these women and girls. Particularly their right to an adequate standard of living is heavily impacted by the absence or limited access to social protection, social services, including health care and decent work. The French NHRI has conducted several studies on the effectiveness of human rights for women and girls living in the French overseas territories, dealing amongst other issues with access to justice, reproductive rights and access to education. Even when the state does provide for measures designed to uphold human rights, e.g. by ensuring access to social security, these measures may in some instances prove to be less effective for persons living in rural areas and especially for women and girls. For example, the NHRI of India regularly visits remote areas of the country in order to monitor the implementation of government programs which are designed to provide access to food grains, health care, education, water and sanitation facilities. Likewise, the NHRI of Bangladesh monitors the application of social safety net programs designed to uphold the rights of women living in rural areas, while the NHRI of Colombia reports that it specifically monitors the implementation of a 2002 Law providing for the equal participation of rural women in the Municipal Council for Rural Development and the Regional Planning Councils. Finally, many participating NHRIs affirm that their approach is considerate of everyone’s rights, including those of women and girls in rural areas. As such, programs aimed at improving the situation of women generally or the situation of persons – male or female – living in rural areas can have a positive impact on rural women’s rights15. In this vein, the NHRI of Northern Ireland reports that rural women and girls in Northern Ireland have many shared issues with urban women and that their recommendations to government departments or other public authorities generally apply to both women in rural as well as urban areas. 2.2 UNDERSTANDING RURALITY Through the explicit provision of the rights of women in rural areas, CEDAW acknowledges the existence of inequalities due to geographical location16: “It implicitly recognizes variations in access to services based on geography, suggesting that rural populations are often underserved in comparison to their urban counterparts.”17 However, while rural living generally puts women in a position of greater vulnerability, especially in terms of socio-economic disadvantage and access to justice, the experiences of women in rural areas may vary widely from one place to another. In other words, rurality does not define these women; it is not a characteristic they embody. Rather, it is a circumstance that may render the exercise of their fundamental human rights more difficult18. One of the key objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is that the targets fixed therein should be met for everyone, everywhere and that this requires reaching out to those who are farthest behind. It is captured in the “Leave no one behind” motto which headlines the Agenda. Understanding the barriers rurality creates for women and girls and developing strategies for change thus requires reaching out to rural and remote regions of the country. This can, for example, be seen in the work and the slogan of the NHRI of Nepal (“Human Rights House to House: A basis of Peace and Development”), which has put more focus on the protection and promotion of human rights in rural areas and especially on the rights of women and girls living in these areas. 15 As such, many of the initiatives, programs and campaigns mentioned in NHRIs responses have not found their way into this report because they did not specifically target women and girls in rural areas. However, this should in no way be understood as diminishing the importance and the positive effects of these activities, including on the rights of women and girls living in rural areas. 16 Or “spatial inequalities” as Lisa R. Pruitt puts it in her article “Deconstructing CEDAW’s Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference” (2011) 17 William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 347, p. 358. 17 Ibid, p. 359. 18 This report therefore does not use the term “rural women” as this may suggest that women in rural areas are in principle different from women in urban areas. Instead we chose the designation “women and girls in rural areas” or “women and girls living in rural areas”. 5