At Bench Memos, Ed Whelan has continued his series on the transnational jurisprudence of Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee to fill the critical position of State Department legal-adviser. In the most important posts yet (here and here), Ed uses the U.N. Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to explain, concretely, the Leftist extremism of transnationalism and the lengths to which Koh is willing to go to see the agenda imposed.

CEDAW, you’ll be shocked to learn, was signed by Pres. Jimmy Carter in 1980. It was never ratified, though, precisely because it is rife with provisions the American people would never enact democratically. It would impose a test that finds discrimination against women if the effect of distinctions drawn by a society creates inequality between men and women. That those distinctions have no discriminatory purpose, that men and women might be different by nature, or that men and women might gravitate to different interests by inclination is not acknowledged as a possibility. The treaty enshrines the “progressive” view that any differences between the sexes are social constructs that modern law exists to break down.

It is thus the treaty’s purpose to enforce access to abortion on demand, legalize prostitution, outlaw any discrimination due to sexual orientation, require gender studies and feminist research in university curricula, redistribute wealth, impose comparable worth rules (i.e., the government would fix wages across industries to ensure that “equal value” is accorded to jobs done by men and women), set quotas to ensure that women receive adequate political representation, reduce the influence of religion (e.g., the Catholic Church in Ireland) to the extent it influences public policy to the detriment of abortion rights, and even eliminate Mother’s Day (which is seen as a propagandistic enforcement of gender stereotypes).

As Ed points out, Koh has disingenuously labeled these concerns raised by CEDAW critics as ”preposterous” misrepresentations of, and “myths” about, the treaty. Yet, Ed does not draw these concerns from critics. Instead, they are taken directly, often verbatim, from the CEDAW Committee created by the treaty to report on perceived abuses and police treaty compliance. As Ed demonstrates in detail, it is simply impossible that Koh does not know about the CEDAW Committee reports — on occasions where it has suited his purpose, he has relied on them.

Dean Koh not only wants the United States to ratify CEDAW; he wants the treaty to be “self-executing” — i.e., not just an agreement between states regarding goals to strive for, but a source of legal rules that federal judges would be empowered to impose regardless of whether Americans supported them. (Making treaties judicially enforceable by individuals — like alien al Qaeda terrorists suing the U.S. in federal court — is Koh’s default position on all human-rights treaties.)

I would also point out that, as Ed notes, most nations of the world have adopted CEDAW (169 nations had done so by 2002). This, I predict, would be taken by Koh as a basis for arguing that the treaty, though not adopted by the United States, had — hocus pocus — transmogrified into “customary international law” and, thus, could be imposed by federal judges regardless of whether the United States ratifies CEDAW. (For more on customary international law, see Ed’s posts here and here, and my 2006 Commentary article, “International Law v. the United States”).

Finally, Ed has just added another post: a summary of Koh’s “transnationalist game on treaties” which draws together the major points of the prior posts on treaties. Like the entire series, it’s an eye-opener not to be missed.