Negotiating the politics of gender and rights: Some reflections on the status of women's human rights at ‘Beijing Plus Ten’

This article undertakes a review of the development of the women's human rights project, focusing particularly on violence against women and issues of sexuality and reproductive rights. It notes gains by activists in promoting the women's human rights agenda and highlights the continuing impediments to the project from increasingly influential groups and some United Nations member states opposed to women's human rights. A more general problem is a lack of political will from those member states ostensibly committed to the cause who have often failed to translate this ‘commitment’ into effective action. It concludes that, as we approach the tenth anniversary of the ‘Conference of Commitments’, the implementation of initiatives has often been slow and somewhat ineffective. Governments have mastered the rhetoric of respect for women's human rights, yet the full realisation of women's human rights across the world remains elusive.     

The problem of indeterminacy in approval,multiple, and truncated voting systems

It is well known that a plurality election need not reflect the true sentiments of the electorate. Some of the proposed reform procedures, such as approval and cumulative voting, share the characteristics that there are several ways to tally each voter's preferences. Voting systems that permit truncated ballots share this feature. It is shown that the election results for any such procedure can be highly indeterminate; all possible election results can occur with the same choice of sincere voters. This conclusion of indeterminacy holds even when measures of voters' sentiments, such as the existence of a Condorcet winner or even much stronger measures, indicate there is considerable agreement among the voters. Then, multiple systems are compared with all standard tallying procedures. For instance, a corollary asserts it is probable for the plurality voting method to elect the Condorcet winner while approval voting has an indeterminate outcome.The work of both authors was supported, in part, by NSF Grant IST 8415348. This work was partially stimulated by comments concerning the assertions about approval voting and other systems that are discussed in (Saari, 1987). In particular, we are pleased to thank S. Brams, Carl Simon, and the other participants for their questions after one of us presented (Saari, 1987) at the July, 1984, Workshop on Mathematical Models in Political Science held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.