1989, Argentina’s database continues to be instrumental in the investigation of disappeared children.

The Argentine genetic database set an important precedent and enabled the expansion of genetic tracing as an important tool in accounting for the disappeared and providing a remedy for victims. National and international funding for the database has been budgeted until the year 2050 and has expanded to Guatemala and Peru.

In April 2017, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Marked 40 Years of Searching for the Disappeared. The Mothers are also building a wall with the faces of thousands of disappeared people, to raise awareness of the disappeared during the country’s dictatorship from 1976-1983.

What this shows is that we have to go beyond the tired notions of transitional justice. What is needed is a fuller concept of restorative justice that move away from criminal law formulations of sanctions to reimagining the possibility of restoring a lost social balance through a localization of the international practices and norms of transitional justice.

*Rangita de Silva de Alwis was recently appointed by UN Women and IDLO to the High Level Working Group on Women’s Access to Justice.

Excerpt:

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2018 (IPS)

March 8th, 2018, International Women’s Day, saw an extraordinary global mobilization for gender equality. In the last year, global movements for gender equality– from marches to powerful grassroots organizing and viral social media campaigns, such as #MeToo and #TimesUp in the United States and other countries– have galvanized the world’s attention like never before.

Opening of the 62nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women 12 March 2018. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

This is the UN’s largest gathering on gender equality and women’s rights, and the single largest forum for UN Member States, civil society organizations and other international actors to build consensus and commitments on global policy.

At this tipping point in history, do lawyers, law schools and law students have a higher moral role to play in addressing the shameful legacy of gender discrimination in every community and country? Law schools train the next generation of lawyers, leaders and advocates and help inform the laws and policies that shape the lives of women and men in their countries.

Law schools, by virtue of their very mission, must stand up against injustice everywhere. Along with governments, and civil society networks, law schools have a role to play in the profound legal, political and social changes that are unfolding around the world. In the 21st century, gender discrimination in law remains widespread; according to IFC research, 155 of the 173 economies covered have at least one law that challenges women’s economic opportunities.

There are over 900 legal gender differences across 173 economies. In 100 economies, women face gender-based job restrictions. In 18 economies, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working. However, a powerful new movement that transcends borders and boundaries is driving women to connect, mobilize and lead like never before and law schools must join this global effort.

At CSW 62, Penn Law will introduce a joint publication with UNESCO and UNSDG Fund titled Making Laws, Breaking Silence: Case Studies from the Field. In the words of Asma Jahangir, the human rights icon who died earlier in the year, “these timely and powerful essays from the ground alter the way we think of lawmaking for women and are an important contribution to gender equality law reform around the world.”

This publication is one of several collaborations with the United Nations on Goals 5 (Gender Equality) and 16 (Rule of Law) of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Global Women’s Leadership Project (GWLP), set up as the first phase of the UN Women’s new Family Law database, has created a clearing house of information. In many countries around the world, family law is a locus of gender discrimination and magnifies the unequal status of women in the public sphere.

This is the first mapping of its kind that goes beyond the boundaries of traditional family law to examine the entire legal system of a country to identify the law’s subtle and powerful impact on women’s status in her family.

Penn Law has become a leader among law schools in its partnerships and collaboration with the United Nations and multilaterals, primarily UN Women and the SDG Fund, in advancing research and action on gender equality under law and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Penn Law students who are externing at the UN SDG Fund will cover the CSW proceedings and join a growing group of Penn Law students who have served UN Women and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) as externs.

Researchers in the seminar on International Women’s Human Rights continue to present their research to UN Women and the OHCHR on the ways in which Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820 and 2242, some of the crowning achievements of the global women’s movements, are central to the prevention of violent extremism.

On March 1, Penn Law partnered with Perry World House, and the Penn Middle East Center to celebrate International Women’s Day. The keynote conversation with Ambassador Moushira Khattab, the former Minister for Family and Population who wrote the first Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Law in Egypt and Aisha Oyebode, co- convener of the Bring Back our Girl’s Campaign was a profoundly affecting testament to the power of women’s narratives to alter the socio-political realities that disempower women.

Over the last two years, Penn Law’s Global Leaders Forum has convened some of the world’s most celebrated women leaders (these interviews are part of a women’s leadership documentary series), including President Mary Robinson, Asma Jahangir, Navi Pillay, Hina Jilani, Zainab Bangura, Tzipi Livni, Irina Bokova, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Dubravka Simonovic, Ambassador Maria Mejia, Moushira Khattab, Lubna Olayan, Indira Jaising, Hillary Clinton (via video) and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

These women all share one thing in common: they are all glass ceiling breakers, but also continue to break barriers and push boundaries. These acts of resistance, not just in political, economic and social life, but in received orthodoxy, are the alchemy to achieving full and equal rights for all women.

