What the UN Treaty Bodies Did this Year

By | December 29, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 30 (C-Fam) After a year of having their meetings limited by the pandemic, the UN’s human rights treaty monitoring bodies resumed their work reviewing countries’ human rights records in 2022.  These UN bodies were quite aggressive in promoting abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism.

The committee associated with treaty on women’s rights, called the CEDAW Committee, has been the most aggressive in promoting abortion.  In 2022, it conducted 24 country reviews, almost eighty percent of which called on countries to expand the legal grounds for abortion, decriminalize it, or expand access. It should be noted for more than 25 years, the General Assembly has rejected a call for a global right to abortion.

In over ninety-three percent of its country reviews, the Human Rights Committee, which oversees the treaty on civil and political rights, exerted pressure on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.  The CEDAW Committee also did so in over eighty-three percent of its reviews. The General Assembly has never agreed that sexual orientation and gender identity are new categories of non-discrimination.

Other treaty bodies also pressured countries on these issues, despite the fact that none of the UN’s nine core human rights treaties contains any mention of abortion or homosexuality, much less declaring them to be international human rights.  Among them were the committees attached to the UN’s treaties on the rights of children, persons with disabilities, and economic, social, and cultural rights.

All of these treaty bodies have, to some extent, exceeded their mandates with regard to these issues in the past.  Until recently, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, whose associated treaty has been in force since 1969, has largely stayed silent on these matters.  This year, in its review of the United States, the committee criticized the Dobbs Supreme Court decision striking down a national right to abortion and urged the U.S. to expand access to abortion as a matter of racial equality.

Abortion activist groups have set their sights on the committee’s forthcoming general comment on the intersection of racial discrimination and health to ensure that the committee incorporates abortion as a right into its work going forward.  Organizations like the Center for Reproductive Rights and Ipas, which have longstanding links to members of this and other treaty bodies, have long been successful in getting independent UN human rights experts to promote their agenda.  Work from the European Centre for Law and Justice has revealed the close ties between the UN’s experts and the global abortion lobby.

While these committees’ pronouncements are not binding on UN member countries, and they lack the authority to create novel human rights, it remains important that these notions continue to be contested, both by the UN General Assembly and by the countries that have ratified the treaties these committees monitor.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter