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Women's Rights are Human Rights
Charlotte Bunch
I have two speeches that have been struggling inside me for today: one written
before September 11th and one that keeps being rewritten since that day. Post
September 11th - living in New York City - many things are different - not only
the physical but also the political landscape has changed and is still changing
every day. There are new threats and new wars to deal with, as well as some
potentially new openings for political conversations and new directions to emerge
in terms of international institutions and human rights.
And yet, the issues underlying this crisis are all too familiar. At a meeting in NYC of some 75 feminist activists that I participated in the night that I left to come here - where the agenda was "Implications of the Current Crisis for the International Women's Movement" - we were discussing what has changed as a result of the crisis, and we kept coming back to the point that these are the same issues which women's human rights activists around the world have been struggling with over the past decade:
· growing global inequities
produced by structural adjustment and globalisation;
· the rise of various forms of religious and nationalistic fundamentalisms
that threaten progress on women's rights around the world;
· the escalation of racist and sexist violence in daily life and the
media;
· and of course the dramatic increase in wars, conflict, and terrorism
that are targeted at civilians - increasingly involving women and children.
There are ways in which the current crisis has affected how we do our work, our short-term strategies, and certainly added new concerns to the agenda, but above all, it has added a greater sense of urgency to the fundamental challenges we face.
First some specific Post-September
11th concerns/ observations:
· The polarisation of the "You're either with us or against us"
rhetoric of Bush and Bin Laden is not only threatening civil liberties in the
West - especially for people of Muslim descent - but also creating the cover
for the closing down and/ or harassment of many groups in the Third World, including
feminists in countries like Pakistan who have had their offices attacked. We
cannot let security be the cover-up for further curtailing of human rights anywhere.
Further, this polarization is impeding the ability to have critical conversations
about alternative strategies to deal with terrorism, the future of Afghanistan,
etc.
· As women who have worked to make the UN more responsive to gender and
to strengthen its human rights mechanisms, we think that it is imperative that
the UN, not the US, take the lead in responding to this crisis. If it does not,
the UN will be weakened as a consequence. There are multilateral UN initiatives
that can be taken to counter terrorism and seek to create new conditions in
Afghanistan. Options like a tribunal or trial on the terrorism in the US similar
to the Lockerbee case, using UN peace-keeping forces or even humanitarian intervention
in Afghanistan, etc.
We are trying from our side to push consideration of these ideas, but we have very limited access to this US government. We need women from around the world and especially governments in the security council and the EU to push Bush in this direction and not just compete to support him. The US needs global pressure as well as sympathy.
Making women's voices and views more visible and getting women at the table. This crisis has been a rude reminder that when it comes to issues of security and war, women/ feminists are not on the map. There are lots of women's statements and voices on the internet but not in the mainstream. October 31st is the first anniversary of the Security Council Resolution which calls for involving women in all aspects of peace making and keeping. It will be ironic if this anniversary comes without women's involvement in the biggest war crisis of the year.
This brings me back to pre-September 11th: taking stock. None of the actions I am calling on women to be involved with now would be possible if it were not for the incredible progress women have made over the past century and especially in the past 20 years.
Women's rights to citizenship: to vote and be engaged in the public world is almost universally accepted - if not fully realised -yet it came only in the last century.
Women have defined and put on the world agenda a whole string of new issues around reproductive rights, sexual rights and violence against women - creating new concepts as well as legislation that put yesterday's secrets into today's public policy disputes, from marital rape to female genital mutilation to sexual slavery, femicide, enforced heterosexuality and forced pregnancy, etc. We also have advanced enormously women's economic status, though that has been much too uneven and has been eroded in some areas with globalisation and continues to require more attention.
The recognition of women's rights as real human rights over the past decade has been central to the transformation of these issues from problems or needs to rights of every "human"/ citizen that governments have an obligation to address.
Perhaps most important has been the growth of women's movements around the globe on an unprecedented scale in the past 25 years. There have always been some brave outspoken women working for change, but today, we have a critical mass of women and some men that have been affected by feminism. This movement is both diverse - in locally based and specific contexts -from Flora Tristan in Peru to Beijing Sisters - a lesbian group in China - and globally linked in networks like Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Women in Black, DAWN (Women Developing Alternatives for a New Era) and the Women's International Coalition for Economic Justice - to name only a few. It was this both very local and global characteristic that enabled women to utilise the 1990's UN World Conferences -from Rio to Vienna, Cairo, Beijing, and Istanbul - as global public spaces where women's voices transformed global agendas and got promises from governments and the UN that will have wide-ranging impact if realised.
