Monitoring Australia’s implementation of CEDAW: An ethnographic account of NGO and civil society participation

Abstract

This article explores the significance of NGO monitoring of Australia’s implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). As an active participant in mechanisms to protect women’s rights globally and domestically, Australia played an important role in the drafting of CEDAW, which obligates it to periodically report on its implementation efforts. We offer autoethnographic accounts of our advocacy experience at the Pre-Sessional Working Group of the CEDAW Committee, providing an exploration of feminist ethnography and the lived experiences of women in advocacy. By examining these experiences, the article highlights the critical role of civil society participation, particularly through an intersectional lens, in enhancing the effectiveness of UN processes.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played an historically significant role in enacting and implementing human rights treaties. NGOs collaborate with the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council and treaty bodies to promote effective treaty implementation. A key aspect of their work involves monitoring States’ compliance with treaty obligations by submitting alternative or ‘shadow’ reports to treaty body committees, responsible for overseeing human rights treaties. NGO participation is particularly evident in the drafting, implementation and monitoring of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). ¹ Australian women, as parliamentarians, advocates and NGO representatives, have been global leaders in developing and monitoring the implementation of CEDAW and other international treaties. ²

This article focuses on NGO participation in the CEDAW monitoring process, reflecting on our experiences in making written and oral submissions to the Pre-Sessional Working Group (PSWG) of the CEDAW Committee, ³ as civil society representatives. Introduced in 2014, the PSWG represents a relatively new stage in the Committee’s reporting cycle. Unlike usual treaty body processes, it allows NGOs to frame questions that State parties, including Australia, must address in their periodic reports. This innovative approach, designed in partnership with NGOs, aims to strengthen the Committee’s constructive dialogue with States.

We present an autoethnographic account of feminist advocacy in monitoring Australia’s obligations under CEDAW. Drawing on lived experience, this article highlights the critical role of NGOs in monitoring and advancing CEDAW’s implementation. It illustrates the accessibility of the PSWG process and the importance of NGO involvement in shaping the dialogue with States. By adopting a pre-emptive rather than reactive approach, NGOs enhance CEDAW’s effectiveness and ensure the voices of civil society shape the global and domestic discourse on women’s rights.

NGOs and CEDAW

The enactment of CEDAW, one of the most ratified human rights treaties, ⁴ marked the culmination of decades of NGOs and women-led advocacy for international recognition and legal protection of women’s rights. ⁵ CEDAW establishes binding obligations for States to fulfill the aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for women and provides mechanisms, such as the CEDAW Committee, to monitor its implementation and guarantee those rights. Grounded in the principles of substantive equality, non-discrimination, and State obligation, ⁶ CEDAW binds State parties with respect to public actions, laws and policies, and compels them to prevent or sanction discrimination by private actors. ⁷ State parties must adopt social, economic, political and cultural measures, ⁸ offering legal basis for structural and transformative change in women’s lives. ⁹

As a founding member of the UN in 1945, Australia played a key role in drafting documents and establishing UN mechanisms to promote and protect the rights of women and girls globally, including the CEDAW and its Optional Protocol. By ratifying CEDAW, Australia undertakes to submit periodic reports to the CEDAW Committee every four years, ¹⁰ detailing measures taken, their impact and trends in eliminating discrimination against women. ¹¹ This allows the Committee to scrutinise Australia’s efforts in implementing the treaty. ¹² Nevertheless, implementing the Convention has been problematic. ¹³ Linda Keith notes it might be ’overly optimistic’ to expect immediate improvements following ratification, ¹⁴ particularly as CEDAW has received the most substantive reservations from State parties. ¹⁵

NGOs have significantly contributed to articulating women’s rights under CEDAW and analysing human rights through a gendered lens. ¹⁶ Beyond their role in CEDAW’s enactment, NGOs provide academic analysis, background documentation, and input into general recommendations, statements and guidelines. ¹⁷ They also enhance State compliance through monitoring and advocacy. While NGOs lack a formal role in the periodic reporting process, ¹⁸ their participation exerts substantial pressure on States to fulfill treaty obligations, thereby advancing women’s rights. The continued participation of NGOs has contributed to the development of mechanisms that enhance State accountability for the human rights of women and girls. ¹⁹ NGOs are thus encouraged to submit shadow reports to monitor compliance with the Convention.

