Introduction Locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local

Abstract

In January 2002 Fiji presented its first ever country report to the United Nations committee charged with monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). One of the most controversial sections of the report addressed the use of the practice of bulubulu, or village reconciliation, in cases of rape. During the public presentation of the report in New York City by Fiji's Assistant Minister for Women, the nuances of bulubulu as a sociolegal practice in postcolonial Fiji were obscured within what quickly became complicated layers of political miscommunication, the imperatives of a surging Fijian nationalism, and, as always, the politicization of culture. On the one hand, the CEDAW committee, though staffed by members from a range of different countries, was required by its UN mandate to fulfill a fairly simple task: to decide whether individual countries were taking the requirements of CEDAW seriously, as measured by national self-assessments of violence against women and official responses to this violence. But, on the other hand, because CEDAW expresses both the conceptual and practical constraints of universal human rights discourse, the UN committee was prevented from considering the social contexts within which bulubulu functions in Fiji. To open up the possibility that CEDAW's requirements for defining, preventing, and redressing violence against women were contingent upon their correspondence with circumstance, tradition, or instrumental efficacy would be to deracinate CEDAW, to destroy its potential as one key component in a still-emergent international human rights system.