Professor Bennoune marks Angelo-Berryhill chair appointment with lecture

On Jan. 29, Professor Karima Bennoune marked her appointment to UC Davis Law’s Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Endowed Chair by delivering a lecture on international law and women’s rights to an overflow crowd in King Hall.

Bennoune, the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, traced the evolution of women’s human rights law, starting with anti-discrimination language in the U.N. charter.

“International law provides a strong normative basis for women’s equality,” Bennoune said. “And ongoing feminist advocacy around the world to close the gap between those legal norms and the lived reality should be a critical priority in our troubled times.”

Bennoune addressed recent successes within the #MeToo movement while also offering sobering statistics like a land-ownership rate of less than 20 percent for women worldwide.

“We are not in a post-feminist era anywhere,” Bennoune said. “While there has been tremendous progress during my lifetime on many related issues, we still have not achieved sex equality globally or nationally, anywhere.”

Bennoune expressed gratitude for her new appointment. Angelo, the late UC Davis international law professor, and his wife, Berryhill, were military veterans who helped defeat fascism in World War II before becoming pioneers in the fight for international environmental protections, Bennoune noted.

“Occupying a chair named for them is a great privilege,” she said.

Karima Bennoune, Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton & Company). In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.  She received the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award from IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.