How GQUAL is Reshaping the Face of International Justice

Hi everyone, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, okay, great. Okay, so my name is Jessica Corsi and it's so nice to be in this room. I have never been on this side of the desk. Having done my master's here and my PhD here, it's really nice to be on the other side. So thanks everyone for that opportunity. So today I'm gonna talk to you about GQL, which as you might imagine stands for Gender Equality, which is an international civil society campaign and how they're reshaping international justice, the face of international justice. They call it changing the picture. So I'm gonna explain a little bit about what they're working on and I'm gonna focus in on the International Court of Justice. Full disclosure, I work with GQL. So if you're wondering, does she have skin in the game? Is she invested in their campaign and their outcomes? Yes, and we're gonna focus a little bit more on the International Court of Justice today because that's what I've been helping them with over the past year, how to create gender parity at the International Court of Justice. Okay. Can you show the slide? Is that, yeah, I think. Let's hit from slideshow, start from first slide. Not working. Yeah, okay. So a little overview. We start with gender parity, defining it and a little bit about why it matters. Second, we'll look at the current situation at the International Court of Justice in terms of the gender representation on the bench at the ICJ. Third, I'll tell you a little bit more about the GQL campaign, what they do, who they are, what they care about, how they work. And then the most interesting question to me right now in terms of where I'm at with my work for GQL and my research is how can we link gender parity to existing international law norms? I think one of the themes at the conference, today at least, with our great start from Professor Deschuteser is emerging international norms. And that's definitely one of the themes of my presentation because gender parity as such is not a crystallized international norm. But I'm interested on how we can graft it onto existing norms. And then we'll end with the question, a very interesting question for me, what will create lasting change? What do we actually need to do to create gender parity in international justice? Okay, so gender parity. What is gender parity? Am I gonna have to do this every single time? I don't know, you can just write it down. Exactly, okay, great. Okay, so it's a very basic definition in case you're wondering. It does mean proportionate representation. So most people take it to mean 50-50. So if we're talking gender parity on a bench of 15 people, we're not gonna have 7.5 people of one sex, for example, but we might have six of one and the rest comprise differently. It's binary for current purposes. So you might be sitting in the audience thinking, but gender or sex is not binary. GQOL is working from a binary framework. So they're looking to increase female representation up to the level of 50% in international courts and in special procedures, UN special rapporteurs, for example, UN special experts, committee bodies, et cetera. Why does this matter? There are a number of reasons why this might matter. Equality, in particular, substantive equality. So equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity. Representation, suffrage, and democracy. So there's this notion, which we'll get into in a later slide on linking gender parity to existing international norms, that universal suffrage, which has existed for many, many decades under public international law, also requires equal representation in fact. Now, this has been much more developed in terms of parliaments and domestic legislatures, but GQOL is pushing this norm into international justice in a broader sense. The rule of law. So the idea that equality before the law or under the law also means equal representation in the law, as in in judicial bodies or other lawmaking bodies. Meritocracy, which is not an international norm, of course. Legitimacy, nothing to do with international law except for, as was just mentioned, states are very interested in how legitimate they seem. And the legitimacy of international courts massively enhances their functioning and compliance with international law. So we can think of various reasons. And then the final one might be that states have an obligation to comply with gender parity norms. Okay, so what's happening at the International Court of Justice right now? This is the current picture. GQOL likes to call it changing the picture, meaning we would actually see a variety of different faces here. So as you can see, we see three female faces. It might be hard to pick out since they're all wearing the same outfits, right? I had the pleasure of working with the Chinese judge who you see up there. She's been working with GQOL on this mission to create gender parity at the International Court of Justice, unofficially, of course. So what's the history of gender parity at the International Court of Justice, and why does it matter? I know I don't need to say in this room to these people that there's an enduring importance to the International Court of Justice, but it does bear mentioning, especially as all of you are well aware of the proliferation of a variety of international courts, which doesn't seem to be on the wane. So why do we care about the International Court of Justice? Well, of course, it's still the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. It still has a huge role to play in terms of the peaceful settlement of disputes between states. It continues to be a source of public international law, anti-Orthodox, right? Especially speaking from this place, Cambridge, it remains incredibly important. And also, interestingly, it's not really moving. So we've seen a lot of gains for gender parity at the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the African Court of People and Human Rights, less so at the Inter-American Court, but we're seeing a lot of uptake of women in these roles at different international and regional judicial bodies, but not at the International Court of Justice. So over its history, since its establishment in 1946, out of 106 total members, four have been women. It's obviously a very poor record. Currently, three of the bench of 15 are women. So you can see that any of those numbers that have been gained have been in very recent years. But, as I'm sure you are all well aware of watching the elections with interest, the November 2017 election to the ICJ did not yield any female candidates, nor any female judges. So there were four spots open, and four men were proposed for these spots. So the demographics of the courts didn't change. So GQL is a campaign that's been around for exactly two years now. They're hard at work, but nothing at the ICJ is actually moving. Okay, so this is a little bit more about the GQL campaign. This is a picture from the end of the first international research conference GQL held in The Hague this past November, which was fantastic. Everyone was happy, because we're all high on possibility, right? Before everyone goes back to real life and tries