UC law school lecture examines human rights of women
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Professor Rebecca Cook, co-director of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme at the University of Toronto, will present the lecture “Revisiting Human Rights of Women – Transnational Perspectives”. The event will be held at 12:10 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 6, in Rm. 118 at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
In the lecture Cook will revisit the human rights of women in transnational perspectives since the adoption in 1979 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Her approach for doing so is the wave metaphor, where she will map the following sequential, overlapping and counteracting global waves of:
- the growth of women’s rights in domestic, regional and international forums,
- the evolution of legal, social and political accountability, and
- the emergence of backlashes to women’s rights.
The interplay among these waves can be understood sequentially overtime, geographically among national, regional and international actors, or progressively and retrogressively in actually achieving women’s rights. Finally, Cook will offer some thoughts on addressing the shortcomings in their implementation.
Cook is a professor in the faculty of law, the faculty of medicine and the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto; and co-director, International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme, University of Toronto. She is ethical and legal issues co-editor of the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Reproductive Health Matters and the Human Rights Quarterly, the leading academic journal in the human rights field. HRQ is produced by the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights at Cincinnati Law.
Cook is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Contribution to Women’s Health by the International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians, the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She received her AB from Barnard College, MA from Tufts University, MPA from Harvard University, JD from Georgetown University Law Center, and LLM and JSD from Columbia Law School.
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