Women’s Rights as Human Rights: A Feminist Perspective

Human rights are often presented as universal protections that apply equally to everyone. Yet for much of the twentieth century, the international human rights framework was shaped largely around the experiences of men, leaving many of the most common abuses faced by women invisible. Feminist thinkers in International Relations challenged this gap directly. They argued that the dignity, safety, and equality of women are not a separate category of concern but a fundamental part of human rights themselves. This blog explains how feminists reframed women’s rights as human rights, why certain violations are gender-specific, and how international instruments like CEDAW attempt to address them.

Understanding women’s rights as human rights 🔗

The phrase “women’s rights are human rights” sounds obvious today, but it represented a major intellectual shift. For decades, the mainstream human rights system treated violations like torture, arbitrary detention, and persecution as things that happened in the public, political sphere, usually to men. Abuses that disproportionately affected women, such as domestic violence and sexual assault, were dismissed as private or cultural matters outside the reach of international law.

Feminist scholars identified two core problems with this approach. The first was the androcentric construction of human rights, meaning the standards were built around a male experience of harm. The second was the public-private divide, where the state was expected not to interfere in the so-called private realm of family and home. Because much of the violence against women occurs precisely in that private space, this dichotomy effectively shielded perpetrators from accountability. The feminist critique of liberal human rights theory argued that genuine equality requires recognising gender-specific experiences rather than insisting that women’s claims only matter when they mirror men’s.

From “sameness” to “difference” 🔗

Early liberal feminists fought for equality by stressing that women are rational individuals who deserve the same rights as men. This “sameness” argument achieved important legal reforms, but it had limits. If women only gained protection when their situation matched a man’s, the harms unique to women remained unaddressed. Later feminist approaches shifted toward valuing difference and bringing gender-specific abuses into the mainstream of human rights theory and practice. This move made it possible to define specific women’s rights as human rights in their own right, not as exceptions.

Gender-specific human rights violations 🔗

One of the strongest contributions of feminist thought is the recognition that many human rights violations are gendered in nature. Some abuses target women specifically, or are experienced very differently by women because of their social position. These include domestic violence, trafficking, forced prostitution, female genital mutilation, dowry-related violence, and sexual violence in conflict.

Rape as a method of torture and war 🔗

A central example feminists use is sexual violence in armed conflict. Rape has long been treated as an unfortunate by-product of war or, worse, as an attack on the “honour” of women rather than a violent crime against the person. This framing was deeply problematic because it implied that honour is something lent to women by men, leaving the actual bodily harm unnamed.

Feminist activists pushed to have rape recognised as a deliberate instrument of war and a form of torture. This effort gained momentum after the systematic rapes during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action condemned massive violations including systematic rape of women in war and demanded that perpetrators be punished. Soon after, international criminal tribunals began treating sexual violence as a war crime and, in landmark cases, linked rape to genocide for the first time. As feminist IR scholars also note, violence against women frequently continues in the post-conflict period at rates equal to or greater than during the fighting, yet dominant security approaches tend to obscure it.

The Vienna turning point 🔗

The Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 is widely seen as a watershed for women’s human rights. A global lobby of women’s organisations gathered to confront the 171 states represented and demonstrate how the existing system ignored everyday abuses in women’s lives. The conference declared that the human rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of universal human rights, and it named gender-based violence as a human rights violation. Importantly, this campaign and the famous slogan were largely shaped by feminists from the Global South, not by any single Western political figure.

The significance of CEDAW 🔗

If Vienna provided the political momentum, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) provided the legal backbone. Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 18 December 1979 and entering into force in 1981, it is often described as an international bill of rights for women. Consisting of a preamble and 30 articles, the Convention defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets an agenda for national action to end it.

What makes CEDAW especially significant from a feminist standpoint is that it directly challenges the public-private divide. By becoming a party to the Convention, a state is legally obliged to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in both public and private life. This means a government cannot simply claim that what happens within marriage, family, or community is none of its business.

