Law
This chapter addresses the law of treaties using feminist lenses. It acknowledges the significance of treaty-making in modern international law and the increasing role of non-government organisations in this field. It then examines some of the gendered aspects of treaty law and the problems inherent in using this mechanism to improve the position of women. The chapter observes that international treaty law can be, however, a valuable yardstick to measure responses of national decision-makers with respect to women’s lives.
This chapter investigates a number of modes of international law-making to uncover the interests and perspectives that they support. It focuses on the formation of customary international law, the category of general principles of law and the content of ‘subsidiary sources’ of international law, referenced in the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The chapter presents a case study of the international legal response to violence against women to indicate both the problems and potential of the sources of international law for women.
The corollary to the prohibition of the unilateral use of force is the obligation for the peaceful settlement of disputes and the collective security system established under chapter seven of the UN Charter. The chapter examines the concepts and processes of international dispute resolution through the lens of sex and gender. It argues that the understanding of dispute resolution in international law, as well as that of collective security, are limited and serve to sustain impoverished concepts of peace and security.
The chapter revisits the central argument of the book: that sex and gender (and other identities – race, ethnicity, coloniality) have shaped international law and that the exclusion of women from the substance, methodologies and processes of international law undermine the discipline’s claims to universality and objectivity. It then considers developments in the 1990s, notably in the institutions and processes of international criminal law, that have led to claims of a ‘new’ or ‘transformed’ international law where women’s lives are addressed. It concludes that despite these advances the boundaries of international law have not in fact been significantly shifted.
The chapter outlines the international legal prohibition of the unilateral use of force in international relations in pursuance of the maintenance of international peace and security. It considers the particular ways that armed conflict impacts upon women. It examines the self-defence exception to prohibition against the use of force and other contested exceptions – self-determination; humanitarian intervention – and argues that the gendered nature of the international regime makes it inadequate to deal effectively with the realities of their lives for women in conflict-affected societies.
This chapter considers why issues of sex and gender matter in international law. It introduces the main argument of the book – that the absence of women in the development of international law has generated a narrow and impoverished jurisprudence. Among other things, this jurisprudence has legitimated the unequal potion of women rather than challenged it. The aim of the book is to encourage a rethinking of the discipline of international law so that it can provide an adequate framework for international justice with respect to women. The chapter offers a snapshot of the conditions of women’s lives globally, showing that the quality of women’s lives around the world is consistently different from and inferior to men’s. It examines why the international legal order has paid such little attention to the position of women.
This chapter provides a review of how the book’s statistical and legal analyses of international organizations’ constitutions revealed many new – and seemingly contradictory – interpretations of international organizations law. It reminds the reader of the map that the book provided of international organizations’ values, as well as some of the ways for understanding that map.
This chapter illustrates the extent to which various international organizations’ constitutions refer to a range of principles identified in the literature. It describes the universe of these constitutions quantitatively, and it provides a first analysis of groupings of these principles. The chapter shows how some constitutions refer to different principles more than others. It also shows how these groupings were found, as well as which organizations and principles belong to these groups. This chapter also shows the network linkages between these principles, as constitutions refer to some principles more than others. If mentions of executive staff appear dominant in traditional quantitative analysis, these mentions become all the more important in the network analysis provided. Indeed, no analysis of international organizations law can omit the principles driving executive staff and remain relevant.
This chapter continues to illustrate the quantitative links from the first chapters by concentrating on various substantive principles. These substantive principles act as the main drivers of international organizations law, in contrast to procedural principles. The chapter shows, using the same kind of analysis as in the previous chapter, how equality, peace, representativeness and autonomy mean something together and separately, depending on the constitutions being discussed. Unequal relations between states can never form the basis of peace between states, as the UN Charter and other constitutions attest. State sovereignty may represent the ultimate type of autonomy, but representation in an international organization may actually bolster both the autonomy of the state and the international organization concerned. Such apparent contradictions bedevil all aspects of constitutional interpretation. Valuing these principles and knowing their value in promoting a principle like peace requires a holistic understanding of these constitutions in context.
This chapter illustrates the quantitative links from the first chapters by using the standard tools of legal analysis. In particular, it shows how references to other principles shade any legal or practical definition of authority in these international organizations. For example, the African Export Import Bank’s constitution describes how the Bank’s autonomy from its member states helps to ensure the Bank staff’s authority. The constitutions of the Caribbean Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank also show how some constitutions use recommendations to appoint staff, while in other cases staff make recommendations to member states. Depending on the international organization, the principle of making recommendations serves different ends. In some cases, autonomy helps provide the authority to make these recommendations. In cases like the United Nations, the recommendations themselves carry authority, and the authority vested in the United Nations gives authority to these recommendations. However, the law (and particularly the subsidiary and regulatory law) behind these nuanced concepts of these legal principles remains almost completely undefined.