Protecting Women's Human Rights: A Case Study in the Philippines

Health and Human Rights, 1996

The founding of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) arose out of concern within the scientific and medical community about the human rights violations affecting their colleagues and the severe health effects of human rights violations on the general population. PHR, as a membership organization, has pioneered the field of the activist health professional in human rights, through its many missions documenting violations both of human rights and of humanitarian law; its advocacy efforts; and its educational programs. It identifies new challenges and effective strategies to protest abuses, engage governments and professional colleagues in dialogue, and support likeminded health professionals who work in situations in which their obligations to their patients are often overridden by their obligations to States that want to hide human rights violations.

Australian Feminist Studies, 2013

My review of Niamh Reilly's book on transnational feminist advocacy and activism: Women's Human Rights (2009).

C. Blengino and A. Gascón (eds.), Epistemic Communities at the Boundaries of Law: Clinics as a Paradigm in the Revolution of Legal Education in the European Mediterranean Context, 2019

This text addresses issues related with the teaching of human rights not only as a specific course, but also as a cross-cutting theme of growing importance in contemporary law. Firstly, we will briefly go over some values and skills that one can work on in a legal clinic. Values and skills that through the clinical methodology one can work on with students in a much more effective manner than with traditional teaching methods. Finally, considering the low presence of legal clinics in a country like Spain and the need to promote and develop them, three possible routes to introduce this learning method in law curricula will be suggested.

2009

University of Ibadan Journal of Public and International Law , 2015

Reproductive and sexual health issues affecting women and girls include sexual abuse, râpe, coercion, harassment, sexually-transmitted infections, unsafe sex, unwanted pregnancy and illégal abortion, infertility and inability to regulate fertility or negotiate sex. These are most often considered private and confidential, and victims may not desire or require the formalities and exposure of regular courts. The pro-bono legal clinics without resort to the regular courts or litigation, particularly in the resolution of issues affecting women’s reproductive and sexual health rights, is another form of access to justice. The employment of a plural normative System of resolving dispute in African lives and society remains crucial to engendering and ensuring access to justice for women

________________________________________________________________________________ This paper will attempt to examine the issue of abortion as a human rights issue in Indonesia, where abortion is legal and regulated under a specific set of circumstances, which permits the termination of pregnancy in cases where continuing on with a pregnancy can be proven to be detrimental to the physical and mental health of the mother and the fetus itself, and/or in cases where the pregnancy is caused by sexual crimes, such as rape and incest. However, the rather conservative nature of the society and the local culture -which is influenced by Islamic attitudes towards modesty and sexual practices -prohibits the government from openly socializing its' initiatives and thus forces women to clandestinely seek illegal abortion as a result of the lack of public awareness and out of fear of stigmatization and negative social repercussions due to the association of abortion with a liberal, Western lifestyle. As a result, despite the gains made in the legal front, it is safe to state that

Retrieved online at http://www. cwg. rutgers. edu/ …, 2007

2011

In her 2011 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, 1 Margaret Sekaggya, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, 2 calls attention to the work of sexual and reproductive rights defenders. This group includes a number of individuals who might not initially be recognized as falling under the umbrella of "human rights defenders"-LGBT 3 activists; reproductive healthcare workers who provide access to contraception and abortion; and those providing access to HIV information, prevention services, and treatment, among others. The recognition of sexual and reproductive rights defenders as human rights defenders is an important and timely step in ensuring that women (and men) have access to the sexual and reproductive health ser-* Director of the U.S. Legal Program, Center for Reproductive Rights. ** Director of the Law School Initiative, Center for Reproductive Rights. The authors would like to thank Center staff whose work has closely informed this essay, including Karen Leiter, Michelle Movahed, and Bonnie Scott Jones. Nicole Tuszynski provided excellent research assistance. Special thanks goes to Katrina Anderson, formerly of the Center and now at U.N. Women, for her work recognizing sexual and reproductive rights defenders as human rights defenders in a 2009 briefing paper, which is used and cited in this essay.

