The InterDependent

This December 10, as the world marks International Human Rights Day, it is appropriate to worry about the future of the courageous women of the Arab Spring who stood tall against tyranny to achieve freedom and democracy. Women were at the heart of the upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa. They defied convention and stepped outside their doors to join demonstrations, becoming vital members of revolutionary planning groups and speaking to the media. Yet despite their participation and leadership, the jury is out on whether the changes sweeping the Middle East will improve women’s rights. Will the revolutions lead to women gaining their rights and being real participants in building the new governments and constitutions? Or will they be left out?

UN Photo/Iason Foounten

Already, there is cause for concern. Despite their Tahrir Square involvement, no women are included in the Egyptian constitutional reform committee. In his first press conference, the chair of Libya’s Transitional National Council specifically stated that Islamic law would prevail, including polygamy. Women across the region are nervous, even in countries like Morocco and Tunisia that have recognized women’s rights since their uprisings.

In each of these places, women will fight—and are already fighting—for their equal place in society. In a global world, however, they cannot do it alone. And there is one easy step that the United States could take to help: With 67 votes, the Senate can break a 30-year deadlock and ratify the women’s treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Signed and sent to the Senate by President Carter in 1980 (when I was a member of his White House staff), CEDAW has now been ratified by all the countries on earth except Sudan, Somalia, Iran, two island nations—and the United States. This neglect belies our presumptive world leadership on human rights. By contrast, our ratification of CEDAW would signal an unconditional support of women’s rights at a vital time for the Middle East.

The clarity of both women’s hopes for justice and the grim challenges ahead are found in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights for all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” No gender bias there. Are women’s human rights negotiable or somehow a Western artifice? The Declaration answers in describing its purpose: “To achieve international cooperation . . . in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

Women everywhere have had to struggle inch by inch to achieve that freedom, trying to move away from a world where men—by law and tradition—have controlled women’s everyday existence and rights, without either their participation or consent. As the heady air of the Arab Spring fades into winter, women remember that neither the American nor French Revolutions brought women equality.

Much stands in the way. Women’s human rights have been declared negotiable because of local custom (“We’ve always done it this way.”) or local culture (“Women’s rights are a Western concept.”).

My mother was born before American women had won the right to vote. When I was in high school, girls were only allowed to play half-court basketball. It took Title IX to overcome the notion that we were too fragile to play the entire court. After I completed a master’s degree in nursing administration, my goal to be a hospital administrator was blocked because no Ph.D. programs admitted “girls.” In the early 1970s, as a divorced professional woman with excellent credit, I was required by D.C. law to have my mortgage countersigned by a man. I went hat-in-hand to ask my father.

As my own experience illustrates, the path to equality is a slow one. Women of the Arab Spring have pushed open the first door to gaining their rights, and with their courage have strengthened the potential for lasting democratic change and economic well-being in their societies. In the Arab world, women’s adversary is fundamentalism, the belief that the world must remain now and forevermore as it was in the beginning, in the mythical orderly past—which men ruled. Fundamentalism, of course, is not restricted to the Arab world, and everywhere, its target is women’s rights.

What is the best way to support the women of the Arab Spring today? As a global leader on human rights, the United States cannot stand by, but neither should we interfere directly. Our support is critical: These brave women need our engagement in ways that are helpful in the transition to democracy. Our country’s leaders have spoken out in powerful support for women’s human rights. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have called for women’s full participation in the new governments. The Senate has passed by unanimous consent resolutions of support under the bipartisan leadership of all the women senators. But words are not enough. It is time for action—by the U.S. Senate on CEDAW.

CEDAW is quite simply a comprehensive agreement affirming the principles of fundamental human rights for women and girls. It has a decades-long track record of being a useful tool for women to engage their governments in overcoming barriers to equality. Repeated studies have shown that CEDAW has been used by advocates to promote changes in policies and hold their government accountable for gender equality—with important results: reducing sex trafficking and domestic abuse; providing girls with access to education; ensuring women’s opportunity to work, have credit, own land or run a business without barriers; ending forced and child marriage; improving women’s health; and ensuring inheritance rights. But its ratification in the United States has long been stalled by the same fundamentalist arguments being used by those opposing women’s rights in the Middle East, and by isolationists who have opposed all human rights treaties and engagement with the United Nations.

Women leaders of the Arab Spring who are working for democratic change in the region testified before the Senate recently that having the United States as a CEDAW partner would greatly boost their efforts. We could then help them wield this “gold standard” for women’s human rights as a tool and a benchmark in their struggle toward equality. In the first Senate hearing on the treaty in eight years on November 10, 2010, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law heard Wazhma Frogh of the Afghan Women’s Network describe their success in including Article 22 in the new Constitution, which states that women and men are equal before the law. She told the Senators, “Some have asked whether CEDAW really makes a difference in countries that have very poor human rights records. We have proof that it does. This treaty has led to dramatic progress for women, which just a few years ago we did not believe was possible.”

On November 2, 2011, the two Senate Foreign Relations subcommittees on international organizations and global women’s issues and Near Eastern affairs held a joint hearing on women and the Arab Spring. Mahnaz Afkhami, President and CEO of the Women’s Learning Partnership of women’s rights activists and NGOs from 20 countries, primarily in the Middle East and North Africa, testified, “Our partners in the region have made clear to us that U.S. ratification of CEDAW would reinforce their own efforts to fully institutionalize and implement the treaty provisions for gender equality within their national legislation and constitutional reforms.” Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer testified that ratification of CEDAW would validate the claim that “women’s rights are human rights” and send “a powerful and unequivocal message of support to advocates around the world.”

By holding ourselves apart from the global effort to use CEDAW as a benchmark for women fighting for equality across the globe, the United States is giving the proverbial wink to restrictive governments, saying in effect, “Watch what we do, not what we say.” As an ambassador, I was asked wherever I went, “Why hasn’t the U.S. ratified CEDAW? We need your support.” Providing that support should no longer be a debatable proposition. Nothing should allow us to stand aside from being a full partner in achieving women’s human rights everywhere.

On Human Rights Day 2011, America should rededicate itself to answering the call from the women on the front lines of the Arab Spring and ratify CEDAW. We must stop allowing myths, misrepresentations and bitter politics to hold us back from being the beacon of hope we should and can be worldwide.

Linda Tarr-Whelan is a Demos distinguished senior fellow and author of Women Lead the Way: Your Guide to Stepping Up to Leadership and Changing the World (2009, 2011). She is the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and deputy assistant to President Jimmy Carter for women’s concerns.