The CEDAW Committee has acknowledged that a constructive dialogue requires information from State parties, UN entities, National Human Rights Institutions, and NGOs, ²⁰ recognising the strategic role of NGOs during the monitoring process. In 2010, the Committee clarified and strengthened its relationship with NGOs, reinforcing NGOs’ role in the implementation of the Convention at the national level. ²¹ As a result, since the simplification of CEDAW’s process for its regular sessions, ²² NGOs have been included into the PSWG, ²³ which frames the dialogue between the Committee and State parties. This innovative process, which includes a list of issues prior to reporting (‘LOIPR’ or ‘List of Issues’), ²⁴ ensures that periodic reports address critical concerns. ²⁵ State parties respond to the List of Issues ²⁶ within two to three months, ²⁷ shifting their role in the process from applicants to respondents.

The PSWG gives NGOs a unique platform to address the Committee directly, contributing to the LOIPR and influencing government responses before drafting periodic reports. This process serves both an educative and advocacy function, ensuring that human rights remain on the domestic agenda. ²⁸

Australian NGOs have participated in the PSWG twice, ²⁹ most recently at the 86^th PSWG in 2023, where we participated as representatives of civil society. ³⁰ Although there were three written submissions (including ours), we were the only group to also make an oral intervention.

Lived experience as autoethnography, feminism and intersectionality

We propose using lived experience as a way of bringing diverse feminist perspectives into discussions on how feminism engages with and shapes international law and its domestic implementation.

Theory does not spontaneously emerge from experience but is derived from it, which lends it legitimacy. Rooted in phenomenology, lived experience refers to the personal understanding gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events, focusing on the structures of experience and consciousness. ³¹ Central to autoethnography and qualitative methodology, lived experience prioritises subjective perspectives to capture the nuanced details often overlooked by quantitative methods. Autoethnography challenges dominant and harmful cultural narratives, offering alternatives and articulating insider knowledge of cultural experience. ³² Studying lived experience uncovers insights embedded in personal contexts and meanings. It seeks to understand phenomena from the viewpoints of those directly affected. ³³ In social sciences and law, exploring marginalised groups’ experiences can highlight systemic issues and inform policies for social justice.

Dianne Otto reflects on feminist engagement with international law, highlighting the creation of ‘productive footholds for feminist ideas’ which must be critically engaged with and strategically reappropriated to serve the political purposes of feminism, while also being cautiously celebrated as feminist achievements. ³⁴ For feminist interactions with the law to be legitimate, they must incorporate intersectional considerations. ³⁵

Intersectionality was born out of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critical reflections, likely grounded in her lived experience as a woman at the intersection of multiple identities. ³⁶ The increasing application of intersectionality theory across disciplines and policy contexts speaks to its ongoing utility in challenging power structures. However, its legal origins are often overlooked. Crenshaw’s critique targeted anti-discrimination legislation, which traditionally employed a ‘single-axis’ categorisation that acknowledged only one of multiple grounds of discrimination and failed to capture the qualitative difference of intersecting attributes. Multiple grounds of discrimination are additive; they operate separately and cumulatively. Intersectional discrimination represents a unique, indivisible experience – such as that of a Black woman, whose identity cannot be disaggregated into discrete components. Intersectionality, as a challenge to anti-discrimination law, has direct implications for non-discrimination treaties like CEDAW.

Although CEDAW was concluded before the burgeoning understanding of intersectionality in international human rights law, it anticipates the consideration of intersecting forms of discrimination. CEDAW contains provisions targeting disadvantages faced by women at the intersection of overlapping identities, such as age, ³⁷ regional location, ³⁸ nationality, ³⁹ and marital status. ⁴⁰ A recent Handbook for Parliamentarians by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, highlights how intersecting forms of discrimination often exacerbate the impacts of parliamentary decisions; it therefore recommends prioritising the examination of these effects on women and girls ‘to better inform laws, policies and measures taken to advance gender equality’. ⁴¹

The CEDAW Committee acknowledges intersectionality as fundamental to understanding the scope of State obligations under CEDAW. It urges State parties to legally recognise and prohibit intersecting forms of discrimination and their compounded effect on women. ⁴² Following this principle, we use intersectionality as a feminist legal tool to frame Australia’s legal obligations under CEDAW.

