Piercing the Veil Madhavi Sundert CONTENTS IN TRO D UCTION ........................................................................................ 140 1 I. G RO UND WO RK ................................................................................. 1407 A . The New Sovereignty.................................................................. 1407 B. The New Enlightenm ent ............................................................. 1410 II. T RA N SITIO N ...................................................................................... 14 15 A . L aw 's "P ast ....................................... .....................................14 15 B . Law 's "O ther ...................................... .................................... 14 17 C. Constructing and Obstructing.................................................... 1420 D . C ases in P oint ............................................................................ 1425 1. CEDA W (G lobal) ................................................................ 1425 t Professor, University of California, Davis, School of Law. J.D. 1997, Stanford Law School; A.B. 1992, Harvard College. [email protected]. Thanks to Mahnaz Afkhami, Diane Amann, Anjali Arondekar, Cassandra Balchin, Carol Bruch, Harish Chander, Joel Dobris, Holly Doremus, Rich Ford, Arturo Gandara, Janet Halley, Anissa H61ie, Marirm6 H6lie Lucas, Tom Heller, Bill Hing, Margaret Johns, Kevin Johnson, Larry Johnson, Shulamith Koenig, Harold Koh, Leslie Kurtz, Spencer Overton, Sophie Pirie, Lisa Pruitt, Margaret Jane Radin, Jake Sullivan, Marty West, and the editors of The Yale Law Journal for helpful suggestions. Special thanks to Nancy Flowers, who supplied numerous manuals on women's human rights from all over the world. Dean Rex Perschbacher's support has been generous and invaluable. Additionally, this Article gained much from presentations at "The Globalization of Modern Legal Thought: Production and Reception, 1830-2000" conference at Harvard Law School; a faculty workshop at the University of California, Davis, School of Law; the "Globalizing Sex and Gender" series and a workshop with the Middle East/South Asia Research Cluster at the University of California, Davis; the "Feminist Interventions: Rethinking South Asia" conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the "Gender and Globalization: A Dialogue Across Disciplines, Institutions and Generations" conference at Stanford University; presentations at the Syracuse University College of Law; and the "Redefining Identity Politics-Internationalism, Feminism, Multiculturalism" conference at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research assistants Guru Inder Khalsa, Benjamin Muilenburg, Belle Na, Suzianne Painter-Thorne, and Cancion Soto and the staff of the U.C. Davis Law Library provided valuable assistance. Most importantly, I thank Anupam Chander, whose faith has been critical. This Article is dedicated to my grandmother, Seetha Tilak, and my mother, Mona Sunder, who taught me that being an Indian woman has no bounds. 1399 Imaged with the Permission of Yale Law Journal 1400 The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 112:1399 2. PersonalLaws (India)......................................................... 1427 3. Freedom of Religion and Tribal Sovereignty (United States) ..................................................................... 1429 4. Customary Laws (Zimbabwe, Nigeria,and South Africa)- 1430 III. CONFRONTATION .............................................................................. 1433 A. Human Rights Networks: Women Living Under Muslim Laws ........................................... 1434 1. Identity Problems ................................................................ 1435 2. Identity Strategies................................................................ 1436 3. Identity Norms ..................................................................... 1439 4. WL UML 's Challenge to Human Rights Law ....................... 1441 B. Human Rights Manuals-ClaimingOur Rights ......................... 1443 1. Translation.......................................................................... 1446 2. Textualism .......................... I................................................ 1447 3. Constructivism..................................................................... 1448 4. Reconstructivism ................................................................. 1449 5. Rum blings of a New Enlightenment .................................... 1451 IV . FUTURES ........................................................................................... 1457 A . Piercingthe Veil of the New Sovereignty ................................... 1458 B. Operationalizingthe New Enlightenment .................................. 