Recently, Obama Administration officials, including Secretary Hillary Clinton, Ambassador Susan Rice, and even President Barack Obama himself, have spoken in support of ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).  The treaty also enjoys support from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  Naturally renewed talk of CEDAW, combined with a Senate hearing held on the treaty in November 2010, has activist groups gearing up for an epic inside-the-beltway battle should President Obama transmit the treaty to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) for its advice and consent.

While I understand arguments against CEDAW, especially those concerning the unenforceable nature of human rights treaties, I find them unconvincing considering the promise CEDAW holds as a tool of diplomacy on a very sensitive and complicated issue.  Treaties do not always need an enforcement mechanism to be useful.  Human rights treaties can function as a means of establishing agreed upon norms and values that serve as a framework for dialogue to address worldwide problems.  In this capacity, CEDAW has the potential to provide the United States with another tool to engage internationally and serve as a model on the rights of women.  Even better, it can do so at little or no cost to U.S. sovereignty. (more…)

Traveling in the Middle East over the past week has been extraordinary, to say the least. In a region where change is measured in incremental adjustments over decades, the days of rage and anger should not be interpreted as anything but transformational.

Observers have been tracking the angst of this new generation for about a decade.  The question was always where and when the teapot would sing.  Without any other release mechanism, overflowing anxiety simply funneled to the streets.

Although the activism in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen reflect the distinctiveness of those particular countries, some significant common denominators thread through the region.  First, the demonstrations reflect a chronic angst stemming from the challenges of living in authoritarian states beset by stagnation and corruption; political, economic, and even social, cultural and religious repression, to a noticeable degree.  The call to action came not from political leaders but from frustration cutting through the younger set.
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Walking in to a meeting of Middle East civil society activists in London last week, I expected the usual somber, intellectual examination of how the increase in recent political upheavals was negatively affecting respect for human rights and civil liberties. Renewed violence in Iraq; another delay in installing winners of the faulty elections in Afghanistan; Egyptians lighting themselves on fire; Hezbollah bringing down the Lebanese government; a reconstituted Israeli government reflecting the disintegration of the peace movement; more violence in Gaza; and the overthrow of the chronic Ben Ali regime in Tunisia.

Instead of the usual angst and anguish, these usually serious scholars exhibited a child-like, back-slapping giddiness. The primary instigator was no less than the Brother Leader and “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”

In a televised address this week, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi railed against the online world of Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere – citing the internet as helping to bring down Ben Ali’s two decade rule in Tunisia, saying that he thought the dictator would continue to run Tunisia “for life.” (more…)

As Hungary prepared to take the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union on New Year’s Day, the country faced a slew of criticism over its new censorship laws.  The laws put Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party in control of overseeing the public media and create a party-run media council to regulate both public and private broadcasters.  Hungary’s Nepszabadsag newspaper declared that “the freedom of the press in Hungary has come to an end.” A Washington Post editorial decried the law as “more suited to an authoritarian regime than to a Western democracy.”

Troubling as the media censorship is in itself, it is even more troubling when considered in tandem with the approach Orban is taking to deal with the ailing Hungarian economy.  Since his party’s victory in the parliamentary elections in April of last year, Orban has focused on short-term measures to the chagrin of the EU and the International Monetary Fund, which both want Hungary to focus on long-term spending cuts.  One measure is a controversial reversal of a 1997 pension reform, a move that may in the long-run slow efforts to deal with Hungary’s debt, which is 80 percent of its GDP.  Orban has also sought to increase the party’s influence on monetary policy, allowing a Fidesz-controlled parliamentary committee to fill vacant posts on the Central Bank’s Monetary council.  But rather than ease these concerns, the measures have done little to assure others.  International unease continued as Fitch rating agency downgraded Hungary’s foreign currency credit rating to just above junk status last month. (more…)

At the same time the United States is scaling back its goals for Afghanistan, women in the country are scaling up their own ambitions. In arenas ranging from medicine to the military, from small business to civil society, women are speaking up for themselves and tackling ever-larger aspirations. While problems loom large in a country in which female literacy rates struggle to top 15 percent and rampant insecurity leads many families to keep their daughters and wives indoors, women are making progress. Though their efforts are often overlooked as the world trains its focus on the exits in Afghanistan, they are, quietly and slowly, creating change in their families and their country.

In a box of a building on an Afghan Army base, 29 young women in olive-green uniforms study finance and logistics. They are part of the Afghan National Army’s first Officer Candidate School class for women.

Coming from provinces all across the country, including those in the grip of an increasingly strong anti-government insurgency, these aspiring Army officers say they are determined to serve their country — and to prove to men that women can contribute.

