US, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Allies against Women?
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Senate Panel to Defy Bush, Vote on Women's Treaty
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 18, 2002; Page A21
washingtonpost.com
In an almost unheard-of challenge to presidential prerogative, the Democratic Senate is preparing to consider ratification of an international treaty the White House has indicated it may not want approved.
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) has scheduled a committee vote today on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a 23-year-old United Nations document that was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and has languished ever since.
Six months ago, the Bush administration told the Senate that the convention was "generally desirable and should be approved." But last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell wrote the committee to say that although it still supports the document's "general goal of eradicating invidious discrimination across the globe," the administration now feels its "vagueness" and "complexity" require a review by the Justice Department.
Between those two positions, Biden said Tuesday, the "administration has not substantively addressed the committee's questions" and declined to send any ranking official to hearings on the treaty. "The committee needs to act soon if we want this Congress to vote on this treaty," he said.
After the administration originally said it approved of the treaty, which is known as CEDAW, conservative organizations launched an energetic campaign against it. In letters, e-mails and phone calls to President Bush, Powell and Republican senators, groups such as Concerned Women for America have denounced the treaty as a "dangerous, anti-family document" and "a thinly veiled cover for demanding abortion and decriminalizing prostitution."
Biden's predecessor as foreign relations chairman, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), called it a "radical feminist" manifesto and vowed it would never see the light of day.
The administration has implied that Biden's move to push it through is politically motivated, and Powell's letter reminded the committee that its pending treaty list includes 18 other documents designated as being of higher priority than the convention on women.
It is unlikely that committee approval would result in a vote on the Senate floor, where disapproving colleagues could keep the treaty in limbo. And even if it received the necessary two-thirds Senate majority, such documents do not enter into force without presidential action.
But a public battle over the document, which affirms that women have equal "human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field," could prove embarrassing to the administration on several fronts. Over the years, the convention has been ratified by 170 countries, leaving the United States in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
At the same time, a review by the Justice Department is likely to highlight ongoing internal administration policy battles over international social issues. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was one of the most vocal opponents of the convention during his time in the Senate. Powell, despite last week's letter, supports the treaty and advocated attaching whatever reservations were deemed necessary and blessing Senate action, according to a senior State Department official.
The liberation of Afghan women from the medieval clutches of the Taliban has become one of the leading exhibits in the administration's post-Sept. 11 diplomatic efforts to convince the world of U.S. goodwill and values. "This is one of those broad, thematic issues that matters, to the first lady and to the president," a White House official said.
After the administration indicated in February that it favored ratification, Biden scheduled a hearing for mid-May, postponed it at the administration's request and rescheduled it for mid-June. That hearing convened on June 13 without administration participation.
Among the most emphatic proponents of the convention was Sima Samar, who was then the minister of women's affairs in Afghanistan. Samar's letter to the committee said, "I cannot overstate to you how important it will be for me and other Afghan women if you do take this step. We will then be able to tell our countrymen that the United States, where women already have full legal rights, has just seen the need to ratify this treaty."
After the hearing, Biden sent an angry letter to Powell and Ashcroft, to which Powell replied last week. The administration, Powell wrote, is "committed to ensuring that promotion of the rights of women is fully integrated into American foreign policy." But "the vagueness of the text of CEDAW and the record of the official U.N. body that reviews and comments on the implementation of the convention . . . raise a number of issues."
Until recently, the convention "was not an issue" in the State Department, according to the senior official. "I don't think people over here really thought about the politics of it."
But along with the provision of U.S. funds to U.N. population programs, the availability of sex education and reproductive health services to adolescents and the advocacy of condom use to prevent HIV infection -- all of which Powell has publicly supported -- the convention is a red flag to conservatives active on family issues.
In a February 2001 report titled "How U.N. Conventions on Women's and Children's Rights Undermine Family, Religion and Sovereignty," the Heritage Foundation said the United Nations used the convention to "push policy changes that would ultimately deconstruct the two-parent married family and counter traditional religious norms."
Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America said the convention is "bad for women and . . . bad for the nation" and charged it would "supersede the Constitution." Bush appointed Crouse as part of the official U.S. delegation to last spring's U.N. Special Session on Children, during which the United States stood alone with conservative Islamic states in opposing reproductive health care for those younger than 18, which it said encouraged premarital sex, abortion and HIV infection.
Many conservative organizations charge that the State Department took advantage of White House inattention to slip the convention into the category of treaties the administration considered "generally desirable." The Family Research Council has urged anti-convention calls and letters along with the Traditional Values Coalition, made up of conservative Christian churches, which has demanded that Bush "continue to uphold the beliefs of the American people by publicly denouncing this proposition."
Not all of the convention's opponents charge that it seeks to end family life as we know it. In her Senate testimony last month, former U.N. ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick described it as useless in achieving the gender equality it seeks to promote. As proof, she pointed out that parties to it include countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where discrimination against women remains enshrined in law, custom or both.
Proponents argue that the treaty has enormous symbolic value, at the very least. "America cannot be a world leader in guaranteeing progress for women's human rights, whether in Afghanistan, here in the United States, or around the world, unless it is also a party to the global women's treaty," Harold Koh, former assistant secretary of state for human rights under Clinton, told the Senate.
There is "nothing in the substantive provisions of this treaty that even arguably jeopardizes our national interests," Koh said, and its provisions "are entirely consistent" with the U.S. Constitution and federal and state laws.
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