Human Rights Reader 258

-It is in General Comment 28 that we find the more precise guidance of what equal rights of men and of women really mean.

-States that are party to the Convention to End all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) undertake the solemn obligation to scrutinize their national laws accordingly and to inform the population (and its women) about it; unfortunately too many sates are slow or lenient in doing so. (S. Koenig)

Human rights (HR) provide the critical guidance in identifying the underlying and structural causes of development problems which typically relate to persistent patterns of disempowerment, discrimination, exclusion and multiple HR violations. These deeper causes explain why women and other groups are left behind in the development process and why development policies must address broader HR issues rather than simply deliver a set of technical interventions that aim at improving only certain aspects of women’s problems.

I would say that a number of ‘iron laws’ apply to the disadvantaged HR situation of women. I here propose ten of them to the reader:

1. In their negotiations, women-as-claim-holders need to get rid of any vestige of resentment –an understandable attitude of women who historically have had no or insufficient power when facing those who have an excess of it; even if, for the first time, they have a chance to fight for their gender interests, resentment is not the mood in which HR work is carried out.

2. Women’s participation in politics can no longer be seen as a favor granted them by institutions still largely dominated by overwhelmingly male elites.

3. There is no way women can exercise their rights if they do not know what these are. If this is the result of an intentional stance, one has to be clear: Imposed ignorance (or ignorance tolerated) is a human rights violation! *

*: Be reminded that HR seek gender justice and gender equality, as well as the eradication of misery, of hunger and of ignorance (the three last ones disproportionately affecting women).
4. It is by gaining a HR insight –and acknowledging it– that women can tackle their social grievances and thus become controlling agents of their own destinies. Put another way, women need to express their grievances –and taking HR-related measures is the best way to successfully resolve them.

5. When violations against the human rights of women occur, we must distinguish between its symptoms (such as violence against them and/or their poverty) and its causes (such as patriarchy and the lack of a viable economic infrastructure and opportunities available to them). Only by analyzing and acting upon these causes, can the world bring about ultimate economic and social justice for all. (S. Koenig)

6. The lack of a capacity to demand remedy (in the HR sense) entrenches the weakness of women’s groups.

7. Dignity for women does not and will not come from them receiving a handout (e.g., food or contraceptives); it comes and will come from them providing and fending for themselves. (G. Kent)

8. If we take the humanitarian assistance given to displaced and/or battered women as an example, the latter treats their lives as ‘bare’ life, not as lives with their own voice and painful narrative. If women are to be addressed as dignified human beings, they must have a say to present their grievances and to decide how they ought to be treated. In short, to live in dignity, women must have the opportunity to have their voices heard and have institutionalized recourse mechanisms. (J. Edkins)

9. Stereotyped concepts of the roles of men and women come from all our school textbooks already. Equal treatment for women means that all exclusionary barriers must be removed, i.e., in good part by the elimination of the said stereotypes.

10. Women and girls are disproportionately represented in the groups we consider marginalized in society; the latter comprise: those individuals living in extreme poverty, disadvantaged adolescents and youth, women survivors of violence and abuse, out of school youth, women living with HIV, women engaged in sex work, minorities and indigenous people, women living with disabilities, refugees and internally displaced persons, women living under occupation, and the aging population.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan@phmovement.org

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Adapted from Development in Practice, 19:8, 2009; Carlos Fuentes, Adan en Eden, Alfaguara, Santillana Ediciones Generales, Buenos Aires, 2009; Z. Acevedo Diaz, La Dama de Cristal, Fondo Editorial Casa de las Americas, La Habana, 1999; OHCCHR: HR: Key to keeping the MDG promise of 2015, Aug. 2010; Albino Gomez, Despojos y Semillas, Editorial Belgrano, Buenos Aires, 1997; and  Understanding Human Rights: Manual on HR Education, W. Benedek Ed., ETC, Graz, 2006.

Postscript: Circumstances change; all the roadmaps for women are not pre-drawn. The impossible only requires just a little bit more…

• A truly women-centered approach to human rights (HR) has to depart from the principle that there are an array of ‘securities’ that are indispensable for the well-being of women.
• Providing such securities has remained unresolved.
• Poor women are simply still left-out from the access to the services that can fulfill their rights.
• No matter where, women need assured security in, at least, the areas of:
  • income,
  • access to food fuel and water,
  • education/literacy/vocational training,
  • the support they get to take care of their children and their own gender-related needs,
  • their health, housing, and sanitation needs, plus
  • HR-based legal protection, environmental and personal safety including freedom from domestic violence.
• A women-centered approach to women’s rights calls upon us to focus our work more on the underlying and structural/basic causes of neglect, abuse, ill-health, malnutrition and unnecessary preventable mortality of women and their children.
• It explicitly emphasizes the need for a new set of priorities not given enough attention in current development programs. 
• To pursue this approach, we need to start with a) an explicit activity that identifies households (HHs) with women living insecure lives with many of their rights in any of the above areas being violated; to b) then, turn to demanding a more comprehensive set of interventions that simultaneously and progressively (without discrimination!) addresses the violations identified.
• The identification of HHs with vulnerable women should be accompanied by c) the identification of proven coping mechanisms utilized by other HHs and women in getting access to the different resources and services that fulfill their rights under similar difficult local conditions.
• The challenge, then, is to d) foster the needed consciousness raising for women for them to effectively place claims in front of pertinent duty bearers, as well as to e) find interventions that support the adoption of the successful coping mechanisms by a larger proportion of at-risk women in that particular environment. This becomes the basis for selecting interventions and, most importantly, for organizing women locally.
• All this requires a bigger emphasis on social mobilization programs and on coordinating locally active agencies particularly local NGOs and grassroots civil society organizations.
• If such women’s groups do not yet exist, preliminary efforts will have to be made to organize them.
• What this will also mean is that health, nutrition, water, basic education, etc. approaches impinging on women will need de-facto integration in concrete gender-specific action plans.
• Findings of the HH survey are to be discussed in community participatory fora, and if such fora do not yet exist locally, efforts will have to be made to organize them.
• When the several rights violations are identified, plans to tackle them are discussed –at the same time.*

*: This, because we consistently fail to ask ourselves “how effective is it to continue trying to tackle one HR violation at a time..?”  For instance, we now know that health or nutrition interventions alone cannot resolve the lack of access of women to get tangible results in relation to other rights that are as crucial for their wellbeing!

• Interventions selected for action will not necessarily be new, but will be combined and focused in a way that different relevant causal levels are tackled. (The more basic/structural causes are addressed, the more one will be, in one stroke, addressing several HR violations…).
• Some interventions will only need inputs (resources) and organization (mobilization) of community members and existing women’s organizations themselves; others will require organizing public pressure to get resources from outside to achieve needed results; it is this that leads to real, lasting empowerment.
• In conclusion, if towards 2015, we are to more significantly improve survival, health and nutrition outcomes of women and their children worldwide, we have to address a number of their more crucial unfulfilled rights at the same time.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan@phmovement.org