A case from Peru, brought before the UN Human Rights Committee, resulted in a ruling that the Peruvian government had violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by denying a 17-year-old pregnant woman access to abortion services and forcing her carry her anencephalic fetus to term and breastfeed it until it died.

Today, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) decided its first abortion case, KL v. Peru. The decision establishes that denying access to legal abortion violates women’s most basic human rights. This is the first time an international human rights body has held a government accountable for failing to ensure access to legal abortion services. The Human Rights Committee monitors countries’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“We are thrilled that the UNHRC has ruled in favor of protecting women’s most essential human rights,” says Luisa Cabal, Director of the International Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Every woman who lives in any of the 154 countries that are party to this treaty – including the U.S – now has a legal tool to use in defense of her rights. This ruling establishes that it is not enough to just grant a right on paper. Where abortion is legal it is governments’ duty to ensure that women have access to it.”

The ruling also provides for reparations for the woman, and requires the Peruvian government to establish regulations that will provide for access to legal abortion services.

I have to admit I don’t fully understand the legal implications of this ruling. If I understand correctly, the UN is not taking a position on abortion per se, only that the government may not arbitrarily deny its citizens the free exercise of rights they otherwise have under the laws of their nation. In other words, the problem in this case was not that abortion was or was not legal, but that, given that it was legal under the circumstances, the government had no right to prevent her from obtaining one.

If that is the correct interpretation, it actually provides little protection for women. Governments that seek to block access to abortion can merely make it illegal or procedurally unobtainable (as many US states have done); the treaty does not demand that governments guarantee abortion rights, but only that they enforce their own laws equably. As to what those laws may be, governments are free to institute either pro- or anti-abortion laws. And, if pressed on the issue, governments are free to withdraw from treaties simply by giving notice – as the Bush administration has already done with the International Criminal Court and the (non-UN) Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (as well as by holding the Kyoto environmental protocol in continual limbo).

However, this at least puts the weight of a major international treaty – ratified by over 150 countries, including the US – behind enforcement of women’s rights to abortion where they exist, and against the practice of reactionary governments’ cynical refusal to obey their own laws in the case of abortion. How much legal impact this will have remains to be seen, though it clearly has implications for the United States, where some states have declared official anti-abortion policies above and beyond the legal restrictions on abortion rights that they have enacted. Where the state has discretionary authority and uses it to block women’s rights, or where they violate the access rights allowed under their existing laws, they are now on notice that they are in violation of a UN treaty guaranteeing due process for abortion rights as well as other aspects of the law – and the US government is now obligated by treaty to guarantee the enforcement of laws granting access to abortion, under a treaty obligation to protect all civil rights, whether they like it or not.