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F. Jabeen: Women's Rights, Peace, and Development in South Asia
Written by Miss Farhat Jabeen, Ph.D., Director, Institute of Peace and Development
Friday, February 13, 2009
Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthright of all human being, and their protection and promotion is the first and essential responsibility of every government and authority. Human rights and dignity is essential and basic entitlement of every individual. The principles of human rights were drawn up by human beings as a way of ensuring that the dignity and rights of everyone is property and equality respected, that is, to ensure that a human being will be able to fully develop and use human qualities such as intelligence, talent and conscience and satisfy his or her spiritual and other needs. Human dignity is not an individual, exclusive and isolated sense. It is a part of our common humanity.
Human rights enable us to respect each other and live with each other. The denial of human rights and fundamental freedom not only is an individual and personal tragedy, but also creates conditions of social and political unrest, sowing the seeds of violence and conflict within and between societies and nations. Basically, human rights are the claims of the individual for such conditions as are essential for the fullest realization of the innate characteristics which nature has bestowed him / her with as a human being.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Cairo Human Rights Declaration in Islam, the Magna Carta in England, the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declarations on the Rights of Man, and the Bolschevik Revolution in Russia could be cited as important landmarks in the development of the concept of human rights.
The United Nations is not the first international body to deal with questions affecting the rights and status of women. During the years before the First World War, several international conferences attended by governments, while not discussing the status of women as such and not attempting to promote the principle of equality between the sexes, had nevertheless dealt with some specific problems affecting women.
- For instance, in 1902 international conventions were adopted at The Hague dealing with conflicts of national laws concerning marriage, divorce, and the guardianship of minors, and in 1904 and 1910 conventions were adopted dealing with the suppression of traffic in women and children.
- The covenant of the League of Nations marked a major development on the inter-governmental level.
- The regional organizations of American republics were the first inter-governmental body to take action against discrimination by reason of sex. The fifth International Conference of the American States, held in 1923 in Santiago, Chile, agreed that the program of future conferences should include the study of means of abolishing constitutional and legal incapacities of women, so that women could be assured full civil and political rights. At their next international conference, held in Havana in 1928, the American republics decided to establish an Inter-American Commission of Women. The American republics adopted a convention on this subject at their seventh conference in Montevideo in 1933, two years later; the League of Nations recommended this convention to all countries for signature. At the ninth International Conference of American States, held in Bogota in 1948 two inter-American conventions dealing with women’s rights were adopted. One convention related to the granting of political rights to women and other to the granting civil rights to women.
- In December 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human rights adopted around the world.
- The United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985) was a path-breaking event in the evolution of the women’s movement worldwide. In 1972, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution proclaiming 1975 international Women’s Year, to be devoted to intensified action to promote equality between men and women, to ensure the full integration of women in the total development effort, and to increase women’s contribution to the strengthening of world peace.
The concept of human rights emerged by the middle of the present century. This development found expression in the Charter of the United Nations, which proclaimed “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and Fundamental freedom for all without distinctions as to race, sex, language or religion.” The Charter made promotion of these rights as one of its basic purposes and obligated member states “to take joint and separate action on cooperation with the United Nations for the achievement of this purpose.” Thus human rights were being universalized and internationalized.
The UN Charter has laid down principles of a general nature. Human rights are not defined or specified in this charter. In December 1948, the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It defines specific rights-civil and political as well as economic, social and cultural-with equality and freedom from discrimination as a principal and recurrent theme. The Universal Declaration was not conceived as law but as a “common standard of achievement” for all people and all nations.
This is historical fact that the Khutba Hajj tul Widdah by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is a unique and basic universal theme on human rights; he defined the basic rights of women, as mother, sister, daughter, and wife. Recognition of women’s rights as 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 practices forces recognition of the dismal failure of countries worldwide to accord women the human dignity and respect that they deserve simply as a human being. A women’s human rights framework equips women with a way to define, analyze, and articulate their experiences of violence, degradation and marginally.
