The human rights conundrum in women's meetings every year

Every year, a number of regional and international meetings are held, with the general theme touching on one aspect or another of women’s rights. The latest of these is the fourth Women Deliver Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, that ended this week. The conference focused on a range of issues, including maternal, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, education, environment, and economic empowerment. It made a case through what it terms the Deliver for Good campaign highlighting 12 critical areas that, with greater investment, could improve the lives of women and girls and speed up efforts to achieve gender equality. This is important. Yet, it testifies to the woeful state of womanhood to attract such consistent concern over the same issues year after year with little heed from those who should care most in families, communities and nations. The Women Deliver, a global advocate for girls’ and women’s health, rights, and wellbeing, believes that “when the world invests in girls and women, everybody wins.” The belief echoes the ever urgent refrain in the well known saying, “when you educate a woman you educate a nation,” attributed to the Ghanaian scholar Dr James Emmanuel Kwegyir-Aggrey (1875-1927). It is, indeed, an ever urgent refrain rallying for women’s rights. But, for all the effort, as we in community development often wonder, why should it seem to take so long to secure them their rights year in year out? Put another way, for all the time it is taking for their universal realization, who owes women their rights that the persistent effort should seem so utterly dismal? According to the first article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. If there is a problem in the apparent neglect of an entire section of humanity, it can be traced to the history and foundations of the concept of human rights: The fact that human rights are often unenforceable in the socio-cultural milieu we live in infused with religious ideologies. I do not discount that much has been achieved for women with gender friendly policies in many countries across the world. But some legal scholars would argue that, like the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the achievements are a political settlement. The truth is, aside from the feminist slogans – “the personal is political” – most of the world citizenry remains locked in the grip of persistent patriarchal socio-cultural mores entrenched in religious ideologies that perceive women as subservient to their men, from the rural to the urban among the educated and uneducated alike. Some legal scholars maintain that, philosophically speaking, human rights do not exist. And Mahatma Gandhi denied human rights are inalienable, arguing that rights are owned by states which can – and do – take them away when necessary in the perceived safeguard to the national good. Duties, Gandhi said, are the only things that human beings possess inalienably. Nobody can take away from you your duty, and you cannot have rights without duties. He believed that is on the basis of duties that human beings are at their most heroic, as one scholar recalled in a BBC programme the other day. I would stand with Gandhi and proclaim that each one of us owes the other our duty to protect their right to self realization, whatever the endeavour may be. In Ubuntu, the existential saying is, I am because you are. Katja Iversen, CEO of Women Deliver, put it this way during the conference in Copenhagen: The Deliver for Good campaign will drive action toward what we know is true: investing in girls and women unlocks untapped potential, and creates a ripple effect that benefits families, communities and entire nations. It’s 2016. Now is the time to turn the conversation from ‘if and why’ to ‘how and now’. I would add that it works not just for the women, but for the most vulnerable among us.

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The human rights conundrum in women's meetings every year