Rebecca Oas
(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / Washington, 09.10.2024).- The committee, which monitors compliance with the UN human rights treaty against racial discrimination, issued a general recommendation on the relationship between race and health. General recommendations explain how the committee intends to interpret the treaty.
The new recommendation repeatedly mentions abortion, asserting that “[s]afe, legal and effective access to safe abortion is part of the right to control one’s health and body and the right to life of persons protected under the ICERD.” It argues that abortion restrictions disproportionately impact women of racial minorities and directly calls for countries to “decriminalize access to abortion.”
The CERD Committee is associated with the oldest UN human rights treaty. While multiple other treaty bodies, especially the one associated with women’s rights, have aggressively promoted the legalization, decriminalization, and accessibility of abortion, the CERD Committee has largely remained quiet on the issue until recently. Last year, the committee circulated a draft of the recommendation after conducting listening sessions where pro-abortion groups were very active.
The international abortion lobby has been closely involved since the beginning of the drafting process for the new recommendation. In 2022, a discussion was held on the proposed recommendation attended by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Ipas, Amnesty International, and other pro-abortion organizations. The committee previously circulated a questionnaire, which included the question “[h]ow do racial inequalities affect sexual and reproductive health and rights?” This phrase is not in the treaty, nor has it ever been adopted nor defined by the UN General Assembly.
C-Fam, the publisher of the Friday Fax, contributed comments on the draft, urging the committee to avoid exceeding its mandate by promoting abortion, which is not mentioned in ICERD or any of the other core UN human rights treaties. The submission notes that abortion has historically been used against racial minorities, and not to empower them, and that abortion is not analogous to health care as it intentionally takes a human life.
The legal basis for the CERD Committee’s efforts to locate a right to abortion in its treaty is shaky. The general recommendation cites a few of its own country reviews—including that of the United States—in which it urged the liberalization of abortion laws. It also cited the World Health Organization’s 2022 abortion guideline, which in turn attributes the human rights basis for its work to the writings of other treaty bodies. Unlike the texts of the treaties they monitor, the treaty bodies’ observations are not legally binding.
Nevertheless, despite repeated failed attempts by activists to create a human right to abortion through consensus, the treaty bodies, UN agencies, and other independent human rights experts have generated a growing body of documents framing abortion as a right, all citing each other for support.
The CERD Committee adopted the finalized recommendation at the end of its most recent session, where it also reviewed several countries that had ratified the treaty. The committee urged Venezuela during its review to “take the necessary measures to distinguish between the prohibition and criminalization of abortion with a view to initiating a constitutional reform process to repeal the criminalization of abortion.”
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