During our participation in the PSWG session of the Committee, we adopted an intersectional lens to present lived experience accounts using feminist autoethnography as a qualitative research methodology. ⁴³ These narratives focused on Australia’s implementation of CEDAW, advocating for better inclusion of diverse women’s experiences. Our views are not representative of all women in Australia but reflect the intersection of our multiple identities – one a Muslim, the other a new migrant – representing an Australian Catholic organisation. This diversity of voice illustrates the plurality of women’s experiences in Australia.

Through intersectional autoethnography we bridged academic and advocacy spaces; we borrowed Annelise Riles’ concept of turning rights ‘inside out’ to bring them ‘outside in’. For Riles, making rights the focal point allows academics and advocates to take their work outside their inner circle, to imagine themselves as outsiders of their labour, thereby connecting it to broader social issues. ⁴⁴ This differentiation highlights the work of academics and advocates.

We ‘bring the outside in’, connecting academic insights with advocacy to enhance the protection of women’s rights. Our approach produces an account of otherwise hidden or tacit knowledge, ⁴⁵ interpreting our interactions with the CEDAW Committee ⁴⁶ through the lens of lived experience. We share our descriptions in a ‘down-to-earth and non-systematic manner’, ⁴⁷ occupying the space of both observer and participant, capturing everyday moments that traditional research methods cannot capture. ⁴⁸

Our accounts reflect social change activism aimed at empowering other women and girls and non-governmental actors in their day-to-day-lives. ⁴⁹ By embracing feminist ethnography, we provide a platform to share women’s wisdom and experience, addressing the historical silencing of women’s voices—even within the sisterhood. ⁵⁰ Through this work we reaffirm the critical role of NGOs in UN proceedings and encourage other feminists, human rights advocates and allies to confidently make their voices heard.

Reflection of Perla Guarneros-Sánchez: Being part of the change

In early 2023, I joined a team of legal academics from the Australian Catholic University (ACU) to prepare a written submission for CEDAW’s PSWG. My contribution addressed issues from CEDAW’s 8^th Report, focusing on the lack of protection for refugee women and asylum seekers. I urged CEDAW to question the Australian government on actions taken to uphold the rights of these groups and fulfill its international obligations. This request was part of a succinct List of Issues submitted to CEDAW. Shortly after, we received an acknowledgement email asking if we wanted our submission published on the PSWG website and whether we wished to make an oral intervention – both of which we agreed to.

When the list of submissions by NGOs was published, we were surprised to find only three statements from Australian advocacy groups. ⁵¹ Despite the numerous NGOs working to protect women’s rights in Australia, only two NGOs and our law school made submissions, and we were the sole group taking part in the oral intervention. This intervention was coordinated through International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP). ⁵² After confirming our willingness to present, the IWRAW AP Programme Manager scheduled us as speakers for CEDAW’s PSWG private NGO briefing on 27 February 2023. Initially allocated 10 minutes as the only presenter of an oral intervention from Australia, our time was reduced to five minutes just 48 hours before the session, due to the large number of NGOs presenting from other countries.

Before the meeting took place, speakers were given the opportunity to enhance their document on the List of Issues and prepare a script for interpreters. We rearranged our issues to align with the 8^th Report on Australia, provided questions regarding the government’s actions to address these issues and included relevant legal frameworks and evidence. My speech of 1200 words was reduced to 300, to be presented in two minutes. It seemed impossible in such a short time to present two important issues from Australia’s previous report, highlight the lack of compliance with the Women’s Convention and other CEDAW General Recommendations, and offer evidence. The focus had to be on the core points we wanted to address.

