CEDAW is a law without sanctions. But although it does not have the
power to punish, the convention and its monitoring committee do important
cultural work by articulating principles in a formal and public setting
and demonstrating how they apply to the countries under scrutiny. The
process of ratification, preparing reports, and presenting and discussing
reports fosters new cultural understandings of gender and gender discrimination.
The central regulatory feature of CEDAW is the definition and
naming of problems and the articulation of solutions within a prestigious
global forum. National and international NGOs as well as other international
actors endeavor to shame noncompliant governments. Governments
that resist critiques at home are sometimes more responsive on the global
stage: This is a cultural system whose coin is admission into the international
community of human-rights-compliant states. At the heart of the
legal process is the cultural work of altering the meanings of gender and of
state responsibility for gender equality. Much socio-legal scholarship suggests
that similar processes are basic to the way state law regulates behavior.
Only a small fraction of conflicts actually become cases in court and compliance
depends largely on individual consciousness of law (see Merry
1990; Ewick and Silbey 1998)