Do you endorse that the conventional discourse on human rights has failed to include women’s rights? Explain in the context of feminist theories?. (UPSC CSE Mains 2015- Political Science and International Relations, Paper 2)
- Non-feminist approach to women’s human rights all too often sees them as separate or in some way secondary to other human rights concerns, does not take women’s lives and daily experiences into account, and sees women’s human rights as conflicting with other rights such as religious practices, the rights of men or the (perceived) rights of the unborn child from the moment of conception.
- The critique that the human rights framework is androcentric and marginalizes women’s experiences was articulated by feminist lawyers, development practitioners, and internationally oriented women’s organizations starting in the 1980s.
- Human rights law has evolved since 1948 and there have been three so-called “generations” of human rights treaties (civil and political rights; social and cultural rights; the rights of groups or peoples), yet for feminists they all share the same flaw: “they are built on typically male life experiences and in their current form do not respond to the most pressing risks women face”.
- For the many women around the world whose greatest risk is the one they face at home, a list of political, economic and above all public rights will mean very little. Whereas, the very real dangers faced by women inside or outside of the home are often seen as “too specific to women to be seen as human or too generic to human beings to be seen as specific to women”. Women have distinctive rights, which are also human rights, and which require seeing the human as not only male.
- An effort has been made more recently to redress these imbalances and inequalities and to assert the human rights of women, most noticeably through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and its Optional Protocol, and through international conferences such as the Beijing Platform for Action. These were no doubt born out of feminist activism; however, their feminism has been tempered by non-feminist and oppressive states refusing to subscribe to principles that could greatly limit them, and their activism has been restricted by the enduring patriarchy of the United Nations. The resulting Women’s Convention is largely one that protects women’s rights to the same rights stated for men in existing treaties, in other words an “approach of adding women and stirring them into existing first-generation human rights categories”, rather than acknowledging women’s specific experiences and rights. States were also allowed to sign and ratify the Women’s Convention whilst stating reservations, many of which are completely contrary to the aim of non-discrimination. For example, in response to Article 16 on equal marriage rights, Algeria entered a reservation that these should not contradict the Algerian Family Code.
- Perhaps one of the best examples of the lack of acknowledgement of women’s lives and experiences in international human rights law can be seen in the scant provision for women’s reproductive rights. The Convention makes no reference at all to women’s sexual rights, such as freedom to choose whether or not to have sex, freedom to have consensual sex and sex not linked to reproduction, there is some limited mention of women’s reproductive rights.
- The non-feminist hijacking of CEDAW has resulted in a convention that does not reflect the lives of women and still seems to see some issues as too personal to be political, and some dangers as inevitable and inherent to the condition of being female. Feminists must continue fighting to rescue women’s human rights and to gain international recognition for the fact that when a woman dies from a preventable situation, her government is complicit in that violation of her most basic right, the right to life.
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