Various international conferences have kept women’s rights at the heart of the programme in
order to create significant political commitments to women’s human rights and equality.
Firstly in 1975, also considered to be an International Women’s Year, Mexico City organised
the World Conference on the International Women’s Year, that led to the creation of World
Plan of Action and the designation of 1975–1985 as the United Nations Decade for Women.
Later in 1980, another international conference on women was held in Copenhagen
(Denmark) that opened the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Womenfor signature. The third World Conference on Women was held in Nairobi,
which instructed the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination to begin its working in
1982. These three major global conferences witnessed extraordinary activism on the part of
women from around the world and laid the groundwork for the multiple world conferences in
the 1990s to address women’s rights. One of the such global conference was the Fourth
World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. This conference focused on the rights
of women belonging to particular groups, such as older women, ethnic minority women or
women with disabilities. Certain women issues have been also addressed in various other
international policy documents such as the International Plans of Action on Ageing (Vienna,
1982 and Madrid, 2002), the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (2001) and the
World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons (1982).
Human rights are the basic rights which are mandatorily obtainable by every individual as a
member of human family. Right to equality is conferred by the Article 14 of the Indian
Constitution. Surprisingly, in the arena of women’s human rights in India, a wide gap exists
between theory and practice. Indian society is a patriarchal society where men are always
assumed to be superior to society. The women in India very often have to face discrimination,
injustice and dishonour. Though women in India have been given more rights as compared to
men, even then the condition of women in India is miserable. The paper will throw light on
the human rights of women in India and that how all the fundamental rights given to the
women are being violated in India, by focussing on the various crimes done against them
such as sexual violence, dowry deaths, marital rape etc.
This Violence against women is a type of gender discrimination and violation of human
rights endures everywhere throughout the world. Global bodies are attempting to ensure
women's rights and protect through different treaties and declarations. Despite the fact that
there is raising awareness against these issues, there has been little advancement in
decreasing the viciousness against women and leaving a millions of women to live in to
extraordinary hopelessness and agony. There are distinctive types of abuses against women,
either as physical, sexual, mental and financial. Women are exposed to abuses in a wide
scope of set up, for example, family, network, work places, equipped clashes and so on and
new innovations may make new types of brutality. Any sort of brutality against women is the
infringement of human rights. This study mainly focusing on violence against women as
human right violation in Indian context and an appraisal of existing laws.
