“Equality of rights for women is a basic principle of the United Nations. The Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations sets as one of the Organization’s central goals the reaffirmation of “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, [and] in the equal rights of men and women.”
“The Convention was the culmination of more than thirty years of work by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, a body established in 1946 to monitor the situation of women and to promote women’s rights.” To support the codification of the legal rights of women, the Commission first researched and produced a detailed picture of the political and legal standing of women in each country. Subsequently, the Commission drafted the early international conventions on women’s rights, such as the 1953 Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which was the first international law instrument to recognize and protect the political rights of women; and the first international agreements on women’s rights in marriage, namely the 1957 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, and the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages. The Commission also contributed to the work of other UN offices and agencies, such as the International Labour Organization’s 1951 Convention concerning Equal Remuneration for Men and Women Workers for Work of Equal Value, which enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work.
“In 1963, efforts to consolidate standards on women’s rights led the UN General Assembly to request the Commission to draft a Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women”. The General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in November 1967. The Declaration followed the structure of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was an important precursor to the CEDAW Convention adopted in 1979. Article 1 of the Declaration states that “Discrimination against women, denying or limiting as it does their equality of rights with men, is fundamentally unjust and constitutes an offence against human dignity.” The subsequent articles called for inter alia:
The abolition of laws, customs, regulations and practices which are discriminatory against women;
Women to enjoy full electoral rights, including the right to vote and the right to seek and hold public office;
An equal right to education regardless of gender; and
Equal rights in the workplace, including non-discrimination in employment, equal pay for equal work, and paid maternity leave.
In 1972, the Commission considered the possibility of preparing a binding treaty that would give normative force to the provisions of the Declaration and requested that the Secretary-General call upon Member States to transmit their views on such a proposal. The following year, a working group was appointed to consider the elaboration of such a convention. In 1974, at its twenty-fifth session and in the light of the report of this working group, the Commission decided in principle to prepare a single, comprehensive and internationally binding instrument to eliminate discrimination against women.
The text of the Convention was prepared by working groups within the Commission during 1976 and by a working group of the General Assembly from 1977 to 1979. It was adopted by the General Assembly in 1979 by a vote of 130 to none, with 10 abstentions. In adopting the Convention, the General Assembly “expressed the hope that the Convention would come into force at an early date and requested the Secretary-General to present the text of the Convention to the mid-decade World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women (1976 – 1985).” The Convention entered into force on 3 September 1981.
At a ceremony during a Copenhagen Conference on 17 July 1980, 64 States signed the Convention and two States submitted their instruments of ratification. “On 3 September 1981, 30 days after the twentieth member State had ratified it, the Convention entered into force – faster than any previous human rights convention had done – thus bringing to a climax United Nations efforts to codify comprehensively international legal standards for women.”