1465 1. Passive Proceduralism........................................................ 1466 2. Robust Proceduralism......................................................... 1468 3. Substantive Prescriptions.................................................... 1469 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................... 1471 Imaged with the Permission of Yale Law Journal 2003] Piercing the Veil 1401 INTRODUCTION The failure of the international community to intervene in Afghanistan prior to September 11 th was more than a failure of politics. It was also a failure of law. To put it bluntly, human rights law has a problem with religion. In a postmodern world in which the nation-state has been deconstructed and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of unmediated national sovereignty have been properly put to rest, religion- 1 and its attendant category, culture-represent the New Sovereignty. Human rights abuses that since World War II are no longer acceptable when committed by states2 are paradoxically tolerated when justified in the name of religion or culture. September 11th crystallized this fact. The infamous Taliban regime in Afghanistan assumed power in 1996 and immediately began stripping women of fundamental human rights 3 to 1. See HENRY J. STEINER & PHILIP ALSTON, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS IN CONTEXT 445 (2d ed. 2000) ("If notions of state sovereignty represent one powerful concept and a force that challenges and seeks to limit the reach of the international human rights movement, religion can then represent another."); David Kennedy, InternationalLaw and the Nineteenth Century: History of an Illusion, 17 QUINNIPIAC L. REV. 99, 101 (1997) (describing the historical movement in international law "from autonomy to community," and expressing concern that "there remain those (often in politics, or in the third world, or new to the field) who would return us to a time of sovereignty"). My use of the word sovereignty refers to its traditional sense as the right to be let alone-what's new are the parties making these claims. Cf ABRAM CHAYES & ANTONIA HANDLER CHAYES, THE NEW SOVEREIGNTY: COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL REGULATORY AGREEMENTS (1995). In the words of Anne-Marie Slaughter (writing in her memorial to Abe Chayes), Chayes and Chayes offer an evolving sense of the term in which "sovereignty no longer means the right to be left alone, but rather the right and capacity to participate 'in the regimes that make up the substance of international life."' Anne-Marie Slaughter, In Memoriam, 114 HARV. L. REV. 682, 684-85 (2001) (quoting CHAYES & CHAYES, supra, at 27). 2. It is easy to forget that individual rights are of only recent vintage in international law. As Louis Henkin reminds us: [F]or hundreds of years international law and the law governing individual life did not come together. International law, true to its name, was law only between States, governing only relations between States on the State level. What a State did inside its borders in relation to its own nationals remained its own affair, an element of its autonomy, a matter of its "domestic jurisdiction." LOUIS HENKN, INTERNATIONAL LAW: POLITICS, VALUES AND FUNCTIONS 209 (1989). But as a general matter, human rights law is just one example of the gradual whittling away of traditional notions of state sovereignty. See Anupam Chander, Diaspora Bonds, 76 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1005, 1039 (2001) ("While it is true ...that there was never an era in which nation-states had absolute dominion over their territory, the last century saw a higher degree of legalization of intrusions into territorial sovereignty, as well as a magnification of the number and breadth of such intrusions."). 3. Implementing the "strictest interpretation of Shari'a law ever seen in the Muslim world," the Taliban closed down girls' schools and banned women from working outside the home, smashed TV sets, forbade a whole array of sports and recreational activities, and ordered all males to grow long beards. AHMED RASHID, TALIBAN: MILITANT ISLAM, OIL AND FUNDAMENTALISM IN CENTRAL ASIA 29, 50-51 (2000). A strict dress code was imposed on women, which required them to wear head-to-toe veils, id. at 50, and people were required to blacken the windows of their homes so women could not be seen from the street, id. at 70. Women were banned from general hospitals, id. at 7 1, and their health suffered dramatically, see Physicians for Human Rights, The Taliban's War on Women-a Health and Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan, at Imaged with the Permission of Yale Law Journal 1402 The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 112: 1399 education,4 healthcare,5 work,6 and movement. But war, not law, defeated what has been described as the world's most ruthless fundamentalist