During the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985), women from many geographical, racial, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds organized to improve the status of women. The United Nations-sponsored women’s conferences which took place in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, and Nairobi in 1965 were convened to evaluate the status of women and to formulate strategies for women’s advancement. These conferences were critical venues at which women came together, debated their differences, discovered their commonalities, and gradually began learning to bridge differences to create a global movement.
In looking at the human rights framework from women’s perspectives, women have shown how current human rights definitions and practices fail to account for the ways in which already recognized human rights abuses often affect women differently because of their gender. The end of the Cold War facilitated the exchange of ideas and experiences among women around the world that led to strategizing about how to make women’s human rights perspectives more visible. As women’s activities developed globally during and following the United Nations’ Decade for Women, more and more women raised issues of women’s rights and women’s lives.
The United Nations World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993 was the first such meeting since 1968, and it became a natural vehicle to highlight the new visions of human rights thinking and practice being developed by women. After that it became the unifying public focus of a worldwide Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights, a broad and loose international collaborative effort to advance women’s human rights. The campaign launched a petition calling upon the world Conference to comprehensively address women’s human rights at every level of its proceedings and recognize gender violence, a universal phenomenon which takes many forms across culture, race, and class as a violation of human rights requiring immediate action. The petition was eventually translated into 23 languages and was used by over 1000 sponsoring groups who gathered a half million signatures from 124 countries. The petition and its demands instigated discussions about why women’s rights and gender-based violence in particular were left out of human’s rights considerations, and mobilized women around the world conference. The idea that women’s rights are human rights had become the rallying call of thousands of people all over the world and one of the most discussed new human rights debates.
The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, which is the product of the conference and is meant to signal the agreement of the international community on the status of human rights, states unequivocally that:
“The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights Vienna Declaration (1, 18, 1993).”
At many subsequent conferences, for example, at the international conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the Platform for Action at the IV World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 became virtually an agenda about the human rights of women. Conference documents can also be used to reinforce and interpret international treaties such as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or the Covenant of Social, Economical and Cultural Rights. The most important international treaty specifically addressing women’s human rights is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was initiated during the United Nations Decade for Women and has been ratified by over 130 countries.
- Women’s issues cannot be resolved in isolation from the relationships between women and men or social and economic structures and trends. Instead, changing the status of women requires the entire society to rethink the type of development it pursues. The United Nations Decade for Women has had a number of important impacts.
- It was a running point for the global women’s movement.
- It helped create common ground between women’s activities from the North and from the South.
- It spawned feminist networks and women’s NGOs, and legitimized women’s rights activities within countries.
- The Decade for Women contributed to the growth of the fields of women-in-development and gender-and- development and led to years of funding for women’s projects by rich countries and international development agencies.
Education about women’s human rights not only teaches women about the range of rights that their governments must honor, it also functions as a kind of gestalt by which to organize analyses of their experiences and plan action for change. The human rights framework creates a space in which the possibility for a different account of women’s lives can be developed.
The issue of the advancement of women’s rights has concerned the United Nations since the organization’s founding. Yet the alarming global dimensions of female-targeted violence were not explicitly acknowledged by the international community until December 1993, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. Discussions of gender equality came into this field that time. Gender analysis is a tool to dialogue about the differences between women and men regarding their specific activities, conditions, needs, access to and control over resources, and access to development benefits and decision-making.
The definition is amplified in Article 2 of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which identifies three areas in which violence commonly takes place:
- Physical, sexual and psychological violence that occurs in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household; dowry-related violence; marital rape; female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women; non-spousal violence; and violence related to exploitation;
- Physical, sexual and psychological violence that occurs within the general community, including rape; sexual abuse-sexual harassment and intimidation at work; in educational institutions and elsewhere; trafficking in women; and forced prostitution;
- Physical, sexual and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the state, wherever it occurs.
