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June
17, 2002 5:15 p.m.
Another
Take on CEDAW
The
world as a costume party.
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he
Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings last week on the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
Conservative feminist author Christina Hoff Sommers testified against
the convention as the wrong way to help women. She noted that, for example,
CEDAW appears to commit signing governments to ensuring that male-dominated
occupations are not paid too much relative to female-dominated ones. This
is central planning with a feminist face, and not a great idea for women
or men. Committee chairman Joe Biden's response was to suggest that Sommers
and fellow panelist Jeane Kirkpatrick would have opposed the Declaration
of Independence if they had been around at the time, based on their narrow-minded
attention to details.
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Critics
of CEDAW have argued that if we ratify it with reservations, those reservations
will in the end count for naught. But Cornell University law professor
Jeremy Rabkin makes a different point: Perhaps reservations can basically
nullify the treaty. But then, what's the point of it? Saudi Arabia, he
notes, has ratified CEDAW with the "reservation" that it will
continue to impose sharia law in cases of conflict. "It's part of
the general debasement of international law. We know going into it that
most signatories don't mean it," he says. "It's one more push
for the idea that [international law is] all fantasyland. . . . that the
world is a costume party."
The
problem is endemic to treaties conceived not as contracts among nations
but as steps toward the construction of new international norms. If Qatar
violates the treaty, after all, what are we going to do? Force American
women to wear veils? Rabkin's worry is that we are making an international
law a joke, when parts of it (the core of the notion of diplomatic immunity,
for example) really are important.
WHO'LL
AUDIT THE AUDITORS' AUDITORS?
The Washington Post is running editorial after editorial on the
subject of accounting reform, on the model of the media's earlier push
for campaign-finance reform. On Saturday, it ran a lead editorial
listing individual senators who are on the fence on the issue--a pretty
good measure of increased editorial engagement.
A
previous installment of this campaign slammed
Phil Gramm for resisting the Post's favored legislation on accounting
reform, that of Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes. Sen. Gramm was presented
as having no reason for opposing the bill. Around the time of that editorial,
Gramm made his case against the bill to me.
"Where
we really differ is that Senator Sarbanes is willing to have Congress
write accounting standards, and I'd like to have [a new independent oversight]
board. . . make those standards," he said. Sarbanes would set up
a board as well, he noted, but "makes all the decisions for the board
in advance." Gramm would leave it to the board, for example, to decide
what would constitute an impermissible conflict of interest. "I don't
think we have the competency to do that," he says. "If you make
a mistake you've got to go back and change the law and that might take
50 yrs, as it did with Glass-Steagall," the Depression-era law that
governed American banking for decades.
Agree
or disagree, it's not the unreasoned position the Post makes it out to
be.
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