Promoting and Protecting the Human Rights of Women and Girls A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions • Discrimination against women and other violations of their rights – in areas such as family law, nationality, property, health, bodily integrity, movement and expression – have often been justified by Governments on the basis of culture, religion or ethnicity. This approach has helped to obscure violations committed against women, to perpetuate an ideological resistance to the notion of women’s human rights and to inhibit a unified response from the international community. • For much of its history, the international human rights system has dealt with women as a “special” category, occasionally identifying areas where women’s interests are particularly affected but not integrating women into mainstream human rights activities and concerns. The situation has been somewhat different for girls, where the category of “children’s rights” has been relatively more open to recognizing the distinct needs and vulnerabilities of girls. However, within the broader human rights system, there has been a marginalization of the rights of girls as well as women. 1.3. PROGRESS AND ACHIEVEMENTS IN WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS During the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985), women from all parts of the world joined forces to improve the status of women. A series of world conferences were held at which strategies for improving the situation of women and girls were developed. Towards the end of that period and into the 1990s, women began to use the human rights framework as a way to voice their concerns and describe violations against them, as well as to give shape and substance to the changes that were needed. The incorporation of women’s perspectives and lives into human rights standards and practice forces recognition of the dismal failure of countries worldwide to accord women the human dignity and respect that they deserve simply as human beings. A woman’s human rights framework equips women with a way to define, analyse and articulate their experiences of violence, degradation and marginality. Finally, and very importantly, the idea of women’s human rights provides a common framework for developing a vast array of visions and concrete strategies for change.15 The shortcomings of the human rights system with respect to the concerns of women were not publicly acknowledged until a worldwide global campaign for women’s human rights forced the issue on to the agenda of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights (the Vienna Conference). For the first time ever, the international community openly accepted that the body of international laws and mechanisms established to promote and protect human rights had not properly taken into account the concerns of over half the world’s population. In the final document of the Vienna Conference, States formally recognized the human rights of women and girls to be “an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights”.16 They further demanded that the “equal status of women and the human rights of women … be integrated into the mainstream of United Nations system-wide activity” and “form an integral part of the United Nations human rights activities”.17 These calls were repeated in stronger terms and in greater detail at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Human rights are women’s rights ... And women’s rights are human rights. … As long as discrimination and inequities remain so commonplace around the world – as long as girls and women are valued less, fed less, fed last, overworked, underpaid, not schooled and subjected to violence in and out of their homes – the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world will not be realized.18 4 15 C. Bunch and S. Frost; “Women’s Human Rights: An Introduction” in Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Women; 2000;, p. 1. 16 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action; part I, para. 18. 17 Ibid; part II, para. 37 and part I, para. 18. 18 Speech by Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Fourth World Conference on Women; Beijing, China; 1995.