In South Africa, women married under customary law were still considered minors and could not enter into any legal contract without the consent of their husband or guardians. In Pakistan, Syria, and India women were discriminated against in divorce and inheritance laws. Many governments now recognize the importance of protecting victims of domestic abuse and taking action to punish perpetrators. Once in Japan, women were given no choice over their occupation or terms or client demands and received no compensation for their labor. Federal law enforcement officials brought indictments against 13 ringleaders of a nationwide trafficking network, alleging that the traffickers had brought hundreds of young women and girls from Asia to work in forced prostitution in cities throughout the United States. Hundreds of women from former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, some of them lucrative employment opportunities in West European countries, found themselves sold into slavery-like conditions and held as virtual prisoners in café-bars throughout the Federation. The women had no legal redress; instead, local law enforcement officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina often forced the women to stand trial, fined them, and deported them across country lines, allowing traffickers to pick them up and sell them to another bar owner. In regions of Middle East and Persian Gulf, there are an estimated 1.2 million women, mainly Asian, who are employed as domestic servants. According to the independent human rights groups Middle East Watch, female migrant workers in Kuwait often suffer beatings and sexual assaults at the hands of their employer. In many cases women who report being raped by their employer or are even assaulted at the police station. In most parts of Afghanistan, the education of girls and the employment of women outside the health sector remained banned or severely restricted. Refugee women were subjected to rape, sexual assault, and other forms of sexual violence. Levels of domestic violence were also reported to be very high in many refugee communities.
During times of armed conflict, women’s human rights are in particular jeopardy. During these periods, judicial structures that should both prevent violence against women and respond to it are in disarray, cannot be relied on and, in some cases, are controlled by the very people who were instigating or participating in the rapes. In every civil conflict in recent memory including East Timor, Afghanistan, Angola, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Mexican state of Chiapas, Algeria, Bosnia, Liberia, Serbia, Albania, Chechnya, Nigeria, Iraq, Kashmir, Palestine, and Congo, women and girls were targeted for sexual violence and raped in front of their families. An unknown number of women and girls died after these attacks. In addition to psychological trauma, physical injuries, and sexually transmitted diseases, sexually abused women face HIV infection, a potential death sentence, especially in countries in which health care and medicine are scant. In Jammu and Kashmir, Palestine, and especially in Iraq, women have long faced human rights violence, abuses, sexual harassment, and innocent killing by armed forces.
Hundreds of non-governmental, inter-governmental, governmental, and international organizations, groups, and movements are actively working for women’s rights, development, empowerment, and peace, but women’s empowerment and development are still big issues for United Nations and all other international institutions and organizations, because without gender equality and balance of power between women and men peace and development cannot be secured in the world.
In addition to acting as a significant force in deepening, broadening, and strengthening civil society at a national and international level, women’s NGOs have been successful in influencing the activities of other organizations operating in the international development arena. Coordinated efforts among NGOs have had a growing impact on U.N. agencies and document production in relation to various world conference, most notably the Fourth World Conference on Women. The United Nations had established an “UN Commission on the Status of Women” in June 1946, and that commission and official and non-governmental organizations in the European Union, the Organization of Islamic Conference, Latin America and in African Union are working on women’s rights and resolving their problems.
South Asia is a very big hub of world population. One third of the population of the world lives in four countries: China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. These countries have been facing many problems, such as a poor record of women’s human rights, abuse, forced prostitution, and many other problems. Molestation of women is noted in reports of political, social, cultural, and religious conflicts.
Women are provided complete equality under the constitution of Pakistan and the norm of non-discrimination is reiterated in many of its provisions, both in the chapter on Fundamental Rights as well as Principles of Policy. The fact that women are among the weakest and most disadvantaged groups within a community has also been taken into account, and several constitutional provisions undertake a positive obligation on the part of the government for affirmative action to alleviate the status of women.
