Women's Human Rights

"The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights …" Article 18, Vienna Declaration

The slogan "Women's Rights Are Human Rights" may seem redundant, yet it highlights the long-standing neglect of women's rights and speaks to the need to acknowledge an evident truth that women are irrefutably human and accordingly entitled to whatever belongs to humans. Human rights are rooted in the dignity and worth of the human person and are essential to the well-being of every man, woman, and child. They include civil, political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and other rights and freedoms. They are universal, inalienable, and indivisible and inscribed in international, regional, and national legal frameworks. This entry offers an overview of the implications of the international human rights standards for women and the expanding global movement to reclaim human rights for women by addressing critical issues and major achievements as well as changes and challenges.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The concept of human rights gained prominence in the modern world with the establishment of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 in response to the horrors of the Second World War. Under the UN Charter the international community recognizes that all human beings have equal, inalienable rights. It is the first international instrument to articulate specifically the importance of gender equity in human rights. Its Preamble sets as one of the central goals of the organization the reaffirmation of "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women." The Commission on Human Rights, established in 1946, took up the job of defining basic rights and fundamental freedoms, and its work culminated in the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10, 1948.

The UDHR proclaims the entitlement of everyone to equality before the law and to the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms. It remains the pillar of modern-era human rights and the cornerstone of the global human rights movement. It has since become the most universally recognized, yet the most widely violated, treaty. The broader UN human rights agreements, adopted in 1966—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)—take the UDHR a step further by making provisions legally binding. These three instruments constitute the International Bill of Rights, which has generated numerous human rights conventions and laws, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) (1965), the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) (1984), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989), and the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2001).

HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK: RHETORIC AND REALITY

The human rights delineated in the foregoing instruments are held to apply to all, including women. However, marginalization of women in the human rights process started from the outset, with the discriminatory opening of an earlier draft of the UDHR, "all men are brothers" (Tomasevski 1993). Only four women were involved in the process and had to fight fiercely for the inclusion of women in the human rights vision through gender-inclusive language. The final version thus reaffirms the UN Charter's provision of equal rights for men and women under international law, and Article 1 states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights," and Article 2 states, "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth …, without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." This explicit inclusion of women was clearly articulated to address the issue of women's subordination. However, there has been a great disparity between international human rights rhetoric and women's reality worldwide.

Women have been marginalized or excluded based on cultural, traditional, social, and religious prejudices compounded by political and economic inequalities. This gender discrimination by the mainstream human rights framework has violated its own universality, interdependency, and indivisibility tenets. As former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, stresses, "Universality is, in fact, the essence of human rights: all people are entitled to them, all governments are bound to observe them, all state and civil actors should defend them. The goal is nothing less than all human rights" (United Nations Development Program 2000, p. 113). Historically, human rights thought and praxis have viewed the male as the norm and impeded the protection and promotion of women's human rights. This gender bias has established a dichotomy between the public and private spheres: Violations are taken into consideration only if a state party to human rights conventions can be held accountable for them. This reservation is highly detrimental to women's enjoyment of their human rights, as most abuses against women are perpetrated by private individuals and in the private sphere. The international human rights framework has contributed to a definition of the family as a social, rather than a political, entity. Yet the family is a political unit par excellence and the stage for most violations against women in the name of religion, tradition, and culture. Cultural relativism, with claims that there are no universal human rights, still poses a formidable and corrosive challenge to women's rights to equality and dignity in all facets and all stages of their lives.

The importance of human rights indivisibility and interdependence articulated in the UDHR and reaffirmed in the Declaration of the Second World Conference on Human Rights stipulates that "the international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis" (United Nations Department of Public Information 1993, par. 5). There has been a gap between this rhetoric and the reality: The international human rights community has established a clear hierarchy. It has privileged civil and political rights, often considered first-generation human rights, the human rights, at the expense of economic, social, and cultural rights considered second-generation human rights, third-generation group rights, and fourth-generation women's rights. This separation of public and private responsibility, compounded with fragmentation and subordination of certain human rights, has exacerbated oppression of women and violated their human dignity. Human rights reality thus lags far behind human rights rhetoric for a vast majority of women and girls, and there is an urgent need for redress.

RECLAIMING A WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK

Putting women's rights on the agenda has been a tremendous achievement by the international community and human rights activists. However, the fact of women's humanity has proved insufficient to guarantee them the enjoyment of their internationally agreed-upon rights. There has thus been the need for a gender-balancing act, an elaboration of important declarations and conventions: the 1952 Convention on the Political Rights of Women, the 1957 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, and the 1962 and 1965 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages. Each of these treaties aimed to protect and promote the rights of women in areas where they were considered particularly vulnerable. These women-specific instruments soon proved fragmentary, as they failed to deal with discrimination against women in a comprehensive fashion. The Commission for the Status of Women thus initiated a process that culminated in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, bringing to fruition the UN efforts to comprehensively codify international legal standards to secure women's human rights.

