Women’s Human Rights and the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights

Abstract

The June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights witnessed the extraordinary success of efforts by women’s rights activists worldwide to end the historic disregard of human rights violations against women. Indeed, women’s human rights was perhaps the only area in which the World Conference can be said to have met the challenge of defining a forward-looking agenda twenty-five years after the last world conference on human rights. The conference significantly expanded the international human rights agenda to include gender-specific violations. The final conference document, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, identifies particular examples of gender-specific abuses as human rights violations and calls for integration of women’s human rights throughout United Nations activities. Most strikingly, the conference crystallized a political consensus that various forms of violence against women should be examined within the context of human rights standards and in conjunction with gender discrimination. This Note reviews the treatment of women’s human rights in the Declaration and Programme of Action and related developments in the preparatory process for the World Conference.