Women's Human Rights

International Journal of Clinical Legal Education

Legal clinics are playing a very prominent role in promoting human rights and filling global access to justice gaps through justice education. In turn, they provide access to justice for the poor and marginalized in fulfilment of this social justice mandate. Clinicians realize that human rights and justice education is key to their social justice mission. Apart from adding statements about the importance of justice to their mission statement, clinics have in place programs fundamentally oriented around a vision of justice. Students in clinics play very important roles in achieving their clinics’ social justice mission and goals by sensitizing youths, women, children, inmates and citizens to change thought processes and mold the social fabric needed for a just society, promoting a culture of lawfulness through generating solutions to several social issues that results in good citizenship, improved policies, good governance, access to justice and effective remedies. Generally, the obj...

Lancet, 2007

For humanitarian health-care practitioners bearing witness to violations of human dignity has become synonymous with denunciations, human rights advocacy, or lobbying for political change. A strict reliance on legal interpretations of humanitarianism and human rights is inadequate for fully understanding the problems inherent in political change. With examples from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the USA, the Rwandan genocide, and physician-led political activism in Nepal, we describe three cases in which health practitioners bearing witness to humanitarian and human-rights issues have had imperfect outcomes. However these acts of bearing witness have been central to the promotion of humanitarianism and human rights, to the pursuit of justice that they have inevitably and implicitly endorsed, and thus to the politics that have or might yet address these issues. Despite the imperfections, bearing witness, having fi rst-hand knowledge of humanitarian and human-rights principles and their limitations, and systematically collecting evidence of abuse, can be instrumental in tackling the forces that constrain the realisation of human health and dignity.

International Human Rights of Women,, 2019

This chapter reviews the many achievements of the last 25 years − expressed in the proliferation of laws, norms, and mechanisms − to advance the human rights of women and LGBTQI people and considers in five subsections what is required to achieve their implementation. First, it appraises the major achievement of ending the invisibility of myriad forms of gender-based violence (GBV) and expanding the contexts in which GBV is understood as a complex violation of human rights and, in some situations, a war crime and crime against humanity. Second, it traces a growing consensus that implementation of the human rights of women is inextricable from putting into practice recognition of the indivisibility of human rights. Third, it considers fresh discussions of the supposed binary of “universal human rights” versus and “culture,” concluding that the construct denies the gender harms perpetuated by patriarchal cultures across “the West” and distracts attention from the imperative that human rights implementation must be context-specific in every part of the world. Fourth, it is argued, any twenty-first-century agenda for the human rights of women must proceed from a critical, intersectional perspective – one that recognizes that different women and LGBTQI people experience gender-based disadvantage or oppression differently. Moreover, the concepts of intersectionality and vulnerability deployed in this endeavor must focus on the state and non-state actions required to create conditions that ameliorate vulnerability, and under which differently situated women can access and enjoy their human rights. Finally, implementation of commitments to the human rights of women must address root causes – that is, seek to transform the institutions and structural conditions that perpetuate the disadvantages and unequal power relations that foster vulnerability to abuses of human rights in the first place.

Human Rights Quarterly, 1990

This document includes two articles describing the failure of the international human rights movement to consider or remedy the situation of women outside of the basic demand for political rights of people in general. The first article, "Women's Rights as Human Rights: Toward a ReVision of Human Rights" (Charlotte Bunch), emphasizes the responsibility of governments and patriarchy for the perpetuation of violence against women. Little is done to remedy domestic violence, and in many countries females are routinely denied education, health care, and proper nutrition, with the result that they are unable to escape from the subjugated position that is traditional to the culture. The article explores the importance and difficulty of connectir4 women's rights tn human rights. Four basic approaches that have been used to make the connection are: (1) women's rights as political and civil rights, (2) women's rights as socioeconomic rights, (3) women's rights and the law, and (4) a feminist transformation of human rights. The second article, "Violence Against Women: An Obstacle to Development" (Roxanna Carrillo), specifically looks at strategies for combating violence against women as related to development planning. At multiple program levels, an awareness of cultural specific forms of gender violence can help identify and overcome obstacles impeding women's participation. Such programs must recognize that change can be threatening and can result in more violence. Women must be trained in communication skills, awareness of possible actions, management skills, and self defense. On a very direct level, projects can test one or more education campaigns and seek to make violence unacceptable within a society. (DK)