WUNRN
Source: 15 Year of The United
Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and
Consequences - A Critical Review
Demystifying Cultural Discourses
Women's Human Rights
Culture-based identity politics has
been considered by the UN mandate holders
to pose one of the most serious
challenges to women's human rights.
They have addressed challenges
arising from cultural relativist assertions that reject universality of human
rights, particularly with regard to women's equality, as welll as cultural
essentialist approaches that view some cultures as being inherently misogynist.
Cultural discourses are a significant source of diverse normative systems that
shape power relations between men and women, while the common values across
societies have helped develop human rights law reflecting universality and
shared culture. Despite the shared values that human rights largely embody,
colonial histories, deepening political and economic inequalities, and
divisions between and among nations have polarized societies, particularly in
the post-September 11 times. These divisions and inequalities have coalesced
with patriarchy to provide fertile ground for cultural discourses. Cultural
discourses are manifested in international law on one hand, by resorting to
cultural justification to resist women's rights, and through references to
primordial and hegemonic interpretations of culture. On the other hand, they
are visible in the cultural essentialist targeting of "traditional
societies" in the global South that are perceived as harmful to women.
Over the period of 15 years and several reports - in particular the three
annual reports, two of which deal with this theme specifically - the Violence
Against Women mandate has contributed to a paradigm shift in the way cultural
discourses are addressed and considered within a human rights framework.
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