CEDAW Committee

CEDAW review process CEDAW Optional Protocol

CEDAW

Committee

The Committee members of CEDAW are elected for four-year terms. They are nominated by State parties and elected by a meeting of State parties. Furthermore, elections are held every two years to renew half of the Committee.¹

It is crucial to have experts within the Committee with strong gender equality and women’s human rights expertise. This is because the members are a vital part of the review process of CEDAW. Additionally, when undertaking advocacy on macroeconomy and gender equality, it is helpful to be able to provide feedback to a Committee member who has expertise on macroeconomics or feminist economics.

During the election period, it is helpful to advocate for the election of feminist experts with a gender equality perspective and a true commitment to substantive gender equality,² including in economic policies and measures. This is to gain space for highlighting the importance of macroeconomic policies and measures on gender equality.

In-person advocacy during the CEDAW sessions is another way to raise the importance of macroeconomic issues and their effects on women and girls in your country (or the effects of macroeconomic measures of your country on other countries, i.e. extraterritorial obligations).

The CEDAW Committee also calls for input from civil society organisations on the issues that it is currently discussing. Providing the Committee with information on macroeconomic policies in your country and real-life cases from the field can give them a more accurate picture. Thus, this brings about better suggestions to be developed by the Committee with the UN system and the member states.

A relatively recent example of the CEDAW Committee’s analysis of the intersection of macroeconomic policy and extraterritorial obligations took place during the review of Switzerland in 2016. The below excerpt by Barbara Adams and Karen Judd gives a strong overview of the process:

Swiss tax havens

In November 2016, CESR, Alliance Sud, NYU Law School Global Justice Clinic, Public Eye, and the Tax Justice Network argued that, as a party to CEDAW, Switzerland is obligated to prevent private sector activities that might undermine women’s human rights outside its borders; in this context it cited the obligation to prevent corporate tax abuse, which restricts the ability of other countries to mobilize sufficient revenues to fulfill their human rights commitments. Although Switzerland has publicly condemned the impact on developing countries of illicit financial flows, describing them as ‘nefarious’, and has pledged to join an international effort to eliminate the causes of such flows, the submission pointed out that Switzerland has failed to conduct an independent assessment of the ways in which its own policies encourage overseas tax abuse, including bank secrecy laws, corporate tax privileges, and weak reporting standards.

The CEDAW committee’s concluding observations on Switzerland expressed concern that the country’s financial secrecy policies and rules on corporate reporting and taxation can negatively impact on the ability of other states, particularly those already short of revenue, to mobilize maximum available resources for the fulfillment of women’s rights. The committee urged Switzerland to honor its international human rights obligations by undertaking “independent, participatory, and periodic” impact assessments of the extraterritorial effects of its financial secrecy and corporate tax policies on women’s rights and substantive equality, and public disclosure of its findings.

As the Tax Justice Network highlighted, “[t]he ground-breaking outcomes of CEDAW’s review of Switzerland indicate what can be achieved when human rights and tax justice advocates join forces to use these mechanisms to challenge cross-border tax abuse as a violation of human rights.”

CEDAW review process CEDAW Optional Protocol

Footnotes

1
CEDAW Committee members can get re-elected if they are nominated once again by their member states. In 2020, IWRAW Asia Pacific published an introductory handbook on CEDAW elections, for civil society organisations interested in engaging with the process.
2
‘Substantive gender equality’ is the term used to explain how the CEDAW Committee understands the issue of gender equality: it means equality both in legal and official terms (e.g. in laws, regulations, and policies – de jure equality), as well as equality in opportunities and results in real life (e.g. percentage of women in labour force, gender gap in school attendance levels – de facto equality).