Women play central key role in economic, social, and cultural life. The vast majority of women are concentrated in the most impoverished and oppressed sectors of society. Yet women are being made to bear the brunt of what have been called “structural adjustment” strategies for managing international debts. Women at present contribute in the promotion of economic development of the country in various capacities as they perform not only non-market activities through which they produce goods having greater "use-values” but also various market activities in fields, factories, offices, and elsewhere outside home. So the dual roles of women are (1) as a contributor to production in a country and the other, and (2) as a reproducer of the human race has been emphasized in our literature. Women constitute an integral part in the socio-economic life of any country in the world. However, their role in economic development was not seriously considered and, in fact, "women’s place is in the home” was a slogan during the Industrial Revolution.
Women and development as a subject entered the international scene around 1970 and from then on the “hidden” economic and social contribution of women began to be uncovered. The Declaration of the “International Women’s Year” by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 could be considered a turning point regarding the place, role, and position of women of women in a society. Since then it has come to be recognized as an issue in development. Women are the harbingers of human culture and active partners in economic development. Even the notion is gaining ground that “development without women” cannot take place.
To recognize the role of women in economic development and to enhance the status of the women all over the world, four international conferences on women have taken place, in addition to numerous sessions on women and development in various international conferences. The first conference took place in Mexico in 1975, the second in Copenhagen in 1880, the third in Nairobi in 1985, and the fourth in September 1995 in Beijing. In addition, in the World Summit that took place in Copenhagen March 6-12, 1995 on “Poverty and Unemployment,” the role of women in promoting the economic development of any country was duly highlighted.
The socio-economic roles of women at home are generally gender specific. There is flexibility in some cases, but it decreases with the increased caste status. Women have developed multiple situations and complex and innovative responses to the global economic crisis, both individually and collectively. Researchers and activists have joined forces with grassroots women at the local, national, and international level to organize for survival and change.
As has been argued, circumstances are grim throughout the third world, and women are particularly vulnerable in times of hardship. While there is great variety in both their situations and their activities, and women respond to their self-defined needs in ways that reflect their different cultures and historical circumstances. Certain global trends are having similar effects on women everywhere. Major changes in family composition are increasing the numbers of women who have complete responsibility for their children—indeed, as a result of war and migration for work, there is a growing number of entire communities without men in permanent residence. Women have needs for food, housing, cash, education, health care, child care, social support, protection from violence, and above all, for power within their families, communities, and political units. Without economic and decision-making power, one is dependent on others for the resources one needs, and when resources are scarce dependency is a sure route to deprivation. The hindrances to women’s human rights, gender equality, empowerment, and development need to be overcome. Without resolving these, peace and development are not possible in the world especially in South Asian countries.
Women have succeeded in leadership positions in many countries, Women are heads of states and governments in many important countries: H.M. Queen Elizabeth of United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe ll of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) of the U.K, Golda Meir (1969-74) of Israel, Serimavo Bandaranaike (1960, 70, 94) of Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi (1966, 77, 80) of India, Tansu Ciller (1993-96) of Turkey, Ambassador Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines, Mary Robinson of Ireland, Kim Campbell of Canada, Ruth Dreifuss of Switzerland, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, Helen Clark of New Zealand, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Angela Markel of Germany, Haseena Wajed and Khlida Zia of Bangladesh, Pratibha Patil of India, and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. Notable Pakistani women leaders include Dr. Fehmida Mirza, Speaker of Pakistan National Parliament, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed (1988, 93) of Pakistan, Begum Kalsum Nawaz Sharif, Amb. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, and Asma Jahangir HRCP.
Women have great courage, bravery, tolerance, sacrificial spirit, and goodness in practical life. They can build, improve, and succeed in every field of life with great spirit, strategy, and wisdom. No one can bring development and a peaceful environment without the full cooperation and efforts of the women in the world.
NOTE: Miss Farhat Jabeen, Ph.D., is Director of the eminent think tank Institute of Peace and Development, which has been working for peace, human rights, conflict resolution, inter-faith dialogue, religious coexistence and women’s rights in Belgium and Pakistan since 1995. (http//www.Inspad.org)
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