Law schools and other academic institutions around the world have long played a role in transforming laws and policies and have been associated with new political, cultural and economic movements. It is time now for law schools to take the lead in the most important movement of the 21st century- the unfinished movement for equal rights for women.

Excerpt:

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 15 2018 (IPS)

I first met Asma Jahangir, the champion of human rights in Pakistan, who died Sunday, as a teenager in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. In a friendship that spanned political upheavals and turbulent transitions in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka, to the War on Terror in the US, Asma remained my mentor and muse.

Asma Jahangir. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

In a landmark petition, Jahangir challenged the legitimacy not just of her father’s detention but of Khan’s rule as well. In a watershed moment for Pakistan and South Asia, the Supreme Court ruled that Khan was an “usurper.” Asma learned to fight tyranny both in court and on the street. As a student, she was suspended from her convent school for scaling the walls of the Governor of Punjab to hoist a black flag to protest authoritarianism.

When the principal of her law school told her that as a married woman she could register in law school but would not be able to attend classes, she interpreted that to mean that she could still take the law exams. She had her unmarried friend enroll in law school and take notes for her.

Flouting conventions of the time that forbade women to work, Asma founded the first ever woman’s legal aid office with her sister Hina and two women friends. Her office in Lahore was pock marked with bullets from those who threatened to kill Asma and Hina for defending women from so called “ honor crimes,” women trying to divorce violent husbands, women trying to escape forced marriage, bonded laborers seeking freedom from their abusive landlords, child laborers, religious minorities facing death sentences under the blasphemy laws, and relatives of the forcibly disappeared. When President Amy Gutmann, President of Penn invited Asma to receive a honorary doctorate in law, it was a way of celebrating Asma’s courage, but also a way of using the university’s significant soft power diplomacy and moral authority to signal a strong message against authoritarian regimes and political tyrants who seek to muffle a hero’s voice. When Asma spoke that enchanted early summer evening before commencement, in President Gutmann’s garden, she did not speak of the battles or the bullets, the politics or the power, but rather the sheer exhilarating spirit- soaring joy of her work in the frontlines of a women’s movement in an age of change.

Asma often spoke of Humaira Kakha and Samia Sarwar to show us that there was a human story behind the lawyering, a story of forced marriage and honor crimes, where women are sacrificed at the altar of their family’s so-called honor.

During General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s 11-year rule, which ended in 1988, Jahangir organized the first women’s movement in Pakistan– the Women’s Action Forum to challenge the military dictatorship and the Islamization of the law. The group protested in the streets against the Hudood Ordinance that saw women as second class citizens.

One of the first cases that Asma protested was that of Safia Bibi, a young blind woman who had been raped by her master’s son. Safia failed to fulfil the evidentiary requirements under the ordinance which called for four adult men of honorable character to serve as witnesses to the crime of Zina (rape ) in court.

Instead, Safia’s pregnancy due to the rape was considered proof of the crime of fornication under the Hudood Ordinance, and was sentenced to public lashing, imprisonment and fine.

Asma was not without critics, detractors and attackers. She faced death threats, assassination attempts, imprisonment, house arrest, police brutality and most of all ignorance, with stoic courage, puckish humor, and unflinching grace.

My students at Penn Law analyze an article from the Harvard Women’s Law Journal on the story of Muktharan Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang raped as part of an honor crimes attack. In the article, the author quotes critics who liken Asma and her sister Hina to “Jeans wearing women” who are agents of the West.

Neither woman has ever worn a pair of jeans and both are critics of American exceptionalism and the sometimes perilous double standards of Western powers.

During the Mushraff years, Asma led women in a mixed gender marathon, jogging all the way in a salwar kameez.

The New York Times reported about the marathon in 2005: “The police beat the woman with batons in the full glare of the news media, tore her shirt off and, though they failed to take off her baggy trousers, certainly tried their best. The ritual public humiliation over, she and others – some bloodied – were dragged screaming and protesting to police vans and taken away to police stations. This didn’t happen to some unknown student or impoverished villager. This happened to Asma Jahangir, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion and head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the country’s largest such nongovernmental group. The setting: a glitzy thoroughfare in Lahore’s upmarket Gulberg neighborhood. The crime: attempting to organize a symbolic mixed-gender mini-marathon on May 14. The stated aim of the marathon was to highlight violence against women.”

