Domestic violence through a human rights lens

Abstract

Today, in great part thanks to feminist mobilizations, domestic violence has been recognized as a human rights issue and is explicitly addressed in various international human rights laws and conventions. There has thus been a clear advance in the international normative framework for protecting victims of domestic violence. However, despite this recognition in international human rights laws and norms, we argue that women’s human rights to be free from domestic violence are still not being realized due to a range of factors, including both a continuing reticence by States to acknowledge domestic violence as a human rights issue, especially when this comes into conflict with other political priorities and policies, and by procedural and other barriers that prevent victims of domestic violence from accessing justice through the mobilization of human rights law. This chapter uses case studies of domestic violence in conflict and post-conflict, and domestic violence as a form of gender-based persecution in asylum claims to illustrate some of the limits to the human rights framework for claiming protection for victims of domestic violence.