CEDAW: A MILESTONE FOR WOMEN'S HUMAN'S RIGHTS

The CEDAW is often described as an international bill of rights for women. It is the most comprehensive UN treaty aimed at safeguarding the rights of women in family life, education, health care, employment, politics, economics, and beyond. CEDAW comprises a preamble and thirty articles that define what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end it. The Convention defines discrimination against women as "any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field" (Article 1). The Commission on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women monitors implementation of the Convention and continues to play a dynamic role in ensuring that this issue is a priority for the international community. The Optional Protocol of the Convention gives women and groups of women the right to petition and has the potential to become a highly effective tool for addressing gender-based violence and other violations of women's human rights. It is noteworthy that CEDAW has received more reservations from signatory states than any other human rights instrument. These reservations must be removed to allow this useful document to be effectively implemented at all levels everywhere.

BEST PRACTICES TO STOP VIOLATIONS OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS

The First World Conference on Women held in Mexico in 1975 set in motion the global women's human rights movement by bringing together for the first time women from all over the world, a process that continued in Copenhagen and Nairobi in 1980 and 1985. Putting governments on notice with regard to their obligations toward the women of the world, the movement gathered momentum through the 1990s global conferences and the resulting plans of action. The World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna 1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994), the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen 1995), and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995) were notable for the advances they made in women's human rights theory and practice (Bunch and Reilly 1994). The recognition that human rights can be, and are, violated in gender-specific ways and that violence against women is itself a human rights violation mirrors the significant slogan "Women's Rights are Human Rights."

In the wake of Vienna, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women in 1967, an international consensus on government obligations to end violence against women. The Declaration defines violence against women as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life" (Article 1). It applies to violence by nongovernmental actors, including violence within the family; Article 2 states that violence against women includes, but is not limited to, violence in the family, violence in the general community, and violence perpetrated or condoned by the State. The Declaration directs states not to "invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations" regarding violence against women. It spells out specific legislative, educational, administrative, and other measures to be taken by states. Many of these provisions are reiterated and expanded in the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action (United Nations Department of Public Information, 1996) and in UN resolutions on violence against women. In 1994 the Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women with a mandate to collect information on the causes and consequences of violence against women and to recommend measures for its eradication.

Combating violence against women has been central to the agenda of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). Since 1997 the UNIFEM Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence Against Women has provided more than 2 million dollars to innovative projects around the world that work to eliminate all forms of gender-based violence. On March 8, 1999, the last International Women's Day of the millennium, UNIFEM coordinated an interagency global videoconference, "A World Free of Violence Against Women," linking the UN General Assembly in New York to sites across the globe and also broadcasting by satellite to audiences worldwide. In 1999, the UN General Assembly adopted November 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The UN Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in October 2000, affirms the principle that women should be involved in peace-building processes at all levels and that the rights of women and girls need to be respected in times of war and conflict.

GENDER-BASED VIOLATIONS OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS

Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights for no other reason than that they are women. There are glaring cases of human rights abuses against women that are obstacles and setbacks in campaigns to redress them. The years from 1997 to 2006 were declared the International Decade for the Elimination of Poverty. Yet data and statistics available in many studies indicate that women's poverty, in fact, increased during that decade. Structural social inequalities, gender discrimination, unequal access to resources, and other factors fuel poverty, which affects all human rights. For example, people with low income often do not have access to health or education (economic and social rights); this, in turn, impedes their participation in public life and their ability to influence policies impacting their lives (civil and political rights). Extreme poverty forecloses other choices and hinders human development. Human poverty thus needs to be viewed both as a cause and a consequence of human rights violations.

The correlation between poverty and human rights abuse is well reflected in women's everyday lives around the world. Violations of women's economic rights have worsened and resulted in the feminization of poverty. At the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, governments committed to remedy some of the ways in which macroeconomic policies impact women negatively and disproportionately. World leaders also committed to "free all men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty" by overwhelmingly accepting a number of human rights treaties and, in 2000, signing the international consensus, through the Millennium Declaration, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight targets formulated to curb poverty by 2015 (United Nations Millennium Development Declaration, 2000). Women's economic justice advocates continue to formulate and demand alternative policies that are key to guaranteeing women's economic rights.

Paradoxically, policy makers have expanded deregulation of manufacturing and investment, boosting profits at the expense of poor women and their families. International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Word Bank's Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have shifted more of the burden for meeting people's basic needs from governments to women in households. Strategies aimed at enhancing women's economic empowerment, such as microcredit have shown their limits; also, gender budgeting has failed to transform macroeconomic frameworks and the impact of international trade policies on women. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, laments the prevalence of poverty as being the gravest human rights challenge in the world, with the worst affected populations being women and their children. Tackling poverty as a matter of human rights obligation is imperative to achieve its eradication and promote women's human rights.

