13.10.2022Brown Bag Lunch

The “Human Reproduction Reloaded | H2R” project of the University of Zurich has the pleasure to invite you to the brown bag lunch talk “The Constitutionalisation of Reproductive Rights: Advancing Women’s Equality or Empty Promise” by Silvia Suteu from University College London.

The event will take place on Thursday, 13 October 2022 from 12.15 -13.30 (CET / Swiss time) in person at the University of Zurich and will be chaired by Prof. Andreas Heinemann, the Vice-Dean for International Relations of the Law Faculty. 

The talk will take place in room KOL-G-212. If interested to attend, please fill in the form below not later than 5 October 2022.

Certain constitutions have supplemented general equality and non-discrimination guarantees with explicit protections for sexual and reproductive rights. This has happened in particular in contexts where these rights were previously denied or not realised meaningfully. This constitutionalisation has occurred as part of a more general protection of rights to bodily integrity and health, or else in the form of targeted provisions seeking to give effect to women’s rights (alongside, for example, constitutional bans on gender-based violence). Typically, legislation will still be required to give full effect to these provisions, but their constitutional entrenchment is viewed as a guarantee against retrogression. In other contexts, however, the constitutional text has remained unchanged but existing constitutional guarantees were judicially interpreted to encompass reproductive rights, elevating them to the same level as other fundamental rights and freedoms. Looking at these developments comparatively, the talk seeks to provide a preliminary answer to the question of effectiveness: does constitutionalising reproductive rights advance women’s equality, understood as real access and protection against abuse, or is it an empty promise?

Silvia Suteu is Associate Professor at the University College London (UCL) Faculty of Laws in the United Kingdom. She specialises in comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory, with a focus on comparative constitutional change, gender equality, and participatory constitutionalism. She has published widely on these themes and her monograph, “Eternity Clauses in Democratic Constitutionalism”, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. At UCL, she has convened the Public Law Group, has been an editor of the Current Legal Problems journal, and is the Gender Editor for Lex-Atlas: COVID-19, a global academic project mapping legal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prof Suteu has also done work in international humanitarian and human rights law. She has provided legal expertise on constitution-building to organisations such as Democracy Reporting International, the Euromed Feminist Initiative, International IDEA, and UN Women. She has co-authored handbooks on gender-sensitive constitutions and legislation that have been used by government and policy-making experts and women’s rights NGOs. Prof Suteu is currently developing a project on the constitutionalisation of reproductive rights in comparative perspective, which complements her previous work on gender and the law.