More from Ann Elizabeth Mayer’s long article A “Benign” Apartheid: How Gender Apartheid Has Been Rationalized.
Taking advantage of the failure of CEDAW expressly to rule out any culture-based justifications for gender discrimination and playing to cultural relativist sympathies, states have frequently resorted to culture to defend discriminatory laws and policies. For example, many Muslim countries have entered reservations when ratifying CEDAW, saying that they must qualify their obligations in order to uphold Islamic law and speaking as if it were obvious that women’s rights had to be sacrificed where conflicting religious precepts were at stake.87 [Read more…]