Judith Bauder, a PhD researcher at the EUI Law Department, is the co-author of Women’s Property Rights under CEDAW (Oxford University Press, 2024), which was recognised as the Book of the Year 2025 by the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA). The award highlights the book’s innovative contribution to understanding how the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) — one of the most widely ratified human-rights treaties — shapes global debates on equality, justice, and women’s economic rights.
Judith’s contribution to the volume is particularly distinctive: In Chapter 2, which spans almost half of the book, she undertakes the first systematic mapping of the CEDAW Committee’s work on women and property across more than four decades. Drawing together a vast and previously dispersed set of general recommendations, concluding observations in response to state reports, and views in response to individual communications and inquiries, she reconstructs a landscape in which property is not merely a legal category but a thread running through women’s everyday legal and social realities. These include family relations, access to civil and political rights and justice, issues of land, housing, intellectual property and seed rights, access to financial credit and economic empowerment, social benefits, and protection from gender-based violence.
In this interview, Judith reflects on what it means to study property through a gendered lens, why the Committee’s jurisprudence matters, and how her own experiences shaped her approach to this demanding and deeply human project.
You spent years assembling a broad picture of how the CEDAW Committee addresses women's rights and property. What drew you to map this landscape, and what did you discover as you began putting everything together?
The project grew slowly and without any real intention of becoming a book. While studying at the NYU School of Law on a Fulbright scholarship, I began working on this project as a research assistant and was asked to examine how CEDAW addresses property. At the time, no one had ever tried to bring all the material together. I certainly didn’t begin with the ambition to write a landscape of four decades’ worth of work. I simply grew more curious the more scattered pieces I found.
The project resurfaced during the pandemic, when the world slowed down. I was dealing with my own periods of economic precarity after my return from the US to Europe during the first lockdowns, not quite knowing what the future would hold. Living at the outskirts of Vienna at the time, I was still privileged enough not to bury my head in the sand but to follow my curiosity as a human rights practitioner and scholar and to dedicate myself to studying human rights as one way of making sense of the world.
That curiosity pushed me to gather as much material as I could and to look into the Committee’s work across its different outputs. As I worked through the materials, I began to see how important it is to tell the story of property rights from a woman's perspective.
What emerged was far more complex than I expected. Property appeared not as a narrow legal category, but as something woven through women’s lives – in marriage, divorce, land rights, access to credit, pensions, housing, and safety. Creating this map felt a bit like putting a frame around decades of stories of struggle, resilience, and exclusion.
CEDAW rarely uses the word “property,” yet you found it everywhere. How did you decide what belonged in this wider picture, and what does this broader lens allow us to see?
If I had simply searched for the word ‘property’, most of the story would have remained invisible. CEDAW mentions property explicitly only in two articles: on equality before the law regarding the administration of property, and on equal protection of property in marriage and family relations. Yet when you read through the Committee’s work with women’s lived experiences in mind, you realise that property reaches into many areas that are not labelled as such.
This meant looking horizontally rather than vertically. I examined land and inheritance, but also housing security. I looked at the economic significance of pensions and social benefits, at access to credit for women seeking economic independence, and even at intellectual property and seed rights in cases involving Indigenous communities and agricultural land. In some situations, protection from violence depended directly on who controlled the home
Because CEDAW bridges the divide between civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights, and because its focus is on anti-discrimination and equality, it was possible to develop this holistic view of property rights based on this single Convention.
However, the CEDAW Committee does not operate with a single fixed definition of property, and neither did I. I read extensively on how property rights are defined in legal scholarship and examined how other legal regimes have drawn their own boundaries. But ultimately, the meaning of property from a woman’s perspective emerged gradually through a systematic reading of the Committee’s work itself.
It struck me that much of this work happens quietly. One former CEDAW expert once described the Committee as the UN’s “best-kept secret,” and I increasingly understood what she meant: Its most important insights are often found in places where few people think to look. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this also explains why our monograph is the first of this kind to focus specifically on women’s property rights under the Women’s Rights Convention – CEDAW.
In many of these cases, property appears as both a source of protection and a source of harm. What did going through these stories teach you about that ambivalence?
That ambivalence is at the core of the project. Property can be a source of protection: It can allow a woman to exclude a violent partner from the home or to resist displacement. But it can equally be used against her, whether through in-laws taking over a home after a husband’s death, or landlords evicting tenants during pregnancy, or private developers clearing informal settlements where Roma women live.
Some cases reveal both sides at once. In domestic violence situations, limiting a perpetrator’s property rights may be necessary to protect a woman’s physical and mental wellbeing. At the same time, if she lacks secure tenure or financial resources, she may have no safe shelter of her own.
