International human rights concepts have evolved around two groupings of human rights as conceived by United Nations instruments. The six core human rights treaties are: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICCPR, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ICESCR both ratified in 1966 and both came into force 1976; the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment CAT ratified in 1984 and into force in 1987; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women CEDAW ratified in 1980 and came into force in 1981; the Convention on the Eliminations of All Forms of Racial Discrimination CERD ratified in 1965 and came into force in 1969; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child CRC ratified on 1984 and came into force on 1987. The CEDAW treaty entered into force faster than any other human rights treaty had at that time.

Let’s identify what some of the basic human rights are as defined by the UN instruments. Civil rights are rights such as freedom of speech; freedom to assemble; freedom to organize; the right of the person to demand protection from the state in the face of harm by others; the right to life; the right to be free from servitude; freedom of movement about one’s country; equality before the courts; the right to personhood before the law; freedom of and freedom from religion; the right to opinions; the right to marry or not; the right to a nationality; the equal right to public services. Political rights are rights such as the right to vote; the right to organize political parties; the right to demonstrate against or for a political issue; the right to have access to elected officials; the right to protection from the repressive state. Social and cultural rights are rights such as the right to a cultural heritage; the right to a native language; the right to personal development; the right to a free primary school education; equal accessibility to higher education; the right to benefit from scientific developments. Economic rights are the right to employment; the right to healthcare; the right to development; the right to fair wages with equal pay for equal work; the right to decent living conditions; to safe working conditions; to holidays; to leisure time; to rest; the right to form trade unions; the right to strike; the right to social security; social insurance; protection to the family; paid maternity leave; the right to be free from hunger; the right to food security. It is important to remember that rights have fluidity, they intermingle, they cross over one into the other.

Originally, in 1945 when nations were meeting to form the UN, it was intended that a single treaty would address social, economic, civil, and political rights. However, two separate treaties (ICCPR & ICESR) were eventually developed, because:

• civil and political rights were considered to be enforceable, or justiciable by the state, while economic, social and cultural rights were not
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• civil and political rights were thought to be immediately applicable, while social and economic rights could only be implemented progressively
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• generally speaking, civil and political rights were considered to be rights of the individual ‘against’ the State, that is, against unlawful and unjust action of the State, while social and economic rights were rights that the State would have to take positive action to promote
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• and, importantly, an underlying reason for some western nations to sign only the civil and political rights convention was that economic rights were considered to be the responsibility of the state to the individual and the US particularly, which was ideologically conservative concerning economic responsibilities toward citizens due to its strong capitalist heritage, would not sign a convention requiring it to be accountable to the people for their economic well-being. Additionally, some western imperialist nations, the US above all, refused to allow its citizens cultural rights because then it might come under obligation to rectify the harm it had perpetrated on African-Americans as a result of its institutionalized and legal slavery and racism, its treatment of Oriental-Americans during WWII, and its continued annihilation of the Native American populations since the first English settlers in the 16th century. The industrialized nations of the west are inclined toward economic development of their economies and of the few, rather than the many, not to the development of the masses of individuals nor to the development of discreet social or ethnic groups. This stance against economic rights has had devastating consequences on women’s development aid from the U.S. to countries around the world and in the positions it takes regarding aid and development at the UN.
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Thus, an ideological split occurred between the west and the east. At that time the Soviet Union accepted the idea of civil and political rights for its people but declined to ratify the treaty and chose instead to ratify the economic, social, and cultural rights.

Important characteristics of human rights are that they are said to be inherent, inalienable, and universal. They are inherent in that they belong to everyone because of their humanity. They are inalienable in that people cannot give them up or be deprived of them by governments. They are universal in that they apply regardless of distinctions such as race, sex, language, religion, etc. Human rights are also called non-derogable, that is they are essential to human beings; they are indivisible and interrelated. In other words, no right is superior to another and different rights should not be considered in isolation, since the enjoyment of one will often depend on the realization of another.

