Are women's rights, human rights?

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what being human is and the rights associated with being a human. It has been 63 years since its inception. Yet, within the human rights paradigm, what is perpetrated against women is viewed as either "too specific to women to be seen as human or too generic to human beings to be seen as about women."

The State vs. Women:

In terms of men's private acts against women, a legal exception exists in wartime. Atrocities committed by soldiers against civilians are always, in essence, state acts. However, "men do in war what they do in peace." In this way, the lack of acknowledgement and action that defines peacetime continues in war when it comes to the treatment of women, regardless of international humanitarian law.

The parties to the conflict and the atrocities perpetrated are covered by international humanitarian law. Yet, as we can see unfolding in Darfur and the Congo, rarely are international instruments, invoked to prevent or stop the atrocities or hold the perpetrators accountable.

The more a conflict can be defined as internal, as domestic, as social, the "more feminized the victims become no matter the gender," thus reducing the likelihood that international human rights will be established as being violated, irrespective of the reality of that war.

It must be understood that this is not because women's human rights have not been violated, it is because the violations of women have been obscured.

This shroud occurs in two distinct ways. Firstly, when women are violated like men, the abuse is not characterized as violations of women's human rights. For example, when women, with men, are murdered and buried in mass graves, beaten and tortured, these women are defined in history as part of a group, as Colombian (nationality) or Jewish (religion). The specific crimes that they as women faced, are lost in the identity of a more readily distinguishable group.

Secondly, in peacetime, contained by daily hostilities, women are raped and assaulted by partners, family and friends. However, these atrocities are not distinguished as human rights violations, their victims become the "desaparecidos of everyday life," and what is done to them "smells of sex."

Thus when a husband abuses his wife in her home, humanity is not seen to be violated.

Link Between Gender Based Crimes and Human Rights Law:

No international instrument expressly prohibits gender-based crimes. There is no enumerated ground in any international convention that includes 'based on sex or gender' as an element.