Gender-based violence is one of the most shameful human rights violations of the early twenty-first century. Silenced for centuries, violence against women has reached pandemic proportions and constitutes a clear breach of international and national law. Violence against women is relentless, systematic, and widely tolerated, if not explicitly condoned. Women are targeted for violent attacks because they are women, "punished for being female." It is a "permanent world war—the war against women all over the planet" (Herbert 2006), as documented in a UN Secretary General's report titled In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence against Women released in October 2006. Violence against women is global in reach and takes place in all societies and cultures, affecting women regardless of their birth, ethnicity, or other social status; education, age, or other circumstances.

Violence against women takes diverse forms through their life cycles: from selective abortion of female fetuses and female infanticide due to male-child preference, female genital cutting, virginity testing, girl-child marriage, forced marriage, bride battering, bride burning, honor killing, widow rituals, forced prostitution, and sex slavery, to the growing violence against women and girls in armed conflicts where they are not only victims of warfare and displacement but increasingly targets of mass rape and many other hideous forms of sexual violence used as weapons of war. The trafficking in women and girls is one of the fastest-growing organized crimes in the twenty-first century. Violence against women is also increasingly linked to HIV/AIDS infection; these women do not have basic control over what happens to their bodies.

According to the 2006 UN report, it is estimated that prenatal sex selection and infanticide in India accounted for half a million missing girls per year during the two decades prior to the study. Each year thousands of wives in India are maimed or murdered, many of them doused with kerosene and set ablaze by husbands dissatisfied by their spouses' behaviors or the sizes of their dowries. In Ethiopia the abduction and rape of girls is a customary way to acquire a bride, as most parents agree to the marriage on the grounds that the raped child is no longer fit to marry anyone else. In Pakistan a woman cannot legally prove that she was raped unless four virtuous Muslim men testify that they witnessed the sexual attack. Without those four witnesses the woman victim of rape is revictimized by prosecution for fornication or adultery. In some cases sexual violence occurs in horrendous waves, as has been the case in Darfur-Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kosovo, and the former Yugoslavia. Sometimes men beat, torture, rape and kill women with impunity, as in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city on the Texan border where 300 to 400 women were murdered in during the past decade, some after being raped and mutilated. More than 130 million girls and women are living with the consequences of genital mutilation, and many others have died from the brutal practice in some parts of Africa and the Middle East. A key factor to the protracted occurrence of these crimes is the continued impunity of the perpetrators.

As documented in a landmark World Health Organization (WHO) study on domestic violence published in November 2005, intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence in women's and girls' lives around the globe—much more so than assault or rape by strangers. Intimate partner violence is widespread and has a serious impact on the health and well-being of women around the world. Paradoxically, by its very nature, partner violence is still largely hidden and silenced and is the most difficult to prosecute; it is a social, public health, and human rights threat. According to the UN Secretary General's 2006 report, even in such developed countries as the United States, Canada, Israel, and Australia, the overwhelming majority of female murder victims are killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends. A study of young female murder victims in the United States found that homicide was the second leading cause of death for girls aged fifteen to eighteen, and that 78 percent of all the homicide victims in the study had been killed by an acquaintance or intimate partner. The global statistics are alarming and call for concerted action.

LOOKING AHEAD

A major catalyst in reclaiming, protecting, and promoting women's rights has been the networking of women human rights activists locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Some of these organizations are the women's rights divisions of Amnesty International and of Human Rights Watch, the Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL), Equality Now, Isis Internacional, MADRE, WOMANKIND, Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), Women's Rights Network, and Women's Watch. Activists believe that reclaiming women's rights is a global struggle based on universal human rights and the rule of law. The struggle must be about making women's lives matter everywhere all the time, and it requires everyone to work in solidarity to stop discrimination and violence against women.

Despite the very real progress of the international women's human rights movement in identifying, raising awareness about, and challenging impunity for women's human rights violations, poverty, violence, and discrimination against women remain global social epidemics. The vast body of international human rights instruments alone will not be enough; they need to be implemented. The struggle for the rights of women involves more than state and global intervention; it requires synergy with civil society local action. As aptly charged by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, "Intervention is not just a matter for states. Every person—whether as a worker in government, in intergovernmental or non-governmental organizations, in business, in the media, or simply as a human being—has an obligation to do whatever he or she can do to defend the human rights of our fellow men and women when they are threatened. Each of us has a duty to halt—or, better, to prevent—the infliction of suffering" (United Nations Development Program 2000, p. 31). Society must examine the gender structure that moulds violence against women as the expression of male domination. Society must also confront the culture of violence, particularly through education, identifying and addressing the bases for hegemonic beliefs in male supremacy, formulating and enforcing appropriate legal frameworks, and designing relevant academic curricula and pedagogical materials. Ultimately, society must rethink the culture of violence that permeates domestic, economic, social, civil, political, and religious relationships.

see also Female Genital Mutilation; Gender Roles: I. Overview; Gender Stereotype; Nationalism; War.

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                            Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum