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UN Special Rapporteur in the Field
of Cultural Rights - Website:
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REPORT OF THE UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR
IN THE FIELD OF CULTURAL RIGHTS TO THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2012:
THE ENJOYMENT OF CULTURAL RIGHTS BY
WOMEN ON AN EQUAL BASIS WITH MEN
Direct Link to Full 24-Page Report:
Also accessible through website of
Special Rapporteur.
Introduction - Excerpts:
The Special Rapporteur proposes to
shift the paradigm from one that views culture as an obstacle to women's rights
to one that seeks to ensure equal enjoyment of cultural rights; such an
approach also constitutes an important tool for the realization of all their
human rights.
The report underlines the right of
women to have access to, participate in, and contribute to all aspects of
cultural life. This encompasses their right to actively engage in identifying
and interpreting cultural heritage, and to decide which cultural traditions,
values, or practices are to be kept, reoriented, modified or discarded.
Gender, culture, and rights
intersect in intricate and complex ways, and cultural rights must be understood
as also relating to who in the community holds the power to define its
collective identity. The reality of intra-community diversity makes it
imperative to ensure that all voices within a community, including those that
represent the interests, desires and perspectives of specific groups, are
heard, without discrimination....
The present report analyses notions
of gender that restrict the cultural rights of women and proposes a set of
questions to be asked whenever gender-biased social arrangements are defended
in the name of culture. It includes a series of recommendations and a list of
issues to be addressed in assessing the level of implementation, or
non-implementation, of the cultural rights of women. Such information could
usefully be included in State party reports to the relevant treaty bodies and
to the universal periodic review.
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WOMEN'S CULTURAL RIGHTS: EMPOWERING
& TRANSFORMATIVE
Realizing women’s cultural rights can play a key role in
ensuring that women’s rights are respected more widely.
Farida Shaheed, UN expert in the field of cultural rights,
proposed to shift the paradigm from one that views culture merely as an
obstacle to women’s rights to one that seeks to ensure women’s equal enjoyment
of cultural rights.
“I have received and gathered information on many obstacles
to women’s cultural rights,” she said.
In her report to the UN General Assembly, Shaheed said
that in some countries, “solo female singing has been banned and restrictions
have been placed on female musicians performing in public concerts.” These
prohibitions, the report highlights, derive from the socially constructed rules
of gender. Similarly, a particular instrument or song, the recounting of a
particular story, or practising a particular craft or skill may be restricted
to either men or women.
“Women remain underrepresented in the fields of
science, culture and the arts, even in countries with relatively long histories
of formal equality,” Shaheed said. Some research suggests that women have an
equal chance to get their papers published in peer-reviewed international
journals only when the sex of the author (s) is absolutely unknown to the
reviewers. Besides, although there are a significant number of female authors
of literary prose or poetry, fewer women win literary prizes than men.
Cultural rights are empowering, for they provide individuals
with control over the course of their lives, facilitating the enjoyment of
other rights. A large part of the transformative aspect of cultural rights is
being able to overturn presumed female and male characteristics and
capabilities, which, to a large extent, determine the scope of activities that
a man or a woman can undertake in a given society.
The realization of equal cultural rights for women would
help to reconstruct gender in ways that transcend notions of women’s
inferiority and subordination, thereby improving conditions for the full and
equal enjoyment of their human rights in general. “This requires a shift in
perspective,” said Shaheed, “from seeing culture as an obstacle to women’s
human rights to ensuring women’s equal cultural rights.
She added that women’s perspectives and contributions must
move from the margins of cultural life to the centre of the processes that
create, interpret and shape culture. “Women must be recognized as, and
supported to be, equal spokespersons vested with the authority to determine
which of the community’s traditions are to be respected, protected and
transmitted to future generations.”
In her report, Shaheed called on States take into
consideration their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the cultural
rights of women, on the basis of equality with men.
Cultural rights protect the rights of each person,
individually and in community with others, as well as groups of people, to
develop and express their humanity, their world view and the meanings they
assign to human existence and development through values, beliefs, convictions,
languages, knowledge and the arts, institutions and ways of life. They also
protect access to tangible and intangible cultural heritage as important
resources enabling such identification and development processes.
Under the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, everyone has the right to
take part in cultural life.