When the Mullah’s criticized the TV coverage of the “unsightly spectacle” of women running a marathon, Asma promptly advised them to shut off their TVs.

In the mid-1990s, when no one else would, Asma took up the case of Salamat Masih, a Christian teenager sentenced to death for blasphemy for allegedly scribbling grafiitii on a mosque’s wall. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have become a trap for religious minorities. An accusation can be made on the basis of little or non-existent evidence.

Despite a campaign by extremist forces, Masih was ultimately acquitted on appeal. However, the decision ignited factional violence. Following the verdict, an armed gang charged into Asma’s brother’s house threatening the entire family. In 1997, two years after the acquittal, the judge was killed.

Much is written about Asma the lawyer, and international human rights defender, but Asma was first and foremost a friend, a friend of the powerless. In my visits to her elegant home in Lahore, my most vivid remembrance is of the throng of little children, the barefoot children of the small surrounding tenements, who would rush to her, hugging her, shyly murmuring words of endearment, hanging on to her with their tiny arms, and rubbing their dusty faces on her soft cotton shawl.

I worked with Asma in those liminal spaces between her endless missions at the highest levels of the United Nations, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial and Arbitrary Execution, Special Representative on Darfur, Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion, and her final UN assignment as the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, but Pakistan always was her constant passion and focus. A love so fierce for country and her people, I have yet to witness in another.

A few days before her death, she spoke at Oxford in honor of her friend Benazir Bhutto’s tenth death anniversary. She was a champion of Bhutto, but told me that she refused Bhutto’s offers of high political office in order to remain independent of government patronage, to retain the right to challenge the politics of her friend.

As her mentee, I often feared her criticism, even when it was softened with tenderness, because she always spoke the truth. “Those who pursue perfection never do anything brave,” she would tell me. Asma on the other hand, relished the tumult of her work, the political miasma of the fight for democracy, the brave battles against injustice and impunity, and most of all, the relentless pursuit of the truth, until her last breath.

The Atlantic wrote a few days after her death that “Presidents and prime ministers decorated her with their highest civilian honors” and that Asma “was awarded three honorary doctorates.” One of the doctorates was from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.

When President Amy Gutmann, President of Penn invited Asma to receive a honorary doctorate in law, it was a way of celebrating Asma’s courage, but also a way of using the university’s significant soft power diplomacy and moral authority to signal a strong message against authoritarian regimes and political tyrants who seek to muffle a hero’s voice.

When Asma spoke that enchanted early summer evening before commencement, in President Gutmann’s garden, she did not speak of the battles or the bullets, the politics or the power, but rather the sheer exhilarating spirit- soaring joy of her work in the frontlines of a women’s movement in an age of change.

A senior US diplomat in Pakistan once told me, “I shudder to think what would happen to Pakistan if something were to happen to Asma and her sister, Hina.” I replied, “But what would the world look like?”

While I continue to cherish Hina, who taught last year at Penn Law, the outpouring of tributes show that Asma has inspired a new generation of lawyers, policymakers, journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
As a Penn Law student wrote to me on the evening of Asma’s death, “from Peshawar to Penn Law, women will fight to defend the marginalized because we were touched by Asma.”

Excerpt:

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 8 2018 (IPS)

As the 62nd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations in New York draws near, women from every corner of the world will convene to deliberate on the theme of CSW 2018: Challenges and Opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls. This year, the theme of empowerment has added significance. The #MeToo movement has shocked our collective conscience and made it impossible to ignore that empowerment goes far beyond economic agency.

Rangita de Silva de Alwis

Women’s economic empowerment has enormous consequence. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that gender equality adds U.S. $12 trillion to the global economy, yet women are conspicuously absent from board rooms and in some communities, school rooms. The evidence is now clear, when women are absent from the market place, the market suffers.

Although the cost analysis is important, the #MeToo movement has helped unmask the way in which sometimes women’s economic participation pays lip service to women’s power, while serving those in power. Feminism’s urgent charge is not to commodify women through glossy stories and data, but to pierce those veils to identify the underlying power structures and structural barriers that prevent women’s access to and retention in the market.

Feminism’s latest incarnation, “economic feminism,” poses a complicated challenge to the pursuit of gender equality around the world. By providing legal economic rights to women empowerment is thus framed as voluntary, and structural barriers are normalized.

