Women’s Rights As Human Rights: Local And Global Perspectives

ALO DUTT

B.A.LL.B, IV Yr

Abstract

“A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is
done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong its weapons”

CHEYENNE INDIAN SAYING

The issue of violence against women as a women’s human rights issue has a particular
importance because it is an issue that emerged very much from the work of women at the
local, grass roots level all over the world. This issue was on no one’s agenda in 1975, despite
the fact that the international women’s year and the first decade for women had been
declared. This issue wasn’t even mentioned in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all
Forms of Discrimination against Women. It was an issue that no government addressed in its
policies. Indeed, the issue has really emerged in the past twenty years because of the efforts
of local women – women who were seeking to end violence in all its manifestations – who
worked to put the issue of violence against women on the international human rights agenda.

Why women’s human rights particularly? Why bother with adding the concept of human
rights to women’s rights, "Aren’t `women’s rights’ enough? Why do you need `women’s
human rights’ as well?" For us this is an important question. What it emphasises is that by
claiming women’s rights as women’s human rights, we have taken another step in the process
of establishing what women’s fundamental rights to humanity are. After all, "human rights"
is the term that today most expresses the effort across national lines to come to some
agreement about basic ethical visions and principles of what it means to be human, of what it
means to preserve human dignity and to defend and promote the right to citizenship.

A woman’s freedom depends on many interrelated factors – adequate shelter, food, economic
independence, physical and mental integrity, well-being and safety, social and political
agency. And it depends on other far less tangible things too, such as creative and imaginative
expression, sexual and emotional intimacy, friendship, love. To be free, we need to be able to
make rational, informed decisions about the shape and meaning of our lives, and so long as
we do not have the power of self-determination, we do not enjoy the right to liberty to which
all human beings are entitled. There can be no liberty for a woman who is not free to say "I
make decisions for myself about my reproductive body. I decide whether or not I will have
children, how many, and when." There is no liberty, and often no safety and security, for a
woman who is not guaranteed reproductive self-determination and health as her fundamental
human right. There can be no real freedom where there is social, cultural and political
invisibility, self-censorship, fear, homophobia and discrimination. So, our human rights are
about what happens to us, as people, as women, what we can achieve, how we can not only
survive, but flourish in freedom in every aspect of ourselves and our lives.