Women's right, development and peace in USA

by Dr. Farhat Jabeen
February 18, 2009

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/178/womens-right-development-and-peace-in-usa

Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthright of all human being, 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 American States, held in 1923 in Santiago, Chile, agreed that the program of future conference 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 State, held in Bogotá in 1948 two inter American conventions dealing with women's rights are 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 was 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. 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 last prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is a unique and basic universal theme on human rights; especially 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´ perspectives and lives into human rights standard 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 being. A woman'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 took up organizing 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 and discovered their commonalties, 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. By 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 the question of why women's rights and women's lives of men. The United Nations World Conference o 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 women's rights and gender-based violence in particular, were left out of human's rights considerations, and mobilize 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 Program 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 subsequent, many 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 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. Women's human rights not only teach 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. The Gender Equality came in this field that time, Gender analysis is a tool to dialogue 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:

1. 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;

2. 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;

3. 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 perpetrations. Once in Japan, women were given no choice over their occupation or terms or clients demands and received no compensation for the labor, the federal law enforcement officials brought indictments against thirteen ringleaders of a nationwide trafficking network. Federal prosecutors alleged 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 region 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 were in particular jeopardy. During these periods, judicial structures that should both prevent violence against women and respond to it were in disarray, could not be relied on and, in some cases, were controlled by the very people who were instigating or participating in 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 faced HIV infection, a potential death sentence, especially in countries in which health care and medicine were scant.

In State of Jammu and Kashmir, Palestine and especially in Iraq, women are facing human rights violence, abuses, sexual harassment, and innocent killing by armed forces seeing since long time.

The hundreds of non-governmental, inter-governmental, governmental and international organizations, groups and movements are actively working and participating for women's rights, development, empowerment and peace, but actual position is that women's empowerment and development is still a big question for United Nations and all other international institutions and organizations, without gender equality and balance of power within women and men, it's really impossible towards peace and development 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 also established an "UN Commission on the Status of Women" in June 1946, and that commission and official and non-governmental organizations in European Union, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Latin America and in African Unity are working on women's rights, and resolving their problems.

South Asia is a very big and heavy hub of world population. The one third population of the world is living in four countries China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These countries have facing many problems, bad condition of women's human rights, abusing and forced prostitution and many other problems. They had political, social, cultural and religious conflicts and also molestation of women is noted in reports. 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. Women in their vast majority are concentrated in the most impoverished and oppressed sectors of the societies. Yet it is a woman who is being made to bear the brunt of what have been called "structural adjustment" strategies for managing international debt. 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 role of women: one, as a contributor to production in a country and the other, as a reproducer of 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, and, in fact, women's place in home" was a slogan during the period of 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 Years" 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 with development. They are the harbinger of human culture and active partners of economic development. Even this 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 so far 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 one was held in Copenhagen in 1880, the third one took place in Nairobi in 1985 and the fourth one occurred in September 1995 in Beijing. Besides, in the World Summit that took place in Copenhagen during 6th to 12th March 1995 on "poverty and unemployment", the role of women for economic development of any country had been duly highlighted. The socio-economic role of their women construction workers at home in not much different from that of others. Most of the functions at home are gender specific. There is flexibility in some cases, but it decreases with the increased caste status. Women have developed multiple of own situation, 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 way 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 number 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 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, when resources are scarce, dependency is a sure route to deprivation.

Its needs of the time to resolved the hurdled of women's human rights, gender equality, empowerment and development of women, without these solutions Peace and development are not possible in the world especially in South Asian countries. In previous and present Women's leadership was successful in many countries, Women are heads of the States and governments in many important countries, H.M. Queen Elizabeth of United Kingdom, Queen Margrethe ll of Denmark, Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands, Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) U.K, Golda Meir (1969-74) Israel, Serimavo Bandaranaike(1960, 70, 94) Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi(1966, 77, 80) India, Tansu Ciller (1993-96) Turkey, Ambassador Begum Ra´ana Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo Philippine, Mary Robinson Ireland, Kim Campbell Canada, Ruth Dreifuss Switzerland, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Liberia, Helen Clark New Zeeland, Michelle Bachelet Chile, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed (1988, 93) of Pakistan and Anegela Markel Chancellor of the Germany, Haseena Wajed and Khlida Zia of Bangladesh, Pratibha Patil President of India, Aung San Suu Kyi Burma, and Dr. Fehmida Mirza Speaker of Pakistan National Parliament, Begum Kalsum Nawaz Sharif, Amb. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi and Asma Jahangir HRCP Pakistan. Women have great courage, braveness, tolerance, sacrifices and goodness in practical life. They can build, improve and get successes in every field of life with better spirit, strategy and wisdom. No one can bring development and peaceful atmosphere without full cooperation and efforts of women in the world.

Miss Farhat Jabeen PhD, is Director of eminent think tank "Institute of Peace and Development. She can be contacted at: inspad@gmail.com

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