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precarious. One former staff member described women in the Secretariat during the 1960s as ‘an endangered species’. 72 However, little official attention seems to have been given to the issue of women within the UN Secretariat until the early 1970s. Statistics revealing the very low participation of women in professional posts in the UN were prepared for the CSW in 1950, but no action to remedy the situation was
fundamentalism in the 1980s 78 contrasts with that between the Race Convention and decolonisation and the right to self-determination of colonial peoples and those living under alien domination in the 1960s and 70s. The latter connection made for strong institutional and individual championship of the norm of non-discrimination on the basis of race, notably from the newly independent
centuries when women’s groups in the West organised around seeking political equality through obtaining the vote and equal property rights. 32 Women were also prominent in the peace movements of the time, many seeing women’s political progress and peace as entwined. Campaigns for legal and social equality in the 1960s, and the identification of a global sisterhood facing universal male oppression, are
adjudication, 81 although in the 1990s Southern states participated actively in such regimes. The UN General Assembly has been favoured as a law-making forum by the South precisely because after the mid-1960s the latter had the numbers to control the former’s decisions and the Security Council veto was not available. Since the end of the cold war, however, the diversity of interests of developing states
general principles of law. Since the decolonisation era of the 1960s, other aspects of the sources of international law have become more controversial, for example the ways in which sources are manipulated to preserve the control over substantive principle by those states that had previously dominated the international legal system. Such issues include how and why a newly emergent state is bound by the
race is considered an international legal concern in the context of statehood, but sex is not. In chapter 1 we noted the limitations of the UN’s approach to racism. Nevertheless, racial discrimination as state policy in South Africa has long been vociferously denounced within the UN, particularly in the General Assembly. After the onset of the process of decolonisation in the 1960s