Egypt's Reservations to the United Nations 
Convention on the Elimination of 

Discrimination Against Women and 

Women's Rights in Egypt 

Necva B. Kazimov 

--The object and use of lawyer's language is twofold: partly to prevent informa­
tion being conveyed to certain descriptions of persons, partly to cause such in.for­
mation to be conveyed to them as shall be false, or at any rate, fallacious: to secure 
habitual ignorance, or produce occasional misconception." 

- Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence

Abstract 

This paper addresses the role that the Convention on the 

Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) can 

play to improve women's conditions and secure their rights in 

Egypt, in light of that country's religious-based reservations to 

the UN convention and its recent constitutional amendment mak­

ing the Shari' ah its principle source of legislation. Specifically, it 

addresses Egypt's reservations to Article 16, which concerns the 

eradication of discrimination against women in cases of divorce, 

as this area has been the focus of recent legislative reform. The 

paper is limited to Egypt, because it is the leading Muslim state 

in providing women's rights in the area of family law. 

Necva B. Kazimov graduated from New York Law School (May 2003). She received her 
B .A. in political science from Columbia University (May 2000). She interned at the White 
House (during the Clinton administration) for the Director of the Office of Public Liaison, 
and at the Brookings Institution as a foreign policy research intern to Middle East scholar 

Professor Yahya Sadowski. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Kazimov was a legal studies 
intern at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul, Turkey. Most recently, she interned at the 
Charities and Civil Rights Bureaus of the New York State Attorney General's Office and for 
Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael H. Dolinger in the Southern District of New York.