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FEMINIST MANIPLUATION AT THE UN

The problem with UN treaties is that, customarily, it is the Prime Minister (presumably in consultation with the Minister of Foreign Affairs) who decides whether these treaties should be ratified (they usually are); the public is never the wiser, even though the public is tied to the obligations made under the treaties. 

This problem has been recently exacerbated by the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada is now looking to these international treaties for “guidelines” in interpreting the legal challenges before them.  This is the case, even though treaties are not supposed to be binding until their provisions have been passed directly into domestic law.  This little detail, ie. the necessity of passing domestic legislation before the treaties are considered binding, no longer seems to stop the Supreme Court from legitimizing the treaties anyway, by way of its judgments.  Because of this, such treaties are becoming much more significant.

New Procedures on Treaties

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Bernier, announced, in January 2008, that the Conservative government will change the way it now signs on to international treaties.  That is, the Conservative government has decided that all treaties will first be tabled in the House of Commons so that they will be open to public scrutiny and debate.  Under the new process, MP’s will be able to review and discuss the treaty, and debate and vote on it before Canada formally agrees to ratify it.  The government, however, will still maintain the legal authority to ratify the treaty, regardless of the vote in the House of Commons.  However, the government will give consideration to the views of the House of Commons in coming to a decision.  At least the public, under this new system, will get to know what the treaties actually say before being tied down by them!  This is a welcome change and long overdue.

UN Monitoring Committees

Even if these international treaties are approved by Parliament before being ratified, there is still another problem: that is, the treaty monitoring committees – each treaty has its own monitoring committee – are busily re-interpreting the treaties according to a feminist agenda.  Therein lies a big problem.  Under a UN treaty, nations that have signed on to a treaty are required to submit reports every five years to the treaty’s monitoring committee to show that they are complying with the provisions of the treaty. 

According to the UN protocol, the members of the monitoring committee should be “of high moral standing and competence in the field covered by the treaty”.  Committee members are to be elected by UN members of their own nationality.  The committee’s rules of procedure require that committee members solemnly declare to exercise their duties and powers “honourably, faithfully, impartially and conscientiously.”  We wish!

Feminist Control of the Monitoring Committees

Because most of the UN treaties were passed decades ago, they were not written from a feminist perspective.  Also, even if a new treaty is under consideration, most nations, who are members of the UN (there are now 192 countries), do not agree with radical feminist policies.   Such policies which include abortion rights, redefining the family to include homosexuals, same-sex marriage and independence of adolescents from parental control (which would make it easier to provide the adolescent with abortion, birth control, access to pornography, etc.), and religion being subservient to other rights, would never get passed in the UN, even today.

Feminist Secret Agreement

To skirt the actual written provisions of these treaties, feminist activists met privately with the heads of the UN agencies in a secret meeting in Deep Cove, New York in December 1996.  At this meeting, it was agreed that the monitoring committees would henceforth “re-interpret” treaties to provide a feminist interpretation to them, in order to coerce countries to implement feminist policies despite the fact that such policies were not actually written into the treaties at all.

As a result, for example, the monitoring Committee for the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), has now questioned more than 60 nations on their abortion laws, and has even gone so far as to create its own “general recommendation” that reads abortion into the document.   By repeatedly demanding that every country implement abortion policies, which is euphemistically expressed in UN language as “sexual and reproductive health services”, the committee hopes that abortion rights will become accepted as part of international law.  The CEDAW monitoring committee has met no resistance in interpreting the treaty from a pro-abortion perspective, due to the fact that about half of its members are employees of feminist NGO’s, including such radical NGOs as International Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW), the Latin America and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights, and the Global Fund for Women.


Canadian Feminist Organizations Assist Treaty Monitoring Committees

In order to provide “inside” information on each country’s support of feminist policies, feminist organizations in each country that makes its reports to the treaty Committee, provide the committee with a “shadow” report.  These shadow reports provide information that the committee then uses to criticize the government for its failure to uphold feminist policies.  The organization, the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA), headed by Shelagh Day, former chairperson of the Equality Rights Panel of the Court Challenge Program (CCP), has made shadow reports to numerous treaty monitoring committees, since 2003, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); the United Nations Human Rights Committee which oversees the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.  In all its shadow reports before these committees, FAFIA has highlighted the Court Challenges Program (CCP) as a vehicle promoting equality in Canada (for feminists).  Lo and behold, the CCP was highlighted as a marvelous invention by the Canadian government in all the reports issuing from these various treaty-monitoring committees.

Committee Report Not Enforceable

In its shadow report in 2007, FAFIA mentioned the so-called scandalous decision by the federal government to shut down the CCP.  It will be no surprise, when CEDAW’s next report on Canada, severely criticizes the federal government for its decision to cut the CCP! 

Fortunately, the reports of these UN monitoring committees are not enforceable.  They are used only for propaganda purposes in order to pressure a government to uphold feminist policies.  For example, when FAFIA appeared before the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, reviewing the CCP, on December 4, 2007 (See REALity Jan/Feb 2008, p.8), it referred to the “fact” that disbanding the CCP was a failure to comply with Canada’s international obligations, as stated by the CEDAW monitoring committee.

Not surprisingly, when the Status of Women Committee released to the House of Commons the report on its review of the cancellation of the CCP in February 2008, it referred, of course, to the fact that Canada had failed to comply with the provisions of its international obligations under the CEDAW treaty. 

The Status of Women report on the CCP, released in February 2008, stated: