Human Rights Brief
A Legal Resource for the International Human Rights CommunityFall 1994
New WCL Program Explores Women's Issues in International Law
by Ayesha Qayyum
"Traditional structures and decision-making processes for advancing human rights are inadequate to deal with the needs of women throughout the world," says Lauren Gilbert, Executive Director of the Women & International Law Program (W&ILP) at the Washington College of Law. Launched in April 1994, W&ILP represents a first step in the attempt to incorporate women's issues into the broader framework of international law. "Women are still the poorest and least privileged in most societies," asserts Gilbert, "and are rarely represented in national and global decision-making processes. International institutions have tended to marginalize those issues that affect women." Gilbert adds that the mission of W&ILP is especially important because "legal education has similarly failed to foster scholarship and teaching about the importance of gender in understanding international law and practice."
The Program has three major goals. First, it is geared towards strengthening the international legal studies curriculum to take a greater account of the condition of women. Second, it is designed to contribute to a growing body of legal scholarship on the rights of women in international law. Finally, it aims to develop programs in training and advocacy to make domestic and international laws more effective tools for advancing women's claims. Gilbert explains that W&ILP was established "to address the systematic engendering of international law [and] the ways international institutions could be used more effectively to address women's human rights and needs."
Claudio Grossman, Dean of Graduate Studies and co-sponsor of the Program, maintains that the creation of W&ILP is "a necessary prerequisite" to further work in the field of human rights. Grossman insists that women's problems must be examined in an international context; "the domestic approach alone cannot resolve the issues" raised. The Program therefore, is designed to "create opportunities for faculty and students to be engaged in shaping a new area of law in a responsible, exciting way," according to Professor Ann Shalleck, Director of the Women and the Law Program at WCL and co-sponsor of W&ILP.
In the long term, W&ILP aims to initiate a mutually instructive dialogue between academics and practitioners in international law and "to deepen our understanding of legal theory while enhancing how we practice law," says Shalleck. She adds that, "[s]ince a multi-faceted curriculum is the core of any vibrant academic community, the integration of gender perspectives into international law and international perspectives into women's rights law presents the possibility of developing and transforming both."