Herein the champions of economic feminism proudly parade entrepreneurial women as proof of gender equality, a byproduct of a transformation in a society that sees value in women. In this cultural shift, if a woman is not in the marketplace, it is because she has made a choice not to work – and not because of debilitating structural inequalities.

However, this thinking masks patriarchy’s power over women. Economic feminism, in its unquestioned authority, can pose a threat to women’s advancement around the world. The importance attached to economic instrumentalist arguments for women’s rights can hide unexamined challenges.

Without a doubt, the plethora of recent research confirming gender equality significantly boosts economic growth from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as well as the aforementioned McKinsey study, is to be celebrated for giving a tangible economic reason for countries to improve the status of women.

Unfortunately, this message has been warped by some economies, and economic policies such as Abenomics in Japan supplant important social change policies on sexual abuse and hold back feminism’s goal of full realization of gender equality under law. The reality is that women continue to face inequality that goes beyond just economic opportunity.

Several countries, notably Japan, have put forward “win-win” economic policies, but they ignore controversial and difficult social policies such as violence against women. This approach is similar to the nations that peddled the “Asian Values” theory in the 1990s. The better approach is to reveal the interconnectedness of women’s economic participation with equal protection of laws.

For example, in many corners of the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, women have unequal access to property and land. Globally, women’s unequal access to citizenship, residency, inheritance, and decision-making in public and private often subordinate women’s economic participation.

Gender equality in all laws, most importantly family laws, have a profound impact on shaping and advancing women’s economic participation. In many countries, laws that regulate women in their families require women to get permission from their husbands to travel and disallow married mothers to confer citizenship on their children. Several nations have legislation that do not recognize women as heads of household and control their free movement.

Further, laws around the world permit underage and forced marriage for girls. Every two seconds, a girl is forced into marriage. Women married as children will reach one billion by 2030, according to UNICEF.

Martha Minow, the former Dean of Harvard Law School, has argued that the rules of family law construct not only roles and duties of men and women, but can shape rules about employment and commerce, and perhaps the governance of the state.

And not to be forgotten is that violence is one of the most insidious barriers to women’s economic empowerment. Where a woman suffers sexual and other forms of abuse, her capacity to work and function are severely impaired – Fortune estimates that it costs the US $500 billion, but the human cost cannot be computed.

Fortune argues that when talking about equality, the focus should include violence, or more specifically, violence against women. And according to McKinsey, violence is one of the biggest factors holding American women and all other women back.

Feminism’s and the #MeToo movements’ power lies in its potential to disrupt seemingly immutable gender norms. The international women’s rights community, as it convenes in New York in March, should not be swayed by the promise of economic opportunity alone, it must continue to press on issues of violence, sexual abuse and discrimination that disallow women from participating in economic activity, and inhibit women’s full empowerment.

Excerpt:

By Rangita de Silva de Alwis
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 2017 (IPS)

At this historic moment – this new report (“Business and SDG 16”) is a tryst with destiny, one that fulfills a promise that was made both by the United Nations and the private sector at the launch of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015.

Rangita de Silva de Alwis

Now is the time to mobilize the global business community as never before. The case is clear. Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals will improve the environment for doing business and building markets. “

Just last month, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the private sector, was even bolder in his charge: “Let me start by a brutal sentence: either the Sustainable Development Goals are fully assumed with enlightened self-interest by the business community, the private sector, and the financial sector, or the Sustainable Development Goals will be a very nice exercise in diplomatic discussions in New York and maybe in some policies of some Governments, but the impact on people, the impact on poverty, the impact on the planet, will be extremely, extremely small.”

“This is now an objective that can only work if the whole of society engages, and the role of the business community, the private sector, the financial sector, is also crucial. Without your leadership, our project will simply fail.”

The UN SDG Fund has taken up this charge and issued a call to action: In essence, the Report is a charge for the private sector to be involved on a higher moral ground, for the advancement of the human civilization and calls upon the private sector to privilege the sustainability over transient profitability.

This flagship report is a tool box and a road map to show case ways in which companies should not merely “first do no harm” but also proactively and constructively do good.

The first SDG Fund Report released two years ago made these key findings:

1) Many companies do not understand the depth of the SDGs— how best to implement them, provide a multi stakeholder partnership and common language and target.