One weakness, indeed a serious drawback that is characteristic of United Nations human rights treaties is that the UN has no implementation power on the states. The UN can advise, hope, wish, suggest, educate, implore, even sometimes withhold funding, but it cannot impose any human rights obligations on any nation regardless of whether it has ratified a treaty or not. The UN’s police force is a peacekeeping force and these all serve at the mercy of the supplying nations, which also limits its enforcement capabilities. The UN claims that its power lies in naming and shaming nations that fall short of their obligations when reviewing their periodic reports; in its reputation; and in the power of the NGOs. Nations of the world have intentionally created the UN as a weakly endowed body. Another weakness of human rights concepts as conceived by the United Nations instruments is that they refer to actions committed by and hold responsible nation states or individuals acting for nation states, not individuals acting on their own authority. Thus, for example, rape of women in war, which was only acknowledged as a crime against humanity in 1993 during the International Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, and which is seen by men as a primary means for them to control women, as well as men through women’s bodies, is now a human rights violation while a single man or even a gang of men acting on their own raping a woman is not viewed by international law as a human rights violation even though it is the same act and often perpetrated for the same reasons. [1] This approach to human rights focuses on state-sponsored violations such as illegal detention or torture by security forces. Many violations of women’s human rights occur in private contexts, that is within the home and the home is considered, both legally and socially in many nations still, to belong to the man. In many countries he is legally the “lord of the manor”, but still socially as well in most patriarchal cultures. All of these “individual” actors are rendered invisible to UN concepts of human rights and to the human rights instruments. In addition, the focus on state-sponsored human rights violations makes it almost impossible to address issues of social exclusion and discrimination as human rights concerns. This concept of human rights fosters minimalist and legalistic interpretations of human rights protection.

For women’s human rights the biggest hindrance has been male domination and patriarchal ideology, both of which were instituted into the UN right from the beginning. Thus, women’s human rights were considered private matters and a human rights stepchild. Struggling against entrenched androcentrisms at institutional levels has been the additional task that women human rights defenders face. When women’s human rights have been afforded some recognition, it has been within traditional frameworks, frameworks that are wholly inadequate to address women and girls as these have all been conceived and written with masculinist perspectives. Also, the complaint is often made by feminists that current human rights instruments emerge and respond to concepts and acts of individualism rather than concepts of community or social groups.

In patriarchal societies male citizens are always granted rights that female citizens almost always will not have unless and until there is a feminist revolution with enough power to compel the social and legal structures away from patriarchy. Typically these rights have been: land rights and personal property rights; agriculture rights; citizenship rights; labor rights; reproductive rights; sexual rights; rights to one’s children; voting rights; rights to assemble and speak in public; rights to bodily safety and integrity; education rights; political voice, and many others. In many countries these rights and others have finally been achieved to differing degrees by and for women, almost all having been acquired within the past 150 years, many more in just the past few decades or even in the case of some countries such as Kuwait where women obtained the right to vote in political elections in 2005. In patriarchal times (according to archaeologists the past 5000-6000 years for most of the globe), [2] where nations and other legally recognized structures have granted rights it has always been that men, and often only particular classes of men, but never women generally or even particular women, have been granted rights. Women have always had to either go without or struggle relentlessly decade after decade in order to win their rights, one at a time and piecemeal.

Statistics give us some very clear evidence of the harm done to women as a result of their lack of human rights:

-70% of the people living in poverty worldwide are women.

-About 100 million widows and their children are ostracized, exploited, and harassed by the societies they live in because widows are seen in patriarchal societies to occupy a liminal status because they are of no use to men since they will not be producing more children and they are a financial burden to relatives, particularly in Hindu and Moslem cultures.

- Abortion is the third cause of maternal mortality in Colombia as a result of the lack of women’s right to bodily integrity and the Catholic Church’s campaigns against women’s autonomy.

- A woman dies in Afghanistan every 27 minutes from complications related to pregnancy as a result of a lack of her reproductive rights. 1 out of every 8 women in Afghanistan die during pregnancy or while giving birth. The only country where that situation is worse is Niger, where 1 in every 7 women die during pregnancy or childbirth.

- At least 255 women died in honour-related killings in Kurdistan in the first six months of 2007 because women do not have the right to sexual freedom and the right not to marry, all this based on religious tenets.

- In 2007, at least 600 women and girls in Kurdistan killed themselves, mostly by burning themselves, or by drowning or shooting themselves to avoid marriage or murder by their relatives. 2,500 women have died from honor crimes or suicide between 1991 and 2007 in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces.

-About 20 million women each year are forced to undergo unsafe abortions.

-Only about 50% of all induced abortions are legal, including most abortions in developed countries. Nearly all abortions in Africa and Latin America are unsafe, as are two-thirds of abortions in most of Asia. Approximately 5 million women are admitted to hospital for treatment of unsafe abortions each year.

- Early pregnancy is the number one killer of adolescent girls worldwide.

-Female genital mutilation has been performed on 100-140 million women/girls alive today and there are 3 million more each year, a practice that is both cultural and religious.

- In the 2004 tsunami 3 times as many women as men died because of the cultural taboos against women learning to swim.

- Up to 70 percent of registered cases of violence against women in Afghanistan have their origins in early marriages, this to protect the virginity of girls while they are still unmarried and to provide for dowry payments to male heads of households.

-Currently 75% of all the rape cases that Doctors Without Borders deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo. Darfur is a distant second. 98% of all rapes committed in the world

are against women and girls.

-Of the about one million manual scavengers in India, all of whom are Dalits, 95%are women because women Dalits are considered to have even less right to their human rights than male Dalits, even by Dalit men.

-The practice of devadasi is committed against young Dalit girls when they are ceremonially dedicated or married to a deity or temple. These girls are never able to leave the temple. They are prostituted to the upper-caste males, men and boys, and eventually auctioned into brothels. It is never boys who are married to the deities and forced into prostitution in this way.

- In Lebanon, where religious tribunals rule on marriage, Sunni and Shiite women receive one-third and men two-thirds of an inheritance and when divorcing.

-Twice as many women as men worldwide cannot read or write.

-Women produce half the world’s food but own only 1% of the world’s land.

-The number of women in rural areas living in poverty has increased 50% in the last twenty years compared to a 3% increase among men.

-Women rarely receive more than 70% of the pay men receive for comparable work.

I know this sounds like an endless list and it is.

The phrase and concept “women’s rights are human rights” came into human rights language in 1993 when feminist organizations around the world were organizing for the Vienna Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights, which took place just prior to and in conjunction with the UN Conference on Human Rights. The Vienna Tribunal was organized in order to gather testimony from women and girls around the world on violence against women (VAW) and to insist before the Conference on Human Rights and the world that they recognize that women’s rights are human rights but that women’s rights have not been considered human rights. The particular issue of VAW, in its many and varied forms, was addressed because it is believed by many feminists to be the number one cause of women’s continual oppression around the world and VAW perpetrated by men is often prescribed in [patriarchal] religious texts as a male right. The Vienna Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights was a landmark event and greatly helped to focus the UN and women’s rights organizations on women’s rights as human rights. The phrase became even more institutionalized and popularly recognized when Hillary Clinton used the phrase at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. To insist that women deserve human rights insists that women are human beings too, a claim that has been denied legally and socially for almost all of patriarchal time and place. It may sound obvious to many of you that women are human beings, indeed I sincerely hope that it does. However, women in most of the world are still not recognized by many men and androcentric society as fully human. To be human means to have the right to human dignity, to the respect due to a human being, to have human integrity, to be legally recognized as a full member of the human species and not naturally a drudge, a slave, a servant, a 2/3 or a 3/5 person. Women have been denied full human status for about 5000-6000 years under patriarchal rule and it has not been until the begetting of the feminist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that women have been in any concerted position to claim their human rights as women and as human beings. The fundamental difference and benefit that apply from working within a human rights framework is the fact that you are starting from a position of entitlement – that you are not begging or calling upon someone’s benevolence, that you are demanding something that you are entitled to by virtue of being a human being. And yet today, many countries do not recognize women’s rights but do recognize human rights, therefore, to recognize what is true, that women’s rights are human rights is elemental and by using the human rights framework women in many countries have been able to transcend national boundaries.

Human rights violations against women take very gendered forms, so not only have women been denied their human rights but they have also been subject to the denial of their rights using misogynistic means. Usually, when the violation is physically violent it involves sexual violence, notably rape. This is because the common patriarchal practice has been to commit crimes against women that humiliate them most, and sex is the vehicle in patriarchal cultures that is seen to do this. Sexual crimes against women render them most vulnerable to social ostracism, create women as social outcasts and non-transferable from father to husband, and are so stigmatizing that women are rejected from legitimate job markets and relegated into sex markets.

The human rights instrument that was written specifically for women and girls and which is dedicated to address women’s lack of human rights is the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Violence against Women, CEDAW. Others that are also being used are the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, CERD; the Convention against Torture, CAT; Convention on the Rights of the Child, CRC.

CEDAW has been signed by 185 countries. The Optional Protocol to CEDAW includes, which is potentially very important, a procedure through which individual women or groups can denounce national violations of CEDAW directly to the CEDAW Committee. CEDAW is known as the Women’s Rights Convention or the Women’s Bill of Rights and was adopted by the General Assembly in 1981. CEDAW, for all its attempts to strengthen women’s status and lessen women’s oppression, has been signed with the most RUDs (reservations, understandings, and declarations) of any convention and this testifies to the desire of states parties, and to many men, to maintain women and girls in subordinate status to men and boys.

