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05.04.2016

Submission to CEDAW Committee on Women’s Rights in Conflict and Jus Cogens Rules

The Global Justice Center (the “GJC”) is a legal organization whose mission is to promote justice and gender equality using international law. The GJC seeks to create legal precedents and legal tools by advocating for the progressive interpretation, and aggressive enforcement, of international law, including treaty based law, Security Council resolutions (“SCRs”), and customary international law including international humanitarian law (“IHL”) and the laws of state responsibility.

The GJC has launched a new legal initiative, the “Geneva Project” which is directly relevant to the work of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (the “Committee”) to ensure the rights of women in conflict and post-conflict situations. The key to this initiative is our forthcoming White Paper on the obligations of states and the UN system, including treaty monitoring bodies to enforce jus cogens rules (including those relating to genocide). The GJC believes that the limited monitoring structure currently in place has led to a failure of these actors to “take all possible measures” to ensure the rights of women in conflict and post-conflict situations.

This is a largely unexplored area of law; specifically, how state mandates under IHL and the customary laws of state responsibility interact with Security Council mandates on peace and security. For example, treaty monitoring bodies retain the same procedures for reviewing and reporting on conflict and non-conflict states, though the framework of applicable international law varies for these two categories of states. The GJC believes that changes are necessary in order to safeguard the rights of women in conflict and post-conflict situations.

The GJC welcomes this opportunity to share some of our relevant legal analyses and we ask that the Committee take the following points into consideration when drafting the General Recommendation on women’s rights in conflict and post-conflict situations (the “General Recommendation”).

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