Why are human rights so difficult to realise? Looking specifically at women rights

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Why are human rights so difficult to realise? Looking specifically at women rights
Feminist critiques of human rights seek to disassemble hierarchies which are present in the human right regime. There have been various documents and treaties written across the decades in regard to human rights, the current Universal Deceleration of Human Rights was produced in 1948, it set out 30 crucial rights drafted by representatives with various legal and cultural backgrounds across the world. The deceleration aim is to endeavour by instructing and training to promote respect in regard to rights and freedoms and by dynamic measures, national and global, to verify their universal and viable recognition and observance, both among the member state themselves and among people of territories under their jurisdiction. The UN from its initiation, functioned towards the acknowledgement of women’s human rights. The charter of the UN declares “…faith in fundamental rights, in dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women” and stipulates that all people, irrespective of their sex, shall enjoy human rights”. The UDHR does not specifically address women’s rights but rather it briefly addresses the idea of sexual equality in Article 2: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Those who insisted on the inclusion of “sex” in Article 2 hoped that it would address the inequality of women by putting them on an “equal footing” with men (Johnson 1998:61).By critiquing the basic assumptions of human rights as they were formulated in 1945–8, feminists have uncovered that these definitions are inadequate, that men and women have distinctive associations with the state, and that rights are not fixed and permanent. In addition to this another document part of contemporary society the Convention on the elimination of discrimination against women(CEDAW) signed in 1980 by sixty-four countries, has as its principal goals the protection and promotion of women’s rights and the elimination of discrimination against women. Sally Merry highlights that “CEDAW is like law without sanction” she suggests that it operates in a way where it does important cultural work and does not have power to punish. It has created principles for states in which they can take responsibility for gender equality and implement it within countries under scrutiny. Despite CEDAW being implemented within organisations and countries David Rosenblum contends that the convention has neglected to make gender equality because the scope remains restricted to women. According to him CEDAWS attention on women cherishes a comprehension of sex as binary of a man/woman with a perpetrator/victim relationship, rather than concentrating on ‘women’ as a major aspect of a parallel. CEDAW should look to limit the categories themselves and should focus on the category of “women” reifies instead of undermine gender disparities. He argues that CEDAW should instead focus on the category of discrimination women face — sex (or gender) discrimination — rather than establishing women as its sole beneficiaries. By moving toward a focus on the broad category of discrimination, CEDAW would reflect the complexity of sex discrimination in which perpetrators and victims are not reduced to male and female. This binary distorts the reality of sex identity and portrays an inaccurate picture of sex discrimination. Men and other sexes should be central, along with women, to any rectification of sex discrimination. Using a category of discrimination, rather than the identitarian category of “women,” is imperative for the future of this crucial international treaty.

The role of culture can play a huge part when discussing human rights as they rather can be seen historically, socially and economically contingent. We could critique the part culture plays within the human rights field in regard to women. According to Grant the private and public distinction they have been embedded within the liberal thought has had a huge impact over time (Grant 1991:12–13). As a result of this Freidman highlights that “human rights law was gendered male: it protected a male subject, who experienced violations primarily directed at men, in largely male spaces” (Friedman 2006:480–1). Feminists also critique liberal rights as being universal as Kate Nash says, ‘analysis of the history of liberalism shows how individual rights were conferred on male heads of house hold, dependent on the labour of women in the private sphere within which those rights did not apply’ (Nash, 2002: 415). As the public sphere is associated with masculinity and throughout history men have been seen as citizens “the duties and activities of citizenship have strongly depended on manliness” (Voet 1998:7). The association of the feminine with the private sphere has historically identified and still continues to identify women as non-citizens, and, hence, as less than fully autonomous beings. For example, laws governing the nationality of children in countries such as Kenya, which deem that the citizenship of children is determined by the father’s citizenship (and not the mother’s), reinforce the concept of rights as male. The association of the feminine with the private sphere identifies women as non-citizens, and hence, as less than fully autonomous beings unable to make claims to rights (Romany 1994).A second, interrelated issue is how economic globalization depends on a gendered sexual division of labor. The international sexual division of labor is predicated on the public–private split in which men’s work is considered to be “human” or real work, and women’s work is determined by their “nature” (Mies 1999:46). Work is defined as a public masculine activity and women’s work (or non-work) is defined as a private sphere activity. However, women’s work in the private sphere is extremely important to the functioning of the capitalist system, yet despite this important role, women are undervalued in both the public and private spheres because of their identification as housewives, rather than as “workers” (Mies 1999:116). The sexual division of labor and its resulting sexism also helps maintain capitalism as system (Wichterich 2000; Campillo 2003). This has important consequences for women, because even when they do work outside the home they are usually cast in unequal terms. The implication is that capitalism necessarily depends on a certain amount of low-wage and unpaid labor to keep it functioning (Peterson 2003), as the “labor input in non-wage work ‘compensates’ the lowness of the wage-income and therefore in fact represents an indirect subsidy to the employers of wage laborers in those households” (Wallerstein 1988:8). The identification of women with the private sphere helps keep capitalism’s costs low and at the same time provides a justification for this strategy.

