The global women's human rights movement has won important battles in the international arena as well as on the home front. In March 1993 the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted for the first time a resolution calling for the integration of the rights of women into the human rightsmechanisms of the United Nations. Later that year, governments participating in the World Conference on Human Rights declared:
the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.
Gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment and exploitation, including those resulting from cultural prejudice and international trafficking, are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person, and must be eliminated.3
This declaration was a milestone for the women's human rights movement because governments around the world had for a long time refused to acknowledge that women, too, are entitled to enjoy their fundamental human rights. In December 1993 the General Assembly took another key step toward integrating women into the U.N.'s human rights work by adopting the Declaration on Violence Against Women. With this declaration, the U.N. member states recognized explicitly that states are obliged to fight specific forms of violence against women and called on governments to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, and punish acts of violence against women.
With the appointment in 1994 of a Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, the U.N. recognized the need to address the gender-specific aspects of violence against women.4 The special rapporteur was given the authority to investigate violence against women, to recommend measures to eliminate this violence, and to work closely with other special rapporteurs, special representatives, working groups, and independent experts of the Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities and treaty bodies to combat violence against women.
Despite such indicators of progress in promoting women's rights, the dismal record on preventing abuse persists. Even those governments that profess a strong commitment to promoting human rights in general have balked at fulfilling their obligation to protect women's rights. On the international level, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women lacks sufficient technical and financial support from the U.N. to carry out her work. Similarly, despite the strengths of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, its effectiveness in promoting women's rights remains severely compromised by inadequate technical and financial resources and its inability to consider individuals' complaints against states. Moreover, the U.N. has failed to integrate women's human rights into its treaty-based and non-treaty-based bodies' system-wide work on human rights. International financial institutions are also in a position to influence the governmental response to abuses against women, yet they generally have refused to address the discriminatory barriers to women's participation in development, or gross violations of women's human rights.
In far too many cases—many of them documented in this report—overwhelming evidence of human rights violations goes unheeded by repressive governments with the tacit acceptance of other governments and international institutions. In very few instances has the international community denounced abuses against women and pressured abusive governments to prevent and remedy them. Thus, in Peru, President Alberto Fujimori has not prosecuted one soldier accused of rape in the context of the counterinsurgency offensive; instead he declared an amnesty for all security forces that makes it legally impossible to investigate the many egregious abuses, including rape by soldiers and police, committed over the past fifteen years. In the United States, the federal government has failed to use its authority to stop torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment of women prisoners in state prisons. In Turkey, the government has yet to investigate police and state doctors for forcing women and girls to undergo virginity exams; indeed the government tried recently to adopt regulations specifically endorsing such exams. And, in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian forces reportedly have renewed their campaign of massive human rights abuse, including rape, to drive non-Serbs out of so-called safe areas.
The challenge for the governments attending the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995 is clear. They must act now to make good on past promises, to eliminate discrimination from their laws andtheir practices, and to stop and punish violence against women wherever it occurs.
3 "The Vienna Declaration and Program of Action," adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights, June 25, 1993, pp. 33-34.
4 U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Fiftieth Session, Resolution 1994/45, March 4, 1994. Endorsed by Economic and Social Council, decision of 1994/254, July 22, 1994.
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