SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Agnieszka Kajrukszto
On the Human Rights of Women
March 18, 2009
It is shameful that while we live in a world where, for the first time in centuries (ever?), enough wealth has been produced globally to fulfill the needs of the human race to live free from want and deprivation and with dignity, inequalities are growing apace, between countries, between the rich and the poor and between men and women. On the one hand, concerned citizens and organizations all over the world are interacting with various international agencies, many of them affiliated to the United Nations, to promote human rights and are calling upon these agencies and national governments to intervene strongly to make this a reality. On the other, financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF and trade regulatory bodies like the WTO are advocating and insisting on national governments following policies that institutionalize violation of these rights by increasing exploitation and inequality. National governments are being expected to assume the responsibility to ensure economic, social and cultural justice at a time when their policies are informed more and more by the buzzword of privatization and budgetary cutbacks. The global capital market now concentrates sufficient power and legitimacy to command accountability from governments regarding their economic policies. This often clashes with the government’s human rights obligations.
Many theorists argue that it is impossible to separate political and social rights from economic and cultural rights; that in order for them to be meaningful, they have to be enjoyed together.
It seems to me that it is shortsighted to treat any notion of rights as if it was a gender neutral concept. Human rights are powerful, as noted by Jose Alvarez, because of their ability to universalize and internationalize a set of ethical claims. But they are also blurring the gender realities of the world we live in. Because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was inadequately addressing gender issues, additional documents were created, such as The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) or Beijing Platform for Action. CEDAW make governments responsible for including gender equality in domestic legislation, repeal all discriminatory provisions in their laws, and enact new provisions to guard against discrimination against women. Yet, reproductive rights are often not recognized in international human rights law, even as he United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) continue to advocate for their more wide spread application. Many governments, including my own (Poland) does not recognize women’s basic right to control her own body, and refuse to enact basic gender equality legislation.
In many post Soviet states, the current debates about women’s human rights evolve around a false dichotomy of protecting “vulnerable” women by keeping them from “dangerous” occupations, versus equalizing them with male citizens, regardless of biological differences. Also, there is a contradiction in the current Polish democratic discourse between the stress on democratization and human rights (including women’s rights) and a neo-liberal agenda of growth.
I think that instead of universalizing human rights, we need to change the paradigm completely and enact women’s rights as a universal concept, privileging the female experience as the universal norm. Then we can worry about how the rights of males can be adjusted to fit into this new framework. I am sure that our male citizens will not mind waiting a few hundred years so that we may address their particular issues with a couple of strongly worded additional conventions and platforms of action.
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