A central, well-known tension is between universal and cultural relativist positions on human rights. The universal position decrees human rights as inalienable and held by all members of the “human family,” whereas the cultural relativist position argues that “members of one society may not legitimately condemn the practices of societies with different traditions, denying that there can be valid external critiques of culturally-based practices and that no legitimate cross-cultural standards for the evaluating the treatment of rights exist” (Mayer 1995:176). Many justifications for the denial of women’s human rights are framed in cultural relativist terms, and often positioned as an anti-Western, anti-imperialist response.
This paradoxical position frequently results in conflict between women’s individual rights and group cultural rights. Women may agree with the right of their cultural group to practice their culture, while at the same time disagreeing with how these cultural practices affect their personal autonomy and agency. Winter (2006:385) notes that cultural relativist arguments are disproportionately deployed on the question of women’s rights, in that “those articles in UN treaties in favor of religious and cultural rights and the elimination of race discrimination do not appear to be as problematically ‘Western’ as those which defend women’s rights.”

Many human rights indicators (though not all) use male experience as the norm, and the achievement of women’s human rights is seen as relative to the rights that men have already achieved. Thus, the typical human rights data show that women are discriminated against in so far as they have not achieved the same rights as men, despite the efforts put forth by many feminists to expand and reframe notions of rights that take into account the difference of women’s and men’s lived realities. Barriteau (2006), in her study of the Commonwealth Caribbean, argues that composite human rights indicators, such as the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), place too much emphasis on the material relations of power (and empowerment) to the exclusion of the social and ideological relations of power. Thus, the high score of the Commonwealth Caribbean countries on both the GDI and GEM masks the daily realities of gender based oppression in many women’s lives. Because of this, it looks as if women’s human rights have been achieved, and therefore it is very difficult to mount a critical challenge against the indicators. Many feminists are concerned that this type of outcome creates “an impression that women no longer require assistance and that men are now much more needy beneficiaries” and as a result, there will be a “re-masculinization” of both the development and human rights discourses (McIlwaine and Datta 2003:375).

Attempts have been made to rectify these inequalities internationally through the 1979 UN Women’s Convention, which ‘contains guarantees of equality and freedom from discrimination by the state and by private actors in all areas of public and private life’ and is monitored by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (Griffiths, 2001: 104). Importantly, however, discussions of violence against women with respect to human rights in contemporary society typically call for reforms of cultural practices in “traditional” societies such as ‘dowry-deaths, son-preference, female infanticide, honour- killings, and female genital mutilation’– ignoring inequalities of power in the west – and require states to change cultural practises that subordinate women (Merry, 2001: 37). For example, the 1992 Declaration says that ‘states should condemn violence against women, and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religion or other consideration to avoid their obligation with respect to its elimination’ (Merry, 2001: 37). This is problematic because it see’s culture as this traditional ‘object’; culture refers to the experience of the ‘other’. Instead, it is important to understand that ‘the principles that we may use for judging behaviour or anything else are relative to the culture in which we are raised’ (Brennan, 1989: 370). Thus, what is required – not just for the protection of women but of all groups represented by human rights – according to Griffiths, is a perspective on the relationship between culture, rights and law that focuses on the ‘multiple configurations of meanings representing a network of perspectives that emerged from the situated contexts in which people live’ (2001: 102).

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