“Women Run the Show”?: Gender Violence Reform and the “Stretching” of Human Rights in Rwanda

Abstract

Even many scholars considered to be strong human rights universalists understand that the interpretation and implementation of human rights will vary across time and place. What remains unclear is how much room for interpretation exists before the rights in question are no longer recognizable as human rights. This article engages this question through an analysis of Rwanda's 2009 gender violence legislation, a law framed by the government as human rights-oriented and widely praised as “landmark” legislation. I argue that an analysis of its provisions reveals the dangers of approaching the implementation of gender violence legislation as a progressive step in itself and that granting flexibility to authoritarian, post-conflict societies in the interpretation of human rights norms risks stretching human rights in a way that undercuts the principle that makes them distinctive—that all persons are entitled to equal concern and respect, independent of the fulfillment of social obligations.