Provenance of a treaty and its archaic ideas

Here is Christina Sommer’s new article in Policy Review about the fight over CEDAW ratification in the US.

Sommers gets to the heart of the debate about treaties: once ratified, who decides how it is interpreted? A corollary: what power if any do reservations really have?

Sommers rightly notes that this is one of the most contentious issues in international law. The UN bureaucracy says reservations have little effect, while proponents of CEDAW in the US say they will protect US sovereignty. Meanwhile, the Obama adminstration dismisses the whole question as irrelevant in its pursuit of ratification.

What is irrelevant, Sommers says, is the out-moded thinking behind a treaty that, like the Equal Rights Ammendment, suffers from its own success–at least in the US.

View online at: https://c-fam.org/turtle_bay/provenance-of-treaty-and-its-archaic-ideas/

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