Women's Property Rights Under CEDAW

The gender gap with respect to wealth and property is a chasm. For over 40 years, the leading international treaty body on women's rights, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the CEDAW Committee), has been generating jurisprudence interpreting CEDAW's obligations that states protect the equal rights of women in relationships; family rights, including inheritance; rights to land, adequate housing, financial credit, social benefits, intellectual property, and other economic rights dependent on equal access to justice. This book uses the CEDAW Committee's own texts: its General Recommendations, Views in response to communications, Concluding Observations in response to State reports, and Reports on Inquiries. The book finds that CEDAW's vision of what it means for women to have equal rights to property is dramatically different from what many scholars consider to be the leading source of "the international law of property," namely the case law generated on behalf of foreign investors' property under the international investment regime. CEDAW's vision is also more far-reaching and nuanced than the gender equality approaches followed by international financial institutions like the World Bank, whose gender equality rhetoric exceeds its actual on-the-ground development efforts. While CEDAW's property rights converge with those protected under other international human rights regimes, they remain unique in addressing the underlying patriarchal structures, stereotypes, and forms of intersectional discrimination that have undermined the fundamental rights of women and girls and led to their continued impoverishment all around the world. This book concludes that CEDAW's re-engendering of property--although a flawed and evolving work in progress--has the potential to be transformative for the half of the planet who is more likely to be treated as property than to have any.

José E. Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at NYU School of Law and the faculty director of its US-Asia Law Institute. He has taught at George Washington, Michigan, and Columbia law schools (where he was the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law). A former President of the American Society of International Law and co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law, Professor Alvarez is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institut de Droit International, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His six prior books and more than 140 other publications address public international law, international criminal law, human rights, international trade and investment, international adjudication, global health law, and international organizations. Judith Bauder is a researcher in international law and international human rights law at the European University Institute. From 2020-2023, she worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Section for International Law and International Relations at the University of Vienna. Over the past ten years, Judith has worked in international law and international human rights law in academia, for international organizations such as the International Law Commission, for international human rights law clinics, for human rights research institutes, and for NGOs in Austria, the United States, Switzerland, North Macedonia, and Haiti. Judith completed an LL.M. in International Legal Studies at NYU School of Law as a Fulbright scholar. She holds degrees in law and political sciences from the University of Vienna with exchanges at the Université Panthéon Assas and University of Melbourne.