Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Twenty-Five Years On

Abstract

“Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” by Charlotte Bunch (published in Human Rights Quarterly in 1990), is considered a classic text in the field of women’s human rights. In it, Bunch sets out her arguments about the importance of connecting women’s rights to human rights in theory and practice and what prevented recognition of women’s rights as human rights. This chapter revisits Bunch’s 1990 article to explore continuity and change in how gender and women’s human rights are viewed 25 years after the UN World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna 1993) declared that “the human rights of women … are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights.” The chapter is organized around the responses given by Bunch to a series of questions about the continued relevance of the ideas developed in “Women’s Rights as Human Rights” regarding, for example, the current status of human rights as a global ethical and political vision compared to 1990; the nature of the excuses given for inaction on the human rights of women, then and now; and the extent to which the international human rights community has fulfilled its promise in 1993 to prioritize the human rights of women, especially by addressing gender-based violence.