The World Today presents: Global Justice: The Struggle for Women’s Human Rights

Women’s human rights have seen astonishing advances in recent decades, thanks to new laws and sustained organizing around the world to stop violence against women; improve their safety and security both inside and outside the home; eliminate discrimination against women in law and practice; advance their sexual and reproductive autonomy; and create a robust human rights ecosystem that is nurturing of, responsive to, and values women’s intersectional identities. Despite this progress, women’s human rights are still under threat – and while women in some countries are still fighting hard for their rights to be recognized in the first place, others are trying to save their existing rights from being rolled back.

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been a crucial means to defend women’s human rights around the world since coming into force in 1981. Why is CEDAW still so important four decades after its adoption? What have been its major contributions? What still needs to be done, and where can we be hopeful as we look at the state of women’s human rights worldwide?

In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, join Perry World House for a wide-ranging conversation between experts Rangita de Silva de Alwis and LaShawn R. Jefferson, as they discuss this revolutionary lawmaking and strategic organizing tool and other strategies to make women’s human rights a universal reality.

Speaker

Rangita de Silva de Alwis is the Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow on Gender Equity at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. She is also a Leader in Practice at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program (2019–21); Senior Fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession; and was a Distinguished Advisor to former U.N. Under-Secretary-General Phumzile Mlambo Ngckua, Executive Director of U.N. Women.

Moderator

LaShawn R. Jefferson is Perry World House’s Executive Director. She brings to Perry World House over two decades of legal and policy advocacy, strategic planning and communications, and research and writing on women’s international human rights through civil-society organizations and philanthropy. Previous to joining Perry World House, she was with the Ford Foundation and Human Rights Watch, where she worked to advance women’s human rights globally and in the U.S. through philanthropy, research, and advocacy.