Women’s Rights Are Nobler Than a Chair in New York

A few days ago, a senior international official consulted me about the mediation system and where a diplomatic peace conference for the Middle East might be convened, in the nature of a new Westphalia for the region, that is, a settlement capable of re-establishing sovereignty and mutual recognition in this deteriorating international climate. Our discussion ranged across the risk of a widening war, the effect of energy markets on Chinese calculations, the pathways of negotiation, and the prospects for de-escalation.

In the course of that discussion, it struck me that the United Nations still likes to imagine itself, in Tolstoyan terms, as something like War and Peace: a grand theatre of history, diplomacy, and moral weight. Yet in its contemporary reality, it sometimes appears closer to Anna Karenina: elegant, tragic, and moving steadily toward the station, where outward brilliance no longer suffices to conceal an inner crisis.

From there, the conversation turned, as it so often does in an age of symbols, to another question: would it amount to a diminution of women’s rights if a woman were not elected as the next Secretary-General of the United Nations?

I answered: yes, at the symbolic level, that would be a failure. But women’s rights run deeper than a name engraved on the door of an institution, and they are nobler than being measured by a chair in New York.

This is not to belittle representation, nor to deny the power of a public image when it corrects some part of a historical wrong. Symbols matter, and the election of a woman to such a position could indeed be a deserved moment. But the flaw begins when we persuade ourselves that the question of women can be settled by a single appointment, or that justice can be performed by an international institution that has begun to erode under the weight of its own inadequacy, staggering in a world that no longer fully believes in its old language. Justice for women is not ultimately tested in the salons of international legitimacy, but in the realities of everyday life.

For that reason, March 8 should not be understood merely as “Women’s Day,” as though justice could be arranged on a calendar. It should serve instead as a reminder that every day is women’s day, and that every institution worthy of the name, and every legal order that seeks legitimacy, must in its deeper normative structure be fair to women, grounded in their full legal standing, and protective of their rights in matters great and small.

The question, then, is deeper than the summit. A woman is not vindicated only when she reaches the top of a hierarchy, but when the law is present and capable of protecting her in the details: in work, in pay, in safety, in representation, and in access to decision-making. She is vindicated when she can trust that justice is not a rhetorical ornament invoked on ceremonial occasions, but a daily function of the state, society, the market, and the moral order.

I also found myself reflecting on the religious dimension of all this. I n some contemporary evangelical, Torah-based, and other salvationist readings of history, there is a tendency to render present injustice tolerable, even acceptable, on the assumption that history is already written toward an inevitable end. This is precisely what the jurisprudence of Islamic public ethics transcends at its core. Even at the edge of the Final Hour, the Prophetic teaching calls not for surrender to fatalism, but for ethical action that plants life against despair. And in the Farewell Sermon itself, women remained part of the essential trust: “Treat women well.”

My answer, then, was not really about the United Nations alone. It was about a wider illusion: the illusion that justice for women passes through an institutional façade, even when that façade has already begun to lose its capacity to carry the meaning of peace and justice it claims to preserve.

If a woman comes to occupy that chair with a view from the thirty-eighth floor in New York, that is well and good. But if she does not, the matter should not end there. The more important question is not who sits in the seat, but whether justice itself still has legs to stand on, anywhere at all.

Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan

Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.