Women's Rights, Asylum Jurisprudence and the Crises of International Human Rights Interventions

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The growth of the international women's rights movement and its emergence as a field of research and advocacy has led to a valuable but increasingly self-contained discourse, often cut off from developments in postcolonial conditionalities (‘Postcoloniality’), on the one hand, and conceptions of the different legal contexts in which international human rights operate, on the other. Such a trajectory of ‘development’ in human rights standards for women have no doubt had an enormous impact on women's lives worldwide, but simultaneously it is also culpable of creating the ‘woman-as-victim’ subject, ‘geographically captive’ in the ‘barbaric’ cultures of the ‘Third World’. In this article I will briefly map the developments that led to the integration of gender into the international human rights law discourse and examine how the language of ‘violence’ and ‘respectable victim hood’ (from Vienna 1993 to Beijing 1995) has been privileged leading to the dislocation of ‘discrimination’ as envisaged by the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), as the primary index for measuring women's human rights violations. […] A critique of the international asylum adjudication system is necessary to do a reality check with regard to what it can exactly offer when it comes to drawing the fundamentals of refugee rights guarantees from the basic principles of international human rights law.