International human rights law has not yet been applied effectively to redress the disadvantages and injustices experienced by women by reason only of their being women. In this sense, respect for human rights fails to be “universal.” The reasons for this general failure to enforce women’s human rights are complex and vary from country to country. They include lack of understanding of the systemic nature of the subordination of women, failure to recognize the need to characterize the subordination of women as a human rights violation, and lack of state practice to condemn discrimination against women. Moreover, there has been...

In The Politics of Rights, Stuart Scheingold writes:

The appeals made by the myth of rights for the support of Americans are rooted in traditional values and closely associated with venerable institutions. The symbolic voice of the myth of rights can, moreover, be easily understood and readily adapted to political discourse. But just how compelling is it? How pervasive and widespread and uniform a grip do legal values have on the minds of Americans?¹

Implicit in this argument is that, for human rights to be effective, they have to go beyond the normative, textual essence and become a part of...

What does a category of women’s international human rights mean and what are its implications? This chapter considers these questions, arguing that the development of women’s international human rights has the potential to transform human rights law generally.

Human rights law challenges the traditional scope of international law. It gives individuals and groups, otherwise without access to the international legal system, the possibility of making international legal claims and thus expands the state-centered discourse of international law. International human rights law is a product of the post–World War II order. The United Nations Charter recognized in principle the centrality...

Human rights discourse is a powerful tool within international law to condemn those state acts and omissions that infringe core and basic notions of civility and citizenship. “To assert that a particular social claim is a human right is to vest it emotionally and morally with an especially high order of legitimacy.”¹ Violence is an egregious form of such an infringement of the core and basic notions of civility and citizenship. Violence assaults life, dignity, and personal integrity. It transgresses basic norms of peaceful coexistence.

Women are everyday subjects of a system of familial terror that includes diverse modalities of...

The abuse of women by their male partners is among the most common and dangerous forms of gender-based violence.¹ Its victims exceed those of the most brutal dictatorships. As a result of the global mobilization of women, and international attention to certain ongoing atrocities, both official and private violence against women have begun to be recognized as a human rights concern. Nonetheless, intimate violence remains on the margin: it is still considered different, less severe, and less deserving of international condemnation and sanction than officially inflicted violence.²

There are essentially two major obstacles to the treatment of intimate violence as...

This chapter argues for a re-examination of the relationship between international law and women’s international human rights law, more specifically, the relationship between the current conceptualization of state sovereignty in international law and the participation of women in the creation of women’s international human rights law.

International law structures women’s international human rights law, yet, for reasons ranging from lack of knowledge to realism to the rejection of authority as antithetical to feminist perspectives, women are only beginning to explore these underlying structures.¹ This chapter focuses on two fundamental aspects of contemporary international law: (1) its statism and (2) the...

States are responsible for bringing their domestic law and practice into conformity with their obligations under international law to protect and promote human rights. This responsibility applies not only to laws enacted by formal legislative organs of the state but also to those attributed to religious and customary sources or sanction, regardless of the manner of their “enactment” or articulation and/or implementation.¹ In other words, every state has the responsibility to remove any inconsistency between international human rights law binding on it, on the one hand, and religious and customary laws operating within the territory of that state, on the...

The proliferation of human rights standards at the international level in the last forty-five years has been a striking feature of the development of international law in that period. While there had previously been international concern with issues that we would now characterize as human rights issues, the volume and scope of international and regional instruments in the field of human rights is now extensive.

This period has also seen some important developments in the recognition by the international community that sex/gender is an important category of analysis when it comes to examining the enjoyment of human rights, a recognition...

The time has come to recognize that denials of individuals’ rights on the ground only that they are women are human rights violations, and to require state practices that expose women to degradation, indignity, and oppression on account of their sex to be independently identified, condemned, compensated, and, preferably, prevented. The purpose of changing ubiquitous state practice may appear ambitious, but it is not too ambitious for the needs of our times. Egregious and pervasive violations of women’s rights often go unrecognized. Moreover, when they are recognized, they go unpunished and unremedied, and are all too often defended as a...

Before addressing the substance of my chapter, I think it useful to state my position on some points. First, I have consciously changed the title of my chapter and refrained from using the expression “women’s rights.” My starting point is that human rights are those rights that each and every human being has on the sole merit of being human; thus it does not seem possible to use an expression that suggests the idea that some human beings, women, have different rights from those of other human beings, men. A first consequence of this position is that I find in...

This chapter is intended to contribute modestly toward the effective protection of the rights of women under the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights 1981 (the African Charter).¹ This Charter was adopted under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity in 1981, and came into force in 1986. It establishes human rights standards of regional application and a machinery for the protection of human rights in Africa.

A notable significance of the adoption of the Charter by African states is that human rights is not a foreign concept in Africa. Moreover, as a human rights instrument, the Charter...

