7 - Women and self-determination in United Nations trust territories

Summary

As seen in connection with the East Timor case in Chapter 4, the idea and the institution of ‘trusteeship’ have traditionally been the terrain on which the meaning of self-determination for colonial peoples has been worked out in international law. This chapter shows that the responsibility to educate the colonized for self-government or independence that was expressed in the international trusteeship system established by the United Nations Charter after World War II has also been significant as a way for women's groups and, within the UN, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to integrate their vision of equality into colonial self-determination. The reinterpretation of this responsibility in the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (Declaration on the Independence of Colonial Peoples) (GA Resolution 1514 (XV)) as a duty to take immediate steps toward self-determination corresponded similarly to the CSW's re-examination of the priority between women's equality and self-determination and, indeed, the very import of equality. Conversely, the status of women in the trust territories was critical in the contest among the UN Trusteeship Council, the states administering trust territories and the local leaders in those territories over the meaning of self-determination.

While this inscription of ideas of gender and decolonization onto the figure of the colonized woman has been explored in feminist and postcolonial studies, it has not informed international law.