2) It was understood in three dimensions – economic, social and environment- and is the key feature

Goal 16 has been described as the “fourth dimension” of sustainable development. This moniker emerged in the consultative process of the Open Working Group as a punitive label: opponents to rule of law in the Sustainable Development Agenda claimed that, as a fourth dimension, rule of law did not belong in a set of goals consisting of the first three dimensions.

This debate occurred despite the specific and explicit affirmation of the links between rule of law and sustainable development in previous UN conferences.

The SDG’s go beyond traditional notions of development. The three spheres of sustainable development – economic, environmental, and societal – typically are not interconnected with peace-building, access to justice, or inclusive institutions.

Instead Goal 16 is, a “cross-cutting” goal that reflects the overarching promise of the UN Charter: that development, peace and security, and human rights are all irrevocably interlinked. In Goal 16, peace-building and rule of law, are essential to support the rest of the development agenda. Goal 16 must be acknowledged as the keystone of sustainable development.

The bedrock of the Report is that it is not enough for Goal 16 to just react to numerous challenges and obstacles. Instead, Goal 16 must be proactive. Instead of adapting after the fact, the private sector must anticipate and begin responding before the fact. This is the ambitious goal of this Report.

I wish to organize key findings under five thematic pillars:

Combating Violent Extremism:

The increased emphasis on prevention represents a meteoric metamorphosis of United Nations policy. Previously, peacebuilding was originally viewed “sequentially,” coming after “comprehensive” peace-accords.

“[P]eacebuilding was presented as the logical follow-on to peacemaking and peacekeeping: the main objective was to prevent relapse into conflict once a peace agreement had been secured.” This siloed vision is only recently being replaced by a novel holistic one that places prevention at the center.

A new UN architecture has ushered in the sea-change, codifying the concept of “sustaining peace” as “a goal and a process to build a common vision of a society […] which encompasses.

As the Secretary General’s Action Plan on the Prevention of Violent Extremism states: “Lack of socio-economic opportunities are drivers of extremism and conflict. Countries that fail to generate high and sustainable levels of growth, to create decent jobs for their youth, to reduce poverty and unemployment, to improve equality, to control corruption and to manage relationships among different communities in line with their human rights obligations, are more prone to violent extremism and tend to witness a greater number of incidents linked to violent extremism. “

Goal 16 presents a valuable opportunity to bridge the development and security divide. It explicitly provides an entry point for development and security actors to come together to promote inclusive, multidimensional approaches to achieve a peaceful society.

Here again, the Report highlights the work of the private sector – which is working on controlling money laundering and financing of terrorism, in building structures on zero tolerance of corruption, and gender equality in institution building.

Gender Equality in the Private Sector

Goal 16, read with Goal 5, is a clarion call for gender equality as a preventative tool and as an important signifier of the rule of law. Corporate board leadership is an important cornerstone of private sector leadership that impacts the public sphere.

The feminization of boards also engages the private sector in the public goal of fostering women’s corporate leadership. Such policies, if universalized, would fundamentally shift both corporate governance and public governance. Increasing the role of women in corporate governance increases gender equality by advancing women’s contributions to the public economy among other things.

Recent studies show that higher numbers of women in executive positions can result in higher rates of corporate return on equity. Similarly, countries with higher levels of women’s political representation tend to have higher levels of economic growth.

Building a New Vernacular:

SDG 16, both its targets and its indicators, revolves around the rule of law and building a new vernacular. The Report introduces a new language for businesses to engage in the rule of law: The Basic View of Self Interest: Private sector itself are creatures of rule of law. Businesses depend on reliable rule and reasonable justice; The Enlightened Corporation: The private sector should build its own effective, accountable and inclusive institutions and support the expansion of rule of law in society.

The Costs of Corruption:

The World Bank states that: “Businesses and individuals pay an estimated $1.5 trillion in bribes each year. This is about 2% of global GDP and ten times the value of overseas development assistance.

The Report analyzes anti-corruption legal reforms on the ground in Cambodia, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, India and the United Kingdom, including challenges and opportunities in law reform and highlights gaps and progress. In the final analysis, law reform remains laws on paper unless they are given life to through political will.

Building Bridges and Partnerships:

This report embodies the values of collaborations and partnerships. The UN SDG Fund’s vision has been to build partnerships with the private sector and academic communities so as to strengthen the UN’s new architecture— for a reimagined global order— one that sees the pivotal importance of the private sector and academic institutions.

The role of academic institutions to spur the next generation of leaders to advance and accelerate the SDGs in the 21st Century and to reach a higher moral ground is the key to unlocking the transformative potential of the SDGs.

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