“We have faced so many wars and so many restrictions on women and now the day has come where women have joined the military,” said Shima, a young woman from the Taliban stronghold of Ghazni. “We have to think about the equality of men and women just like other nations where women fight for their countries.” (more…)

In a room full of computer screens, a US civilian with a joystick on the console kills a man thousands of miles away. Having aced a course on drones with ferocious names like Reaper, Hunter, and Tigershark, he is competent to take down a target — a dangerous terrorist, a drug lord connected with the Taliban, a farmer planting IEDs, or, accidentally, an innocent civilian, as the drones are liable to targeting errors. The drones often save American lives and tax dollars at the expense of the lives of innocent civilians: just last month, an air strike mistake led to 23 civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

However, instead of addressing the targeting failures or keeping the drones in the combat zone, the United States sometimes dismisses problems by defining its enemies as “unlawful combatants” and keeping the drone operations secret. If Washington continues to excuse itself from the rule of law in this manner, the use of armed unmanned vehicles may create more problems than it solves.

Last week, a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council called on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of drones outside of war zones because the use of drones undermined global constraints on the use of military force.  The report stressed that the drone technology is changing the rules of conflict and undermining the foundations of humanitarian behavior in war. Here are just some grounds on which the US use of drones could be challenged. (more…)

Just a few years ago, conventional wisdom held that Google would be the vanguard of Internet freedom in China, transforming the way information flows throughout the historically closed society. But while the rapid expansion of the Internet in China has indeed served as a vital medium for political activism, Beijing has essentially kept pace with its extensive surveillance network to silence “cyber dissidents” and with its use of the Web as a pro-government propaganda machine to steer public opinion. At first glance, it appears that China’s censorship practices warrant a strong U.S. policy and a thorough condemnation from the Obama administration. But as Emily Parker, the Arthur Ross Fellow at the Asia Society, explains, U.S. technological innovation – not U.S. policy – is likely the most capable, effective, and politically sensible tool for chipping away at China’s Great Firewall.

Since Google’s departure, the Chinese government has taken action to tighten its grip on the Internet. Earlier this month, China quietly acknowledged the creation of a new “Internet news coordination bureau,” officially responsible for “guidance, coordination and other work related to the construction and management of Web culture.” And just this week, China’s legislature proposed an amendment to the Law on Guarding State Secrets that would require telecommunications companies to “detect, report and delete” leaks of “state secrets,” broadly defined by the government as “information concerning national security and interests that, if released, would harm the country’s security and interests.” These measures are just the latest pieces fastened to a massive regulatory system, much to the chagrin of the international human rights community and many of China’s 400 million Internet users. (more…)

President Sarkozy’s proposed ban on wearing full veils in public sends a clear message to Muslims living in France: your religion is not welcome here. France has already banned the display of religious objects in schools, a law that was primarily enacted to keep headscarves off of pupils, but one that nevertheless was at least nominally fair in its breadth. Sarkozy’s new proposal, which is popular with his party members and the French public alike, is targeted just at Muslim woman, making it – in a word-  discriminatory. Indeed, as France’s top legal advisory body, the Council of State, has noted, the law may be unconstitutional and breach the European Convention on Human Rights, making the chances of the legislation actually passing unclear. Regardless, the damage it done. Sarkozy’s enthusiastic support for the proposal will only serve to distance French Muslims from French society, further alienating a demographic already on the edges.

As a region, Europe has long struggled to relate to and assimilate its growing Muslim population. (more…)

It is a good thing that that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, never tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Judging by her recent actions it appears she would never be able to say the oath of enlistment with a straight face. I mean the part where one swears to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, which includes little things like subsequent amendments, such as those in the Bill of Rights.

What I refer to is when she and Bill Kristol, via their “Keep America Safe“ campaign, accused nine lawyers in the Justice Department, who had represented Guantanamo detainees of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” of working in the “Department of Jihad,” Perhaps Cheney and Kristol are simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that gets them on a talk show. After all, the right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, in so doing they trample underfoot other Constitutional rights that benefit all of us.

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Ordinary Americans are, by and large, pragmatists about legal matters.  They tend to favor legal outcomes that deftly balance competing considerations.  Outcomes that achieve this balance do not do a disservice to broad swaths of people but instead aim to enhance or at the minimum preserve meaningful social policies.  Pragmatism about law, in other words, is really a product of thinking clearly about what the law is for:  the law serves the American people, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, the currently constituted Supreme Court, led by that fearless foe of pragmatism, John G. Roberts, does not care that most Americans loathe the notion that judges ought to carry out their duties without the interests of the citizenry in mind.  Constitutional law, as Roberts himself is keen to emphasize, has nothing to do with sound public policy and should not be tempered by any moral or social concerns, however relevant they may seem to the electorate.  Constitutional law is a free-floating, self-sustaining set of rules that answers to no one, not even the American public.

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