Working through these stories taught me that property is never neutral. It is deeply relational and contextual. It can protect, harm, or do both simultaneously. That complexity is why I resisted offering a single definition or a neat solution. Instead, I tried to lay out the landscape so that others can ask further questions from it.
Some of the most striking examples you analysed involve women who experience several layers of disadvantage — Indigenous women, Roma women, mothers of children with disabilities. How does looking across these stories change what equality under CEDAW looks like in practice?
Looking across these stories makes it clear that discrimination rarely comes in a single form. The case of Cecilia Kell, an Indigenous woman in Canada, illustrates this perfectly. Her partner excluded her from a home that he could only access because of her Indigenous status. She faced gender-based violence, financial insecurity, and cultural marginalisation, and by the time her claim reached CEDAW she had already endured years of unsuccessful domestic proceedings.
The North Macedonia cases involving Roma women were also powerful for me, partly because I had lived in Skopje and knew the neighbourhoods described. These women lived in extremely precarious dwellings and were removed because of private development projects. The Committee essentially said that their safety and families mattered and that they had a right to shelter somewhere.
Seeing these cases side by side moves equality beyond a simple comparison between women and men. It shows how gender interacts with indigeneity, poverty, disability, or migration status. CEDAW has been unusually forward-looking in recognising and addressing these intersectional experiences of discrimination.
In our earlier conversation, you mentioned that this chapter also became a personal journey. How did your own position and experiences influence the way you approached this work?
I think you inevitably bring your own experiences to this kind of work, even if you do not explicitly spell them out. In my own family, there is a history of expropriation and displacement. Listening to my grandmother, who came as a refugee to Austria, taught me how difficult it is to build an existence when you have to start from scratch. The women’s stories I encountered through listening and reading shaped how I understood the material long before I ever opened a case file.
I also had to reflect on my own position as someone working in Europe, trying to draw examples from all world regions, while being aware of the limitations that come with that. Positionality is not a one-time declaration in a footnote of a book chapter; it is something that quietly but consistently guides the entire research process.
My main contribution to this book is descriptive by design, but that does not mean the reading was emotionally detached. Working through cases involving violence and exclusion is demanding. Most of all, it requires reading and analysing these stories with empathy, compassion, and a sense of respect and responsibility. As a researcher, I also advise taking breaks and practising self-care. Your well-being is just as important as that of your research subjects; nothing is won in the struggle if you do not protect yourself too.
You describe the chapter as descriptive, yet clearly it has implications. What do you hope readers, researchers, or advocates might take from this work?
My aim was not to deliver a final verdict on property or on CEDAW, but to lay out the terrain clearly enough that others can decide what to do with it. Once you see how the Committee has dealt with land, housing, credit, pensions, or social benefits, you can judge for yourself where the gaps are and where change is needed.
One idea that stayed with me from the Global Justice Clinic at NYU is the simple but powerful injunction: Know the law, use the law, and change the law. Understanding how a legal framework works is often the first step toward critiquing and reforming it. I hope the chapter gives others the factual grounding to do exactly that.
Your current project at the EUI looks at how corporations engage with human rights in their due-diligence processes. Both projects examine how different interpreters turn broad rights into concrete practices. Do you see a connection between these two worlds?
At first glance the topics seem far apart, but the underlying question is the same: What happens when a broad human-rights idea meets a specific institution?
In my CEDAW research, I examined how a treaty body with interpretive authority translates women’s lived experiences into legal language. In corporate due diligence, I examine how companies, a more novel norm interpreter in the human rights field, translate human rights obligations into risk management systems, supply chain tools, and internal procedures. In both settings, rights shift once they become part of institutional practices. They are interpreted, narrowed, expanded, or reframed. Understanding those shifts is key to understanding what happens to human rights in practice.
My work now is about tracing those transformations and asking what they mean for accountability and equality. In that sense, there is a line connecting the two projects, even if the actors involved look very different.
Working on CEDAW taught me that the language of human rights can feel abstract, but once you focus on the human experience shaped by the realisation — or denial — of rights, the story is different. That is something I try to keep central in all my work.
Judith Bauder is a doctoral researcher in the EUI Department of Law. Her research focuses on international human rights law, gender equality, and global governance, with particular attention to how institutions interpret and operationalise human rights in practice. Her doctoral thesis “Corporations as Interpreters of Human Rights and Environmental Obligations in their Due Diligence” is supervised by Prof. Sarah Nouwen. Judith is also affiliated with the Environmental Challenges and Climate Change Governance cluster and she is a coordinator of the Human and Fundamental Rights Working Group.