THE ANALYSIS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ‘INFLATION’ IN THE CONTEXT OF EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL REGIME OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Abstract

Without a doubt, the concern about ‘human rights inflation’ reflects the modern world’s increasing ambition, breadth and complexity in developing the human rights regime. This rapidly expanding catalogue of rights has generated discussion about human rights proliferation, devaluation and too vast interpretation. Consequently, some critics perceive new generations of human rights as less relevant, which ultimately is supposed to alter their purpose, legitimacy, and effectiveness. This article seeks to disentangle the inflation objection from other concerns about rights expansionism and to critically assess it. Therefore, it will both analyze the phenomenon of rights inflation as well as evaluate its scope of implication based on the progressive development of women’s rights in the domain of gender-based violence and conflict-related sexual violence. The article will also analyze examples of possible regresses of women’s rights in the topic of reproductive rights based on constitutional court decisions in the United States and Poland. To underline only a few examples, the most striking ones will be presented and they will relate to (i) the evolution of women’s rights invigorated by the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the interpretation of its provisions by the CEDAW Committee, (ii) the recognition of the crime of sexual violence in armed conflicts as well as a more accurate definition of the crime of rape and lastly (iii) the exponential progress of second generation rights, which include social, economic and political emancipation of women. The article will reach its conclusion by explaining the importance of generating a sense of closure in human rights interpretation through drawing strict boundaries around the corpus of ‘proper’ human rights without entitling to a suspicion of claims of too far-reaching cultural and political transformations within societal structure. Instead of calling it human rights devaluation, the author argues that it should be perceived as human rights evolution, which encompasses both a constant adjustment and reinterpretation of rights according to the rapidly changing world as well as the way people understand it.