An Inter-American human rights system without the United States? Understanding why the United States has not ratified the Belém do Pará Convention
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Abstract
Violence against women (VAW) is a pervasive problem globally and is especially prevalent in the Americas. In the late 1980s, the Inter-American Commission of Women (Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres, CIM), a specialized commission of the Organization of American States (OAS), drafted the Belém do Pará Convention—a legally-binding international convention adopted in 1994 to prevent, punish, and eradicate VAW through the Inter-American human rights system. Since its adoption in 1994, the Belém do Pará Convention has become the most widely ratified international treaty in the Americas, and 32 out of 35 OAS member states have ratified it. Strikingly, the United States has not. To explain why, I examine three areas: (i) the U.S. tendency to attach reservations when ratifying international human rights treaties and the international community’s criticism of this, (ii) the limitations of the U.S. Constitution and federalist structure on ratifying international human rights treaties; and (iii) the U.S. government’s exceptionalist attitude regarding domestic VAW laws. Because of the restrictions of federalism and U.S. reservations to international human rights treaties, I argue that the U.S. government asserts exceptionalism in its own limited domestic VAW laws in order to justify its absence from the Belém do Pará Convention. Perhaps the most harrowing conclusion from my research is how U.S. absence from human rights treaties grants it impunity within the Inter-American human rights system, which has dire consequences for the ability of U.S. women to seek justice for the violence committed against them.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States