Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives

1. Women's International Human Rights Law: The Way Forward

Chapter 1 Women's International Human Rights Law; The Way Forward Rebecca J. Cook 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 systemicnature 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 an unwillingness by traditional human rights groups to focus on violations of women's rights, and a lack of understanding by women's groups of the potential of international human rights law to vindicate women's rights. This chapter reports a consultation of lawyers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe held at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, in August 1992. The participants brought legal theory and practice to bear on the relationship between international human rights and women's rights in order to develop legal strategies to promote and protect women's international human rights. This chapter is a report of that consultation, but by no means thereport. There are as many reports as participants, but the real impact of the event will appear only when the findings of the consultation are brought to bear on the prevention, investigation,and punishment of violationsof women's human rights. The intention is to offer some idea of the multiple perspectives that emerged on the consultation themes: 4 Rebecca J. Cook i to review the progress of women's rights and identify challenges and prospects; ii to recharacterize internationally protected human rights to accommodate women's experiences of injustice; iii to guarantee specific human rights of women; and iv to make international human rights law more effective for women. Progress, Challenges, and Prospects Why Rights? Hilary Charlesworth, of the Faculty of Law, University of Adelaide, opened the consultation by raising a fundamental question: Do legal rights really offer anything to women? Women's disadvantages are often based on structural injustice and winning a case in court will not change this. Her answer wasthat, "Because women in most societies are starting in such a disadvantaged position, rights discourse offers a significant vocabulary to formulate political and social grievances which is recognized by the powerful."1 Celina Romany, of the City University of New York Law School, answered the question differently. She said that rights could be far more powerful if women were not limited by the ways in which men talk about rights, and encouraged women to make "rights talk" their own. She explained that rights are defined by who talks about them, the language that is used, and the process of talking about them. She recommended that women, their language and their ways of talking about their experiences of injustice need to make a far greater contribution to the development of international human rights law.2 Participants agreed that many more women, and women from many diverse backgrounds, should talk about the kind of content that should be added to women's rights. Andrew Byrnes, of the Facultyof Law,University of Hong Kong, proposed that we need to make "a concerted effort to expand the range of participants in that dialogue, and towrest some of the power of defining and speaking from narrow androcentric models to address issues of central concern to women." Other participants questioned the validity of the rights discourse. Adetoun Ilumoka, a legal practitioner from Lagos, Nigeria, said that the rights discourse in Africa is not meaningful, explaining that the severity of socioeconomic problems faced by women in countries undergoing structural adjustment may require a basic needs strategy Introduction:The Way Forward 5 rather than a rights strategy.3 Radhika Coomaraswamy,of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said that in Asia the rights discourse is weak, in part because it privileges free, independent women, whereas Asian women tend to be attached to their communities, castes, or ethnic groups. The consultation adopted the working presumption that there should be a relationship between international human rights and women 's rights. However, no one lost sight of the limitations of a rights strategy and the fact that its...