OverviewThe area of human rights is a “limited excep-
tion” to the general absence and impact of women
from and on the substance and process of interna-
tional law (Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000,16).
The term human rights refers herein to the human
rights norms established in the international system
in and following from the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights 1948 (UDHR). The discourse of
“women’s rights are human rights” is one of several
ongoing discourses and debates provoked by a con-
sideration of women, gender, and human rights,
and indicates the relatively recent concentration on
the specific subject of women’s rights by “tradi-
tional” human rights institutions and organiza-
tions. Another is the debate on universality of rights
versus cultural relativity, and closely related to this
is the discourse of “Islamic human rights,” the
compatibility or otherwise of the “status of woman
in Islam” with the requirements of international
human rights standards. This in turn involves both
state practice, in terms of the determinations made
by Muslim majority states as to the requirements
and applications of Islamic law on matters to do
with the status and position of women, and the
debates in Muslim communities (domestically,
regionally, and internationally) as to these require-
ments. Issues of “voice,” of “authority,” and of
representation figure prominently in these debates,
linking to the discourses of postcolonialism and
feminism.
Commentators credit the efforts of women’s non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) in securing
provisions in the United Nations Charter (1945)
prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sex
and providing for equal rights of men and women,
in advance of the UDHR. Similar efforts secured
the establishment of the United Nations Commis-
sion on the Status of Women (CSW) in 1946. The
CSW has always had a majority of women dele-
gates, and maintains close links with the women’s
NGO movement. Despite the CSW’s considerable
achievements, Connors observes that on the spe-
cific subject of human rights, “its existence has,
ironically, contributed to the neglect by both the
traditional United Nations human rights frame-
work and human rights NGOs of issues of con-
cern to women” (1996, 152). For the first decades,
Human Rights
most women’s NGOs focused on the CSW rather
than the mainstream human rights mechanisms.
Women’s organizations did participate in the 1960s
in the drafting processes for the two International
Covenants, on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
which include the requirements of non-discrimina-
tion and equal rights. Nevertheless, writing in
1997, Gallagher noted “a near-unanimity amongst
women human rights activists that ‘specialization’
has become ‘marginalization’ – that women and
their concerns remain on the sidelines of United
Nations activity for the protection and promotion
of human rights” (1997, 285). One reason advanced
by commentators for this marginalization is the
“public/private divide” (contested in postcolonial
and feminist discourses) that tended to leave abuses
in the “private” sphere of the home and family out-
side the purview of state-focused international
human rights law.
A formal call for the “mainstreaming” of
women’s rights in the United Nations system was
made at the Second World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna in 1993. In the final document of
the conference, states agreed that the human rights
of women were “an inalienable, integral and indi-
visible part of human rights.” For Sullivan, the
most striking result at Vienna was that “the confer-
ence crystallized a political consensus that various
forms of violence against women should be exam-
ined within the context of human rights standards
and in conjunction with gender discrimination”
(1994, 152). The intense preparatory and lobbying
efforts of women’s rights and NGO activists world-
wide are generally credited with the achievements
at Vienna. Links between women’s rights and
human rights organizations were strengthened, and
the 1990s also saw increasing attention paid to
abuses of women’s human rights by the “tradi-
tional” international human rights NGOs. This
period also saw a preference for the term “gender”
over the use of “women.” In 1994, the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights appointed
the first Special Rapporteur on Violence against
Women, in this action mandating the first gender-
specific brief for a Special Rapporteur. In 2000, the
Human Rights Committee issued in its General
Comment 28 an analysis of the gender-specific
implications of the ICCPR, article by article. This