Although I am both a trained lawyer and an academic, presenting before a United Nations Committee – albeit in a virtual format – was a novel and challenging experience. On the night prior my presentation, I was nervous. The session was scheduled for 2:00 am AEDT, and I woke up a couple of hours earlier to rehearse my speech and prepare myself to project a ‘professional’ appearance. Months later, during a conference presentation, I was asked whether ‘visual representations’ – often typified by male experts in business attire – are truly necessary when addressing UN bodies. This prompted me to reflect on some critical questions: Must those who present before the UN be subject-matter experts? Should they adhere to conventional standards of professional appearance? And, most importantly, can lived experience alone constitute sufficient expertise? ⁵³

At the time, I had not yet understood that my credentials as a lawyer, academic or holder of a PhD were secondary to the purpose of my participation. Upon joining the online meeting, I was struck by the presence of over 30 other speakers, all women from various countries, representing diverse cultural backgrounds and human rights concerns. None were dressed in traditional business attire. It was at this moment that I came to an important realisation: I was not there in my professional capacity as a legal scholar; rather, I was there as a woman – a migrant woman – advocating for the protection of women’s rights in Australia.

This experience challenged preconceived notions about international advocacy. It became evident that, to participate in these forums, there is no need for advanced academic degrees, professional titles or affiliation to a large institution. There is no need to speak perfect English – or, indeed, any English – just a need to speak any of the UN’s official languages. What is required is an understanding of how governments can better respect the rights of girls and women, alongside a deep commitment to be part of the movement for change. It is not the crafting of an eloquent speech or the accumulation of professional credentials that legitimise participation in these spaces, it is the willingness for an individual to raise their voice and engage with available mechanisms, to advocate for change.

My presentation before the CEDAW PSWG was transcendent, although not in terms of advancing my professional career. Instead, it was transcendent because it demonstrated to others – particularly other women – that anyone can take part in this process. Participation in international human rights advocacy is not confined to traditional experts. Anyone with lived experience and commitment to justice can participate by providing relevant information to the Committee, to set the agenda and formulate questions to be posed to the governments of reporting States. In this context, even a two-minute intervention can be profoundly impactful.

Reflection of Sevda Clark: Living and doing intersectionality

I had made oral representations in Geneva before, representing the Norwegian Human Rights Institution. But this was different. This time, I appeared before a UN Committee concerning my home State: Australia. It was a humbling and edifying experience.

Living intersectionality means that I have a lived experience of being a woman at the intersection of multiple identities. Due to knee-jerk responses to socio-historical context (whether influenced by a post-9/11 world or the Cronulla riots, much closer to home) I have lived exclusion in varying degrees due to some aspects of my identity. How can one be a feminist, hijab-wearing, Australian woman, all at once?

Driving these exclusions have been reductions of my identity along a single, one-dimensional axis. My identities have been defined for me by the popular media in its often-totalising re-presentation of Muslim-ness, Australian-ness and everything in between, including what it means to be or not to be an Australian woman (think of Gillard’s now famous misogyny speech in Parliament). This is Voice-over rather than Voice.

In the sea of attempts to get out of the wreckage of an increasingly divided post-9/11 world, Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence, mapped the ‘illusion’ of reductionist and singular conceptions of the self. He cautioned against this propensity as being the incubator to the violence that totalising and essentialising views of human identity can produce. Sen observed a ‘big conceptual confusion about people’s identities, which turns multidimensional human beings into one-dimensional creatures’; and questioned why the cultivation of such singularity succeeds despite its extraordinary naiveté in a world of obviously plural affiliations. ⁵⁴ In this sense, Sen considered a deeply crude intellectual move to view a person solely in terms of one of their many identities. ⁵⁵

Underlying my interventions to the CEDAW Committee was giving presence and voice to my experience of this ‘crude’ intellectualism. It was also informed by my experience developing rights and intersectionality policy at the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2019–23), ⁵⁶ which confirmed that the strongest form of rights protection is deeply grounded in an intersectional approach.

Doing intersectionality means using my voice – and presence – to actively contribute to the strengthening of women’s human rights more broadly – not despite, but through, my unique site of intersecting identities. The power of representation in public settings – ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ – was very real for me in my self-conscious role as a representative of the diversity of women in Australia and my wish to bring a consciousness of this diversity (to counter ‘othering’) into the CEDAW space.

I had previously used personal narrative in my legal writing to bring in an ‘outsider’s voice’ into the law, using a critical legal feminist approach. I had observed that ‘[p]aradoxically, bringing in the voices of outsiders has helped to make critical legal theory central to the legal canon’. ⁵⁷ I had brought the outside in; I now speak from that privileged site of human rights lawyer, academic and advocate.

