Women's Human Rights and Problems

Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject

deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights for

no other reason than that they are women.

Women's Human Rights

- Introduction

Millions of women around the world suffer abuses of their equal rights to own, inherit, manage, and dispose of property. These violations are degrading, discriminatory, and sometimes deadly. After their property rights are violated, many women end up impoverished, struggling to meet their families’ basic needs, living in decaying shacks in dangerous slums, and vulnerable to violence and disease—including HIV/AIDS.

A number of factors contribute to these violations. Chief among them are discriminatory laws and customs, biased attitudes, unresponsive authorities, ineffective courts, and other obstacles, such as the social stigma of being branded “greedy women” or “traitors of custom” if women assert their property rights.

Violations of women’s property rights are not only an affront to human rights, they also doom development efforts and the fight against HIV/AIDS. According to the United Nations, gender inequality hinders development: women’s insecure property rights contribute to low agricultural production, food shortages, underemployment, and rural poverty. Losing property and undergoing harmful customary practices also increase women’s vulnerability to HIV infection.

The term "women's human rights" and the set of practices that accompanies its use are the continuously evolving product of an international movement to improve the status of women. In the 1980s and 1990s, women's movements around the world formed networks and coalitions to give greater visibility both to the problems that women face every day and to the centrality of women's experiences in economic, social, political and environmental issues. In the evolution of what is becoming a global women's movement, the term "women's human rights" has served as a locus for praxis, that is, for the development of political strategies shaped by the interaction between analytical insights and concrete political practices. Further, the critical tools, the concerted activism, and the broad-based international networks that have grown up around movements for women's human rights have become a vehicle for women to develop the political skills necessary for the twenty-first century.

The concept of women's human rights owes its success and the proliferation of its use to the fact that it is simultaneously prosaic and revolutionary. On the one hand, the idea of women's human rights makes common sense. It declares, quite simply, that as human beings women have human rights. Anyone would find her or himself hard-pressed to publicly make and defend the contrary argument that women are not human. So in many ways, the claim that women have human rights seems quite ordinary. On the other hand, "women's human rights" is a revolutionary notion. This radical reclamation of humanity and the corollary insistence that women's rights are human rights have profound transformative potential. 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, analyze, 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.

- Applying the Human Rights Framework to Women

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines human rights as universal, inalienable, and indivisible. In unison, these defining characteristics are tremendously important for women's human rights.

The universality of human rights means that human rights apply to every single person by virtue of their humanity; this also means that human rights apply to everyone equally, for everyone is equal in simply being human.

The idea of human rights as inalienable means that it is impossible for anyone to abdicate her human rights, even if she wanted to, since every person is accorded those rights by virtue of being human. It also means that no person or group of persons can deprive another individual of her or his human rights. The idea of inalienable rights means that human rights cannot be sold, ransomed, or forfeited for any reason. The idea of inalienability has also been important in negotiations over the priority given to social, religious and cultural practices in relation to human rights. For decades, women and that have often been "protected" under the rubric of religion, tradition or culture has been particularly difficult, given both the integrity of culture guaranteed by the Universal Declaration and the history of Northern domination in much of the world.

The Academy of Economic Studies of Moldova

The Chair of Applied Modern Languages

The Faculty of Accounting