scholarly journals United Nations Endorsement & Support for Human Rights: An Experiment on Women's Rights in Pakistan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gulnaz Anjum ◽  
Adam S. Chilton ◽  
Zahid Usman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights

Part II Subsidiary Human Rights Organs, 7 The Commission on the Status of Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kabasakal Arat Zehra F
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
The Status ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Status Of Women ◽  
Operational Structure

This chapter describes the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which was the first international organ ever created to promote women’s rights and equality. The status of women has been on the agenda of the United Nations since its inception and typically addressed as an issue of discrimination in relation to human rights. As the UN’s work on human rights has evolved and expanded, so have its apparatuses and activities on the advancement of women’s rights and status. The CSW played a key role in drafting declarations and treaties that promote women’s rights, organizing world conferences on women, the development of other UN agencies that address women’s issues, and monitoring and evaluating the attention given to women by other agencies. The chapter examines and discusses the CSW’s operational structure, changing agenda, major accomplishments, the difficulties encountered by the Commission, and the controversies surrounding both its work and the UN approach to women’s issues.

scholarly journals The Illusion of Progress: Evaluating U.N. Women’s Rights Instruments

Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Christina Borst
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
The United Nations

Though the realm of international women’s rights has overcome significant challenges, scope is often restricted to gender discrimination violations that are de jure rather than de facto in nature. These advancements concerning the rights of women can, to an extent, be attributed to the proactiveness of the United Nations. This paper seeks to identify the instruments the U.N. has developed for the protection of the human rights of women and address their subsequent effectiveness. By examining developed instruments, cultural patterns, and historical examples, the U.N. has and continues to make a concerted effort toward ensuring de jure protections. Enforced by analysis of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, discrepancies between what the U.N. classifies as human rights and the human rights of women become apparent. Still, the de facto discrimination against women in states with contrasting governmental structures and cultural mores is not customarily accounted for by the United Nations. Questions remain in regards to whether or not the U.N. can or should be responsible for remedying the global variance in de facto discrimination against women. It is suggested that the United Nations shift its focus toward strict instrument enforcement.

scholarly journals United Nations endorsement and support for human rights: An experiment on women’s rights in Pakistan

2020 ◽  
pp. 002234332091283
Author(s):  
Gulnaz Anjum ◽  
Adam Chilton ◽  
Zahid Usman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
International Human ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
New Policies

The United Nations is one of the organizations charged with developing and promoting international human rights law. One of the primary ways that the United Nations tries to do that is by regularly reviewing the human rights practices of member states and then recommending new policies for that state to implement. Although this expends considerable resources, a number of obstacles have made it difficult to empirically assess whether the UN’s review process actually causes countries to improve their human rights practices. To study this topic, we conducted an experiment in Pakistan that tested whether respondents were more likely to support policies aimed at improving women’s rights when they learned that the reforms were proposed by the United Nations. Our results indicate that the respondents who were randomly informed of the United Nations endorsement not only expressed higher support for the policy reforms, but also were more likely to express willingness to ‘mobilize’ in ways that would help the reforms be implemented. Our treatment did not have any effect, however, on respondents that did not already have confidence in the United Nations. This suggests that the international human rights regime may only be able to aid domestic reformers when there is already faith in those institutions.

DIREITOS HUMANOS E IDENTIDADE CULTURAL: A MUTILAÇÃO GENITAL FEMININA E SUAS IMPLICAÇÕES PARA OS DIREITOS DAS MULHERESHUMAN RIGHTS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doglas Cesar Lucas (Unijuí/RS) ◽  
Pâmela Copetti Ghisleni (Unijuí/RS)
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Female Genital Mutilation ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
Global Concern ◽  
Female Genital

Embora não seja possível fornecer um número exato, de acordo com o recente relatório Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global Concern, elaborado pela UNICEF – United Nations Children's Fund, estima-se que aproximadamente 200 milhões de meninas e mulheres em trinta países já foram submetidas à mutilação genital. Essa prática cultural é endossada por discursos comunitaristas radicais e pela vertente conservadora do multiculturalismo. A globalização faz da pluralidade cultural um fenômeno cada vez mais evidente e nos apresenta questionamentos sobre como conciliar a universalidade dos direitos humanos com esse fato de que a contemporaneidade apresenta demandas cada vez mais plurais, segmentadas e ao mesmo tempo específicas. Nesse sentido, o presente artigo propõe um olhar crítico sobre o relativismo cultural e suas implicações no que diz respeito à mutilação genital feminina, sem olvidar, contudo, da importância dos laços de pertença com a comunidade. É que embora não seja possível reduzir os direitos humanos à experiência Ocidental, há uma dimensão comum em todos seres humanos que deve ser tutelada, independentemente da sua cultura, e cuja violação implica em profanar a si mesmo.

Women’s Rights as Human Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Joachim
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
World Conference ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
The Social

For centuries, women have been struggling for the recognition of their rights. Women’s rights are still being dismissed by United Nations (UN) human rights bodies and even governments, despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. It was not until the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria that states began to recognize women’s rights as human rights. However, this institutional change cannot solely be credited to the UN, but more importantly to the work of international women’s organizations. According to the social movement theory, these organizations have been permeating intergovernmental structures and, with the help of their constituents and experienced leaders, framing women’s rights as human rights in different ways throughout time. It is through mobilizing resources and seizing political opportunities that women’s rights activists rationalize how discrimination and exclusion resulted from gendered traditions, and that societal change is crucial in accepting women’s rights as fully human. But seeing as there are still oppositions to the issue of women’s rights as human rights, further research still needs to be conducted. Some possible venues for research include how well women’s rights as human rights travel across different institutions, violence against women, how and in what way women’s rights enhance human rights, and the changes that have taken place in mainstream human rights and specialized women’s rights institutions since the late 1980s as well as their impact.

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