Women also got more forceful in the 1990's in using the UN and human rights mechanisms - which are more legally binding than World Conference documents - to demand accountability of governments - by doing things such as CEDAW shadow reports and releasing them to the media - and inviting the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to their countries to report on violations.
If we consider all that has happened around efforts to transform gender roles and gain our rights in many areas in a relatively short time - I cut a whole page of examples from the very local to the global - I think we often forget what's been gained. There is little wonder that the backlash and resistance is also very intense and comes from many quarters.
During the 90's, at the international level, an unholy alliance of the Vatican, Muslim fundamentalists, the US right wing, and occasionally others united to fight particularly against women's reproductive and sexual rights. While women have not lost the gains made in Vienna, Cairo, and Beijing, these forces have made it increasingly difficult to advance further in that arena as we saw in the prolonged battles of Cairo plus 5 and Beijing plus 5. Further, in the UN General Assembly last year and at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, other tensions - particularly over globalisation and the Middle East - have eroded the ability to make advances in this arena. The Bush administration's disdain for internationalism fed this problem.
As a consequence of all these forces, many women's human rights advocates have been looking to see where advances can best be made at this moment internationally and some are moving more toward working with regional bodies and/or specialized agencies such as WHO or UNHCR and UNFPA. Others have focused on national level implementation of the promises already made in previous documents and generally the sense is that we must find more ways to ground these rights and promises in policy and daily life... even as women face a growing backlash or reluctance to put resources into these issues in many places. All of these were challenges women's human rights faced pre-September 11th.
But this crisis has highlighted for me some of the biggest challenges we were already trying to grapple with in seeking to realise the promise of womens' human rights and make them even more urgent. They have many dimensions and names but center on the questions of globalisation, fundamentalism, racism, cultural diversity and the universality of human rights. Globalisation has both positive and negative effects on women and in my view is already a reality, not a debate. But if the negative effects of it on vast numbers of people and the glaring global inequities that it has produced are not seriously addressed, we are in trouble. The alienations that many feel in a globalised world are feeding many forms of fundamentalism - not just Islamic terrorism.
It was home-grown alienated Christian fundamentalists that bombed a federal building full of people in Oklahoma. This is much more than a question of Islam and modernity. All fundamentalisms seem to share the need to control women as symbols of their identity and culture.
In 1995, in Beijing, I said that women must help create another way to go forward that does not just leave us with rampant greedy capitalist development or returning to patriarchal traditions and fundamentalism as the only options. lt is even more urgent today as the world polarises further around these two. The struggle to find ways to realise social and economic rights and to hold the forces of globalisation accountable to human rights standards can be one of the contributions of human rights activism to this debate and women need to attend to this more and to ensure that work on it is gendered.
At the World Conference Against Racism in Durban women worked for an intersectional approach to understanding how race and gender and other factors affect one another in organising for women's human rights. We noted that the false dichotomy created by the debate between universality of human rights and cultural diversity is particularly damaging to the rights of non-Western women of colour.
But universality should mean that all human beings - in all our diversity - are entitled to the full enjoyment of all human rights. Therefore, women have a universal right to the enjoyment of all human rights and differences in the contexts of their lives should not diminish this entitlement.
However, universality of rights does not mean that all women's (or men's) experiences, strategies or choices in affirming their human rights are or need to be identical. lndeed the very success of the 'women's rights are human rights movement' was to articulate how differences - gender and sex differences in that case - must be seen and taken into account in order to realise women's equal and universal claim to human rights.
Similarly, if human rights are to be universal in practice, more diverse forms of human rights abuses must be described from a non-Western perspective. Only as rights are defined in terms of the full diversity and differences in people's experiences, can remedies be shaped that respond to different factors that deny diverse women and men the full exercise of their rights.
Difference should not be seen as contradictory to universal. Rather there is a creative tension between the universal principles of human rights and the diverse particulars which must be taken into account to realise those rights for all.
There is more I should say... It's a big agenda. But women have never been better positioned to try to work across many lines of division to shape new alternatives.
As Anika Rahman, a South Asian Muslim-American feminist said at the meeting - the work we do for women's rights and in support of the human rights of all is the answer to September 11th. But... can we do it fast enough to make the differences needed before the patriarchal face-off closes down the global space and the possibilities that women and others are trying to create for a better world? We can only hope and try.
Presentation by Professor
Charlotte Bunch at "Terre Des Femmes International Congress on Women's
Human Rights", Berlin, Germany, October 12, 2001.
Professor Charlotte Bunch is a leading USA feminist. She is the
Executive Director Centre for Women's Global Leadership Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey, Douglas College.
Phone: 732-932-8782 or Fax: 732-932-1180,
E-mail: cwgl@igc.org
Website: www.cwgl.rutgers.edu