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June
17, 2002 5:15 p.m. |
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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.
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.