scholarly journals Taking Women's Rights Seriously: Using Human Rights to Require State Implementation of Domestic Abortion Laws in African Countries with Reference to Uganda

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles G Ngwena
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Safe Abortion ◽  
European Court ◽  
Abortion Laws

AbstractThis article is constructed around the premise that women's rights to safe abortion give rise to obligations that the state has a positive duty to implement. Using Uganda as a case study, it frames failure by a state to implement its abortion laws in ways that render the rights tangible and accessible to women as a violation of human rights. The article develops a normative human rights framework for imposing on a state the obligation to take positive steps to implement abortion laws that the state, itself, has adopted. The framework does not depend on requiring the state first to reform its substantive laws or broaden the grounds for abortion. Rather, it focuses on the implementation of existing domestic laws. The article draws its remedial juridical responses partly from conceptions of women-centred rights to procedural justice, equality and health, and partly from jurisprudence developed in recent years by United Nations treaty-monitoring bodies and the European Court of Human Rights.

Human Rights Universalism in Practice: What the Iranian Women’s Rights Movement Can Teach Us

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-479
Author(s):  
Nicole Nickerson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights Movement ◽  
International Human

Abstract Does practice demonstrate the legitimacy of international human rights law? This article explores this question via a case study of the women’s rights movement in Iran. Current human rights sceptics question the system’s legitimacy because of a lack of universality and an excessive top-down approach. However, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a remarkable community of grassroots activists. The bottom-up women’s rights initiative of the One Million Signatures Campaign utilised human rights discourse in combination with local, indigenous values in pursuit of gender equality. The article argues—via the case study of this movement—that there is practical evidence to support a theory of human rights universalism, as positive human rights law empowers the existing subjectivity of individuals. The universal legitimacy of international human rights law does not primarily come from a global network dictating common values, but from members of civil society mobilising their status as rights holders.

International Obstacles to Russian Gender Discrimination Cases at the European Court of Human Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-174
Author(s):  
Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom ◽  
Valerie Sperling ◽  
Melike Sayoglu
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
Case Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Court ◽  
Very High

Chapter 5 takes up the international obstacles to successful gender discrimination claims at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), both across the Council of Europe, and from Russia specifically. The reluctance of the Court until recently to find violations of Article 14 alongside violations of other articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the limited set of circumstances in which discrimination falls under the Convention’s jurisdiction, and the very high bar of evidence required to prove discrimination, all play a large part in explaining the Court’s miniscule case record on gender discrimination. Yet we also document how the Court has become more open in the past several years to finding sex-based discrimination violations, in part due to the diffusion of successful logics of argument among women’s rights lawyers, as well as the emergence of standards in other international women’s rights conventions that the ECtHR has begun to acknowledge, such as the Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The chapter discusses a variety of landmark cases at the ECtHR in this area, such as Opuz v. Turkey and Konstantin Markin v. Russia.

Constitutional Innovation and Animal Protection in Egypt

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (04) ◽  
pp. 1364-1390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen A. Stilt
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Animal Protection

This article examines constitutional innovation through the case study of the emergence of animal protection in Egypt's 2014 Constitution. Egypt's provision, which is a state obligation to provide al-rifq bi-l-hayawan (kindness to animals), was adopted in Article 45 as part of the country's second constitution following the 2011 revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Three aspects proved crucial to the adoption of the provision: a decision by animal protection activists to influence the constitutional process; the ability of citizens to convey their ideas to the constitutional drafters, albeit in a limited way; and, most importantly, the use of frame bridging. The activists and then the constitutional drafters presented the new cause of constitutional animal protection in terms of well-established areas of social, and constitutional, concern in the country, including Islamic law, women's rights, human rights, and the protection of the environment.

scholarly journals Hidden under Headscarves? Women and Religion in the Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 173-200
Author(s):  
Eva Brems
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
European Court ◽  
Women And Religion

Abstract The paper offers an analysis of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights at the intersection of women’s rights and religious freedom. It maps different configurations of gender and religious interests across the corpus of case law, and analyses the Court’s intersectionality practice.

Algerian Feminists Navigate Authoritarianism

Women Rising ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 129-134
Author(s):  
Maro Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Authoritarian Rule

Algerian feminists, who are committed to advancing human rights and women’s rights, oddly supported the authoritarian rule of President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika and viewed him as the best option available to women. In this chapter, Maro Youssef argues that secular Algerian feminists are not passive victims of patriarchy but rather active agents and complex subjects who negotiate and renegotiate their contract with the state to advance their interests. She explores how feminists’ position is founded in their fear of the Islamists and their beliefs that Bouteflika is capable of preventing Islamists from regaining power. By aligning their efforts with the state, women believe that they can stop Islamists from reversing the rights that women have already achieved or imposing their conservative version of Islam on the Algerian society.

scholarly journals Rights Inside Out: The Case of the Women's Human Rights Campaign

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelise Riles
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Women's Human Rights ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Inside Out

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women's rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper answers this question with respect to the work of self-reflexivity in creating a “virtual sociality of rights.”

scholarly journals Challenges Surrounding the Adjudication of Women's Rights in Relation to Customary Law and Practices in Tanzania

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Norah Hashim Msuya
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
African Countries ◽  
National Human ◽  
Harmful Traditional Practices

Women's rights litigation has produced varied outcomes in many African countries. Although courts have looked at the legislation that discriminates against women with different degrees of success, matters such as tradition and culture continue to be unpredictable when subject to lawsuit. In Tanzania, the judiciary has gradually begun to recognise that discrimination on a prescribed ground cannot be justified. However, this principle has not blocked some judges from maintaining that gender discrimination based on customary rules can still be justified, despite the existence of internal, regional and national human rights law, which prohibits it. It is contended that the judiciary has a significant role to play in ensuring that customary law and harmful traditional practices are reformed and advanced to comply with human rights legislation and ensure equality between men and women in Tanzania.     

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