The assertion of rights presumes their existing or probable violation, and a desire to remedy or prevent violation. It has been argued that many of the standards embodied in human rights instruments today have been recognized by most societies at some point in history.¹ They are articulated as rights largely vested in individuals and asserted against the state or other individuals, and their expression in specific international or national legal and policy instruments is specific to certain historical periods and social formations. Is the widespread acceptance of vague general principles, such as the right to life, health, and work, sufficient...

In this chapter I will discuss some of the methodological problems that the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project has encountered in addressing domestic violence against women. I have chosen to focus on domestic violence both because of the severity of the problem and because of the complexities of the legal and conceptual issues that arise in treating it as a human rights violation. By highlighting these complexities, I hope to illustrate how international human rights law can most effectively be used to combat domestic violence. The discussion will also have obvious relevance to other efforts to address de facto...

In recent years the international women’s rights movement has been successful in addressing universal gender discrimination. It is due to this success that human rights groups have begun to address questions of the human rights of women. For instance, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Human Rights Law Group have all created programs that specifically deal with gender-specific issues. While it is too early to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs, it is certain that this interest is long overdue.

This chapter attempts to explore:

1. Some conceptual and methodological obstacles inherent in...

International standards in the field of human rights are numerous and their quantity continues to grow rapidly. But the eagerness of the international community to set standards masks a deep-seated reluctance to design adequate corresponding implementation schemes.

The consequence of this hypocrisy has been the establishment of international supervisory bodies with different enforcement tools. The Human Rights Committee set up by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, with additional powers granted by an Optional Protocol, considers individual communications concerning violations of the Covenant. The power of individual petition is not available, however, with respect to violations of the...

While the Constitution of India adopted in November 1949 contains articles mandating equality and nondiscrimination on the grounds of sex, several laws that clearly violate these principles continue to exist, especially in the area of personal laws or family laws. Most of these laws, which contain provisions that are highly discriminatory against women, have either remained static or have changed in retrogressive ways.¹

The Indian state has, however, made no effort to change these laws or introduce new legislation in conformity with Constitutional principles. In fact, the Indian government seems to have chosen to ignore these principles completely and acts...

The struggle for women’s rights in the Sudan started nearly fifty years ago. At that time, few women were educated and those who were lived mainly in the major cities. The Sudanese Women’s Union fought fiercely for women’s rights and promoted women’s education. The Women’s Union and other groups had a great impact on changing the personal law rules at that time so that they were less harsh.

The struggle for women’s rights continues today. Only recently have women begun to address women’s rights as human rights. Women, particularly those active on a grass-roots level, have never addressed their problems...

This paper is not an economic analysis of Economic Recovery Programs, neither does it seek to put forward any economic ideas. It is simply an attempt to put in the context of human rights the privations suffered by a section of one society as a result of programs fashioned by international financial institutions for the solution of the economic problems that have beset our nation for many years. The paper looks at the nature of these programs in the special context of Ghana and advocates that, important as it is that the economy be put on a sound basis, it...

[T]he history of the struggle for human rights from the eighteenth century on has been the history of men struggling to assert their dignity and common humanity against an over-bearing state apparatus. The more recent struggle for women’s rights has been a struggle to eliminate discrimination, to achieve a place for women in man’s world, to develop a set of legislative reforms in order to place women in the same place as men…. It has not been a struggle to define the rights of women in relation to their special place in the societal structure and in relation to the...

Every state in South Asia is bound by the norm of equality and nondiscrimination between men and women as defined by international human rights instruments. The norm of equality is also reflected in domestic law, in entrenched and justiciable provisions of national constitutions. In its domestic application, however, the norm is severely impaired by unjustifiable deviations in the sphere of women’s rights within the family.

The application of the norm in South Asia is asymmetric. It subjects relations in the public sphere, the world of political participation, employment, and education, to minimum standards of equality. In contrast, it relegates the...

Insofar as there exists a de jure or de facto significant difference in opportunities for access to land in any country, and that difference is based purely on whether one is a man or a woman, there is discrimination. Such discrimination violates international human rights law if it is unable to pass the international standards of “objective and reasonable justification”¹ or of reasonable relationship of proportionality between the means and the aim sought.² In many African countries, there is both de jure and de facto discrimination against women in opportunities to acquire, hold, and deal in land. This chapter explores...

Over the past 15–20 years, women in different parts of the world have taken up issues of reproductive health. Their concern has been to empower women to control their own fertility and sexuality with maximum choice and minimum health problems by providing information and alternative services, and by campaigning for women’s right to make informed choices about their fertility, for improved services and for more appropriate technologies.¹

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the Women’s Convention)² is the major international treaty that protects the right of women to make their own decisions about...

The variety of forms of violence against women is matched by an array of sources of international norms addressing that violence. However, none of these norms is sufficiently broad or focused to have more than a minimal impact in controlling or eradicating violence against women. The problem is illustrated by the existing text of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the Women’s Convention),¹ which does not specifically prohibit gender-based violence or place any explicit responsibilities on states parties to take action to reduce it. Instead, at least six articles of the Convention arguably bear...