Taking the floor as the first intervener at the PSWG that night was humbling. Representing our group and– inadvertently – all women. I bore the significant weight of re-presentation, mindful of the complexities of speaking for others while being keenly aware of being spoken for. I am driven by the conviction that our stories hold immense value as social data, and need to be shared, in all their intersectional complexities and cross-sections. While the impact of our brief interventions on the Committee’s perception of lived experience is uncertain, the session’s online accessibility fostered a sense of safety and solidarity, underscoring the importance of our presence in such spaces. Australia has only partially addressed the Committee’s concerns regarding our legislative and constitutional framework, as outlined in the LOIPR to Australia’s 8^th report. In anticipation of Australia’s 9^th report, I reiterated these concerns to highlight the need for further action and full implementation. ⁵⁸ The concerns included Australia not constitutionally recognising the rights of First Nations people, thus depriving Indigenous women and girls of their rights, and Australia not harmonising anti-discrimination legislation. We respectfully submitted to the Committee that it should ask Australia these questions in the process of its dialogue. We also submitted that Australia be asked about whether it intends to incorporate CEDAW into national law by adopting a charter of human rights. This is relevant in the context of the momentum that is building towards a federal Human Rights Act, as recommended by the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2022 and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in 2024. ⁵⁹

Our suggested questions were not controversial and were adopted by the Committee in its LOIPR one month after we made our interventions. In March 2023, the Committee asked Australia for information on the steps it had taken to harmonise federal, state and territory legislation against discrimination based on best practices that are in line with CEDAW and towards fully incorporating the Convention into national law by adopting a federal charter of human rights. ⁶⁰ It remains to be seen how Australia will address these concerns in its report. ⁶¹

As a lawyer who is no stranger to adversarial proceedings, I felt a warm sense of satisfaction in being a part of the conversation framing Australia’s 9^th report, and not merely responding to it. Governments need the ear-to-ground insights that NGOs offer, as do the UN treaty body committees, towards identifying barriers and facilitators to rights advancement. In hindsight, my personal reflection is the sense of a lost opportunity for many of the Australian NGOs I know to be working to advance women’s rights who could have made powerful written submissions if not oral interventions.

Interestingly, no men made oral interventions before the Committee when we signed in via Zoom at 2 am Sydney-time. Could we infer, from this, men’s lack of engagement with women’s rights? Our team’s submission would strongly suggest not, as we were greatly aided by the support and allyship of men who presented the opportunity and who were co-contributors and allies – equally sharing our passion for the issues we were constructively raising before the CEDAW Committee.

More concerning for me was the notable absence of girls appearing before the Women’s Committee. While the PSWG meeting was accessible, and there are no procedural barriers under international human rights law to the participation of children and young people in the exercise of their agency before a UN committee, ⁶² its uptake by that intersectional group was regrettably low.

Conclusion

This article provides ethnographic ‘insider’ accounts from academia and advocacy, focusing on NGO participation before the CEDAW Committee by two female law academics. It underscores the critical role that NGOs play in the human rights monitoring framework, including the State periodic reporting process. Our experience participating in the CEDAW LOIPR hearing raised several research questions: What accounts for the relative lack of NGO participation in PSWG sessions as compared with NGO participation through submissions of shadow reports after Australia’s submission of its periodic report? ⁶³ Is this due to a lack of awareness of PSWG sessions? Is it submission fatigue that accounts for the relatively reduced participation rates of Australian NGOs? Are there procedural issues like access or resource constraints? Or is there dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of the process among NGOs that have participated previously?

This experience presents a pertinent research opportunity. Various reasons could account for the non-participation of Australian women’s rights NGOs in these pre-sessional UN processes before the Women’s Committee. We are currently undertaking a research project using social research methods to uncover the reasons behind the lack of NGO participation in these proceedings with a view to making recommendations for future development.

Using autoethnographic personal reflections of participation in the PSWG process, we reaffirm the importance of NGOs advancing women’s human rights in Australia and shine a spotlight on the experiences of the women actors involved. The goal is twofold: to raise awareness and normalise diversity of Australian civil society’s participation in international meetings, and the PSWG meetings of the CEDAW Committee in particular, recognising that anyone can advocate for human rights protection that is pre-emptive and agenda-setting. Although the process may seem overwhelming, even for women who have legal training and an academic background, the steps themselves do not appear to be a barrier.