Key provisions of CEDAW 🔗

CEDAW’s articles are grouped into six parts, each addressing a different dimension of equality and state responsibility. The main commitments include the following:

• Defining discrimination: The early articles define discrimination against women and obligate states to embody equality in law and to modify or abolish discriminatory laws, customs, and practices.
• Public and political life: The Convention guarantees women’s right to vote, hold public office, and participate in public life, along with rights related to nationality.
• Social and economic rights: It covers equality in education, employment, health, and economic and social life, with specific protections for rural women.
• Marriage and family: The later articles address equal rights within marriage and family relations, an area traditionally considered private.

CEDAW also created the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, a body of independent experts that monitors implementation. States that ratify the Convention must submit periodic reports on the measures they have taken, and the Committee reviews these reports and can initiate inquiries into potential violations.

India and CEDAW 🔗

India signed CEDAW on 30 July 1980 and ratified it on 9 July 1993. The Convention complements constitutional guarantees, since the principle of gender equality is already enshrined in the Preamble, Fundamental Rights, and Directive Principles, and the State is empowered to adopt measures of positive discrimination in favour of women.

However, ratification came with conditions. India entered two declarations and one reservation. The declarations relate to Articles 5(a) and 16(1), where the government accepted the obligation to eliminate discriminatory cultural practices but stated it could not do so without the consent and initiative of the communities concerned. A further declaration on Article 16(2) cited the impracticality of compulsory marriage registration in a country of such size and diversity. The reservation concerns Article 29(1), with India choosing not to be bound by the provision referring inter-state disputes to the International Court of Justice. These caveats illustrate a recurring tension between universal human rights standards and claims about cultural and religious autonomy.

The gap between commitment and enforcement 🔗

Feminists welcomed CEDAW but have remained clear-eyed about its limits. The Convention is one of the most widely ratified human rights treaties, with 189 states parties, yet ratification does not guarantee implementation. Many countries have entered extensive reservations, and over fifty states have ratified it subject to declarations or objections, weakening its practical force.

Several structural problems persist. First, the original 1979 text contained no specific provision on violence against women, a gap later addressed through soft-law instruments and committee recommendations rather than the treaty itself. Second, CEDAW relies heavily on periodic state reporting and lacks strong coercive enforcement, so compliance often depends on political will. Scholars examining the limits of global legalism for women’s rights argue that real change requires transforming the structural conditions and unequal power relations that make women vulnerable in the first place, not merely passing laws.

The call for stronger international mechanisms 🔗

This is why feminists continue to demand stronger international mechanisms. Their proposals include treating gender-based violence explicitly as a human rights violation across all institutions, gender mainstreaming within UN bodies and treaty monitoring, and ensuring effective remedies for victims rather than symbolic commitments. The aim is to close the persistent gap between the rhetoric of equality on paper and the lived reality of discrimination and violence. Recognising women’s rights as human rights was the first step; building the enforcement architecture to protect them everywhere remains an ongoing struggle.

What do you think? Should international human rights law place firmer limits on the cultural and religious reservations that states attach to treaties like CEDAW, even at the cost of national sovereignty? And do you think legal reform alone can dismantle the deeper power structures that make women vulnerable, or is something more required?

References

1. https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-48
2. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/vienna-declaration-and-programme-action
3. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/04/feminism-in-international-relations-theory/
4. https://www.openglobalrights.org/the-forgotten-origins-of-womens-rights-are-human-rights/
5. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/india/cedaw
6. https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cedaw
7. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1779252
8. https://www.iwraw-ap.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/OPS_5-THE-VALIDITY-OF-RESERVATIONS-AND-DECLARATIONS-TO-CEDAW-_-The-Indian-Experience.pdf
9. https://www.academia.edu/17616456/Feminism_and_Human_Rights_The_Inclusive_Approach_to_Interpreting_International_Human_Rights_Law