to actually turn this into reality. So what is GQL? I love international civil society campaigns. This is one of many I've been involved in. And I know there's a lot of reason to doubt that civil society can change anything. I was involved in the civil society campaign that created the WHO's first ever treaty. I was involved in the civil society campaign that created the convention to ban cluster munitions. And this is, I love this one, because I love hyper-specific campaigns. So they're not trying to create gender equality. They're not trying to end child poverty. They're trying to create 50-50 representation on a host of designated bodies. So whether that's the ICJ or the ILC or the appellate body of the WTO, that's their focus. So it's an international civil society network that advocates for gender parity, equal representation, in quote, international representation. So it's building on that suffrage idea that the people at the UN special expert bodies, the UN committee bodies at the ICJ are also representing all of us. And this means that they work on international and regional courts, treaty committees, and so on. And they work with states. So as most things continue to be triangulated through states, that's where GQL works as well. And they work by direct lobbying. And they work on the same theory of legitimacy. So states that would like to preserve or promote their reputation take a pledge. They take a pledge to do something like nominate more female candidates. So far, nothing is binding. It's all voluntary. But there's been a lot of goodwill, mostly from Latin America and the Scandinavian states. Why Latin America? Because the women that founded this are advocates in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And what they noticed is that when they had a more female bench, the results were very different in terms of the verdicts and the reparations made, especially to female victims. And as lawyers, this got them interested. Well, how do we get more female judges on our bench for our clients? And it's grew and it spread into an international campaign. This is the Squire Library right here. It brings me to what for me is the juiciest question in my research and how I can help people and how you can help people if you're interested. Maybe the answer is somewhere in one of those books. That's the public international law section of the library upstairs. So how can we graft this norm of gender parity onto already existing international norms that bind and persuade states? Okay, so one of the first things you might think of is gender equality. This is a well-established norm. It's not in doubt at all. It continues to grow and transform. It's enshrined in almost every international human rights treaty. It's in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's in very many domestic constitutions and so on and so forth. But equality does not mean parity, right? So this is about transforming the notion of equality into substantive equality or transformative equality. That's a great place to start. And the second related place to start is to look at temporary special measures to achieve equality. In other words, quotas, which is why, for example, the European Court of Human Rights does so well at achieving gender parity on its bench. It has a rule to do so. And this is well-established and not contested. So CEDAW, the Convention to End Gender Discrimination, CERD, the Convention to End Racism, and more recently the CRPD, the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, all have measures asserting basically quotas or affirmative action or positive discrimination. And when we look domestically at the top 35 most equal, gender equal in terms of parity, states in the world, looking mostly at their parliaments, not at their judiciary, we find that they're all using quotas in some way, either voluntarily from the political parties or as mandated even by their constitution. This is very interesting to me, number three. Especially for the ISTJ, I would love to graft gender parity onto the ISTJ's well-established geographical parity requirement, right? Which is part of the statute of the court and part of the Charter of the United Nations. There's no reason why gender isn't as salient a category for making a decision as geographical origin. And the reasoning underlying geographical parity, fairness, for example, representation, for example, has a lot in common with the rationale underlying gender parity. Suffrage, rule of law, and democracy, this has been supported by, for example, the European Court of Human Rights, the notion that universal suffrage also requires equal representation in fact. That's another really interesting one. And then diversity, which you might not know as a norm in and of itself, but is closely related to equality and inclusion. So these are some ideas. If you have additional ideas as to how we might help gender parity crystallize based on existing international norms, I am all ears and I would absolutely love to hear it. So what will actually change the picture? This is a picture, literally, obviously, of our current global population, right? You see it's slightly skewed towards females. We're actually slightly more than half of the global population. So how do we get our international courts and our international justice bodies to look more like this, to look more like real life does? We're gonna need the commitment of states. So that's why even though it's a civil society campaign, Chico continues to focus on pledges of states. But it's gonna have to be more than a pledge. It's gonna have to be something much stronger than a commitment. We're gonna need to see the articulation of parity as a right and as a value, right? So that's, again, where that juicy question comes in. What international norms might be moving towards parity? We're probably gonna need to see rules versus policy, which is something I'm looking at right now. I'm comparing states that have achieved and courts and international bodies that have achieved something closer to parity. And I'm assessing, what are they using to achieve that? Are they achieving just a champion, someone at the helm who has taken up this cause? Is it goodwill? Is it based solely on a policy that's not punitively enforced or having any requirements? In my preliminary research, it looks like we're going to need to move towards hard and fast rules. And primarily, we're gonna have to focus on substantive or transformative equality. So if we continue to look at equality of opportunity, bias and structural inequality is going to continue to be a barrier to women serving at the highest level of the global judiciary. And of course, we need continued pressure from civil society. So if this is the first time you're hearing about T-Pol and you're thinking, well, that's very interesting, I would also like to see gender parity in international justice. It's a very inclusive and welcoming campaign, and it's always looking for researchers in particular to contribute to its cause. So I think with all of these things combined with an emphasis on rules, which of course might take the will of the states, we will get closer to changing the picture. Thank you very much.