Temporary Special Measures Accelerating de facto Equality of Women under Article 4(1) UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Article 4(1) UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) deals with temporary special (affirmative action) measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women.

Ineke Boerefijn (LL.M. and PhD in International law of human rights, 1985 at the University of Utrecht) was associate professor at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Utrecht University (1986-2012). She was a visiting research fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of New South Wales and the Australian Human Rights Centre. She has held the ‘Opzij Chair’ at the Centre for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht University, where she focused on the human rights aspects of violence against women. From 2012 till 2013 she was advisor at the Dutch Equal Treatment Commission in Utrecht. At the moment she is coordinating Policy advisor at the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights (since 2013).

Fons Coomans holds the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Peace at the Department of International and European Law at Maastricht University. Since July 2009 is the Head of the Department of International and European Law. He is also the coordinator of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, and Senior Researcher at the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research. His fields of research include the international protection of economic, social and cultural rights in general and the right to education and food in particular, as well as international supervisory mechanisms in the field of human rights. He is the coordinator of the courses on economic, social and cultural rights of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation in Venice. He is also a consultant for UNESCO, an adviser to Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) and a member of the Dutch Section of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM). Since 2014 he has become a member of the board of the School of Human Rights research (SIM).

Jenny Goldschmidt is now emeritus professor in human rights at Utrecht University. She has been working in the field of (comparative) constitutional and administrative law at Leyden University (where she got her PhD in 1981: “National and Indigenous Constitutional law in Ghana”). She specialised in human rights and in particular gender and law. She held Chairs in gender and law at both Utrecht and Leyden University and served in many committees and boards in this field, both in the Netherlands and in the EU and UN. In 1994 she became President of the Equal treatment Commission in the Netherlands, where she served the maximum of two terms, until 2003. In 2004 she became professor in Human rights Law and later Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University until her retirement in 2014. She is member of the International Commission of Jurists (Geneva) and of several Boards of organisations working in the field of human rights, disability rights etcetera. She published many articles and books. 

Rikki Holtmaat is a professor of International Non-Discrimination Law at Leiden Law School since 2003. She graduated cum laude in Law at Utrecht University in 1983 and worked as a member of the academic staff of the Dutch Emancipation Council from 1982 to 1985. From 1985 to 2001 she lectured Women & Law at the University of Leiden. Her PhD-thesis (1992) investigated the construction of unequal gender relations in social security law in the Netherlands. Publications concern the fields of Labour Law, Social Security Law, EU-Equality Law, the CEDAW-Convention and Feminist Legal Theory. Besides her academic career, she also has also worked as an independent consultant and researcher in the area of gender, law and non-discrimination between 1998-2013. Since 2005, prof. Holtmaat is a member of the European Commission’s Network of Legal Experts in the Non-Discrimination Field; between 2008-2013 she has also been a member of the European Commission’s Network of Legal Experts in the Field of Gender. She has done research projects for the Dutch Government and for Dutch NGOs, and for several International Organisations, among others UNICEF, The International Commission of Jurist, the OHCHR, ILO, OSCE/ODIHR and the European Commission.