DEVAW, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women was adopted by the General Assembly in 1993 as an addendum to CEDAW. This non-binding instrument was necessary because CEDAW, reflecting the lack of concern with violence against women at the time it was written, does not mention violence against women, something that many women see as a major shortfall of the treaty. However, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the CEDAW Committee, has in recent years begun to recognize that violence against women is an institutionalized form of discrimination against women and now sees some responsibility to women to address violence against them. DEVAW identifies violence against women in three spheres: the family; the community; and the state. Traditionally, in most patriarchal societies, male violence against women is considered a private matter, something that a husband or father has a right to, and even when the violence is public and perpetrated by unknown men it is still considered a private matter for the family to work out or the woman to just forget about, not a concern of official entities such as police, schools, governments. Fifteen years of struggle using DEVAW to make violence against women and girls a global concern is resulting in some movement by official entities but at the same time violence against women and girls is increasing as new waves of imperialism, capitalism, and fundamental religious surges along with severe backlash against women/girls occur all over the world.

Women-specific bodies at the UN are: UNIFEM which was created in 1976 and then called the Voluntary Fund but renamed UNIFEM, the UN Development Fund for Women in 1984. Its concern is primarily with women’s economic development. UNIFEM is extremely under-funded with a budget of only about 30 million dollars annually. UNIFEM also works on violence against women issues, peace and security issues for women, and women’s economic justice. INSTRAW, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women conducts research and trainings on gender and development. Both UNIFEM and INSTRAW came out of the 1975 Mexico City World Conference on Women. OSAGI, the Office of the Special Advisor to the Secretary General on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women came out of the Beijing World Conference on Women. OSAGI advises the Secretary General and attempts to help improve the status of women within the UN. The CSW, the Commission on the Status of Women was created in1946. The CSW has met annually since 1987 (every two years before that) and is tasked with, amongst other things, monitoring implementation of the outcomes of the UN conferences on women which were held in Mexico City 1975; Copenhagen 1980; Nairobi 1985; and Beijing 1995. The Commission on the Status of Women is the major on-going annual meeting at the UN for women, and women worldwide attend each year as NGO participants with many side events to the official UN CSW meetings. DAW, the Division for the Advancement of Women is the entity that services the CSW and conducts research, writes reports, and develops policy regarding women’s needs worldwide, provides assistance to the CEDAW Committee, and works to implement the UN mandated gender mainstreaming. However, servicing the CEDAW Committee was transferred in 2007 from the DAW to the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.

A global effort is being conducted by 260 feminist organizations from all over the world to reform the gender architecture of the UN. Women’s organizations from over 85 countries are involved in this and extensive reforms are called for in order to fulfill the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promise of equality for women and girls. This effort grew out of recommendations from the High Level Panel on System Wide Coherence convened by Kofi Anan in 2006 and its suggestions for new gender architecture were endorsed by him. Some of these demands are:

-Significant and sustained funding of $500 million to $1 billion for the first year for a new women’s entity in the UN with continued funding to this degree in all subsequent years

-Under-secretary general status for the new women’s entity

-Meaningful and ongoing civil society participation (particularly of women’s groups) by NGOs and other women’s organizations.

-Gender mainstreaming in all UN offices and programs. Extensive field presences and resources dedicated to efforts for women. Both women-specific bodies and gender mainstreaming into all UN activities are needed to ensure women’s full human rights activities within the UN.

This initiative is of major importance to women and girls worldwide as it would have tremendous influence on UN policies and budgetary allowances. Currently, there appears to be no real leadership on this coming from Ban Ki Moon. [3]

These are the formal human rights mechanisms that women have at their disposal and they are all flawed instruments due, in part, to a lack of political will. Women human rights defenders work unceasingly to try to better the conditions of women and girls and are elated when we make official breakthroughs such as the creation of these tools but what happens repeatedly is that there will be no, or at best little, money to implement them, a lack of political will which assures that nothing or very little will change, and that women and girls will continue to have to struggle in the conditions that exist for them and to fight another day for effective measures. While some things are accomplished daily, the efforts needed to ensure human rights for female human beings are massive and continue to present obstacles.

Speech delivered by Patricia Willis of the AHA Feminist Caucus at the 2008 Congress workshop on Women's Rights are Human Rights.

Notes

1 See Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights, published by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership 1994.
2 Gerda Lerna’s The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986 and also her The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, 1993, both Oxford University Press are amongst the most clarifying and heavily researched on this topic.
3 See Gender Equity Architecture Reform Campaign, GEAR Campaign for UN gender reform machinery at WEDO, the Women’s Environment and Development Org www.wedo.org.