Beyond Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Gender, and the Governance of Digital Economies in ASEAN

(Vashti Ortego – Just Security) The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) is not typically associated with AI, sovereign wealth funds, or digital infrastructure investment. Yet across Southeast Asia, the CEDAW framework, particularly through the CEDAW Committee’s recent concluding observations, is quietly becoming a normative force in the governance of digital economies. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), ratified by 189 States Parties, is often described as the international bill of rights for women. Its implementation is monitored by the CEDAW Committee, a body of 23 elected independent experts mandated under Article 17 of the Convention. Pursuant to Article 18, States Parties periodically report to the Committee on measures adopted to give effect to the Convention, generating a constructive dialogue process through which the Committee assesses compliance, elaborates the normative content of treaty obligations, and issues concluding observations interpreting State obligations under the Convention. Although concluding observations are not formally binding in the same manner as treaty text, they nonetheless carry significant interpretive and normative authority within the international human rights system. As outputs of the treaty monitoring process established under the Convention, they shape understandings of State compliance, influence domestic and regional policymaking, guide civil society advocacy, and contribute to the evolving interpretation of treaty obligations. While much attention has focused on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, including in an initial position paper by the CEDAW Working Group on Gender-Based Violence, this framing captures only part of the story. In its periodic review of Singapore, for example, the Committee calls for gender-responsive budgeting across all sectors of government, an intervention that directly shapes how digital infrastructure and innovation are financed. Comparable dynamics emerge across multiple ASEAN country reviews. Although similar patterns are visible in the Committee’s engagement with states beyond the region, this article focuses on how the shift is unfolding across Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states, including Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. In these reviews, the Committee is doing something more ambitious: embedding gender equality norms into the governance of digital economies, innovation systems, and platform infrastructures. CEDAW’s constructive dialogue process functions as a site of authoritative norm elaboration for the governance of digital economies, articulating what gender equality requires of AI systems, digital supply chains, and platform governance, and introducing a rights-based logic that regional frameworks have so far failed to supply. The Committee operates not only by addressing online harms such as technology-facilitated sex trafficking, cybergrooming, online hate speech, the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, but also by shaping the political economy of digital development in ASEAN member states through investment and market regulation, the architecture of AI and innovation systems, and the operational practices of platform governance. This evolution raises important questions about how far this role can and should be developed, and what a more deliberate version of it would look like. – CEDAW, Gender, and Digital Governance in ASEAN