Women’s rights are human rights

How and to what extent can women’s interests be advanced through human rights theory and activism? 

This is a ques­tion near and dear to me. I have been involved with Amnesty Inter­na­tional for many, many years, writ­ing let­ters from a young age, volun­teer­ing during my under­gradu­ate degree, writ­ing art­icles for the news­let­ter as a freel­an­cer and more recently being a fin­an­cial sup­porter with a monthly donation. 

One of my life goals is to work for Amnesty Inter­na­tional or in some capa­city in the Hague on Inter­na­tional Justice. 

The vari­ous human rights declar­a­tions — from the lib­eral rhet­oric of the 18th cen­tury, such as that found in the United States con­sti­tu­tion to the more com­plex argu­ment raised in the Inter­na­tional Con­ven­tion on Eco­nomic, Social and Cul­tural Rights — always make me a little teary and hopeful. 

Yet I am keenly aware of their short­com­ings, most notice­ably their focus on public life at the expense of private con­sid­er­a­tions. Here we see the con­sequences of the public/private divide we dis­cussed last week. 

Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, the UN Declar­a­tions of Human Rights of 1945 and 1948 have equal­ity for men and women inscribed in them. How­ever, it remains an equal­ity relat­ing to rights that do not apply to most women’s lives given the cur­rent state of inequal­ity in the pat­ri­archal sys­tems we exist in at present. 

When read simply, the gen­eric state­ments of rights are broadly applic­able and seem won­der­ful. How­ever, as fur­ther defined, the right to life, for example, relates to the right to free enjoy­ment of life and liberty from gov­ern­mental inter­fer­ence and arbit­rary arrest by the state. Like­wise, the right to free­dom from tor­ture expli­citly defines tor­ture as by a gov­ern­ment or offi­cial rep­res­ent­at­ive of such. This expli­citly excludes kidnap, rape, tor­ture, forced mar­riage and so on, which are common exper­i­ences of women, because they are fre­quently at the hands of men who are acting as indi­vidu­als and may be their fath­ers, hus­bands or broth­ers. These kinds of crimes are per­ceived to belong to the domestic sphere and there­fore to be national, not inter­na­tional, con­cerns. The dif­fi­cult spectre of cul­tural sens­it­iv­ity is raised to argue for non-inter­fer­ence and the third-gen­er­a­tional rights to ”self-determ­in­a­tion” for cul­tures is some­times invoked. 

The ques­tion, if we believe that all people should enjoy a right to life and a life free from tor­ture, is how to achieve that, how to argue for those issues to be included in inter­na­tional issues? At this stage, the response has been to estab­lish the Com­mis­sion on the Elim­in­a­tion of Dis­crim­in­a­tion Against Women, the only com­mit­tee with an all-female mem­ber­ship (the others, mostly 18 strong, have between zero and three female mem­bers). It is also the only com­mit­tee to have had an offi­cial com­plaint registered about its gender balance. 

As far as I’m con­cerned, the prob­lem with that is that it hives women’s issues off to a sep­ar­ate area and allows the con­tin­ued ignor­ance of women’s issues in ”main­stream” human rights discussions. 

The next ques­tion is: If women’s rights are not inter­na­tional issues, then how can we address them on a global scale? How do we coöperate glob­ally to achieve local goals? 

One answer, from Hilary Char­les­worth, is to focus on solid­ar­ity in dif­fer­ence’ (which sounds a little like what I was sug­gest­ing in my thesis) and to stop view­ing eco­nomic justice issues as sep­ar­ate from human rights/social justice issues. This implies a coali­tion between fem­in­ists and anti-cap­it­al­ists that could get quite inter­est­ing. Her sug­ges­tion was in the 90s; I believe that to some extent, the rad­ical global act­iv­ism of the post-Seattle 1999 res­ist­ance has indeed formed such a loose coalition. 

I think what I will do for this tutorial is to get the stu­dents into small groups and have them come up with three spe­cific strategies to advance women’s interests through human rights act­iv­ism and the first steps needed to imple­ment them.