Argentina Pushes Back on Treaty Body Overreach

By | 2026

Chair of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee)

WASHINGTON, D.C. February 27 (C-Fam) The government of Argentina has taken a UN human rights treaty body to task because it promoted abortion as a human right, as well as other controversial elements not in the treaty under consideration.

Argentina was the focus of a periodic review meeting with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee), something all states parties to the treaty must undergo from time to time.  During many hours of “dialogue,” Argentina’s representative, Dr. Ursula Basset, firmly expressed her country’s position, improbably maintaining a cheerful and polite demeanor.

A committee member expressed concern that Argentina’s recent withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) might cause disruptions to health programs. She asked what Argentina was doing to ensure access to abortion drugs. Moreover, she wondered what Argentina would do to prevent conscientious objection to abortion by pro-life medical personnel.

Basset said health care, including vaccination programs, is “the primary obligation of the national government, and, actually, the national state guarantees rights and not the WHO.”

Basset also said that Argentina “believes that there is no right to abortion. There is no obligation on the country to guarantee access to free of charge, safe abortion or on any other grounds.”

“What we have is the protection of life of persons during pregnancy, access to information on family planning,” she continued, “and this right to life in Argentina is guaranteed from conception and in its obligations and its international obligations.”  She also cited the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which addresses the rights of children before and after birth.

“There isn’t any right to abortion, nor is there right to expressions of sexual and reproductive health and sexual and reproductive rights,” she said.

The committee then asked her about comprehensive sexuality education, a controversial concept that includes the whole panoply of the sexual revolution for children. Basset pointed to the right of parents to determine the nature of the education of their children, including religious and non-religious private schools not run by the state.

When committee members asked how Argentina was taking an intersectional approach to discrimination and violence against women, Basset said that intersectionality “is a concept which obviously has been misused in international law.”

“The concept of intersectionality is not a concept that comes under the Convention,” she said. “It was subsequently developed as a theoretical process.”  She argued that it “is based on breaking things down into tiny categories,” which can obscure the bigger picture. “We don’t want to leave anyone behind, so we want a holistic approach.”

The committee chair disagreed. “When you say this is new to the convention, I just have to remind ourselves the convention is a living instrument,” she said, “and it was written in a period at a time where many things were not there.”

The idea that negotiated international human rights treaties are to be understood as “living instruments” was never agreed upon by UN member states, but arose within the treaty monitoring bodies themselves.  It is in this vein that the CEDAW Committee has been pressuring states party to the treaty to liberalize their abortion laws with ever-increasing frequency since the 1990s.

As the delegation of Argentina made clear, they consider their country bound by the text of the treaty, not the nonbinding opinions of committee members.

 

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