Title: Progressive Development of Women's Human Rights in International Human Right Law and within United Nations System
Abstract: AbstractThis article begins by briefly tracing the trajectory of women's human rights discourse starting from the post United Nations period to the present day, within the framework of International law institutions (Kelly, 2005, December: 475; Rampton, 2008 ). It will get insight into the process of reorientation of human rights law through the development of key International instruments that have caused to materialise the concept of women's human rights. The strengths and weaknesses of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women will particularly be highlighted by comparing the Treaty with some of the mainstream human rights instruments. The article will focus on the recent increase in the efforts for gender mainstreaming in the various United Nations' bodies. Finally it will argue that in order for any real progress to be made in terms of eradicating the systemic barriers to gender justice and to eliminate the constructive denial of women's rights, the human rights regime must reconfigure its approaches in addressing the needs of women globally.Keywords: CEDAW Convention, Feminist approaches, Human Rights Law, Women Rights, DiscriminationTheoretic Frame work & Background KnowledgeThe article draws on the feminist insights on law/human rights law. The arguments in this discussion are, therefore, formulated within the conceptual framework of feminist legal theory. It argues that the structures of human rights law, largely due to its reliance on patriarchal foundations of liberal political philosophy, neglected the specific concerns of women for a long time (Tamale, 2008: 352; Nash, 2002, August: 3). The Convention on Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) or Women's Convention 1979 and Vienna Declaration of Human Rights 1993, are the chief women's rights instruments which formally recognised and expressed in unequivocal terms that 'women's rights are human rights'. The article evaluates whether or not the creation of separate treaty for women's rights (i.e CEDAW) has further marginalised women's issues in the International human rights arena. It notes that there are some achievements in the dejure realisation of women's rights and the issue has been lifted out of its previous secondary or 'special status' sphere, within human rights considerations, and placed in the mainstream agenda (Gottschalk, n.d.: 3). However, several structural barriers continue to exist to defacto realisation of such rights. The following section commences by offering a brief introduction of feminist legal theory, it will then present some relevant background information on the history of human rights/women rights.Feminist legal theory came about in the early 1980's 'out of a political concern for the ways in which law may be implicated in women's subordination' (Chamallas, 2003). Feminist legal theory is build up out of a combination of political, social and ethical claims. It attempts to critique and explore law by evaluating the relationships between gender, power, rights and legal system as a whole. Its primary aim is to change women's status through a reworking of law and its approach to gender. The theory agrees that (binary categories of) gender are socially constructed; gender as a category does not only signify differentiation, it does create and reinforce gender hierarchies, unequal power relationships, domination and discrimination.Upon this assumption, feminist legal theory contends that the manner in which gender has shaped the world, including through law, is clearly unjust (Knop, 2004: 16). It attempts to promote a perspective that respect marginalized voices and resist thinking in hierarchical binaries.Those Feminists who have critiqued international law maintain that international/human rights law is prejudiced against women in its very conception (Charlesworth, 1998: 785-786). The conceptual, procedural and substantive dimensions of International/human rights law have been increasingly challenged by such critics (Fellmeth, 2000: 667). …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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