Hulthin's project builds on and contributes to recent human rights scholarship that recognizes the role of treaty bodies in shaping international human rights law, exploring the transformative capacity and strategies of the CEDAW committee within the state-reporting process.
About the project
While scholars and commentators have largely dismissed the impact of United Nations (UN) treaty bodies over the past two decades, recent research highlights their role and agency in advancing norms and shaping international human rights law. Focusing on the state-reporting process under the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), this project examines treaty bodies as strategic actors and human rights law as an iterative, dynamic practice.
Since CEDAW’s adoption, the committee’s interpretations have not only expanded the treaty’s framework to address intersectional discrimination and gender-based violence but have also advocated for structural changes beyond legal reform. Yet, despite global frameworks promoting gender equality across multiple sectors, women’s rights and equality norms face significant backlash, gender-washing by authoritarian regimes, and gendered impacts from political unrest and climate change.
Against this backdrop, this research investigates CEDAW's transformative capacity and strategies amid emerging obstacles to women’s human rights and equality norms through a socio-legal, article-based dissertation.
Supervisors: Nina Reiners and Vibeke Blaker Strand
Program
- Marie Andersen Hulthin - presentation, 30 minutes
- Assessor, Prof. Sara Kahn-Nisser - commentary, 30 minutes
- Open discussion, 30 minutes
- Closed meeting, 30 minutes