Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Local and Global Perspectives   Strategies and Analyses from the ICCL Working Conference on Women’s Rights as Human Rights (Dublin, March 1997)   Edited by Niamh Reilly

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  Introduction to Section 3: Identifying Women’s Human Rights Issues

Each of the themes in Section 3 reflect important areas of concern in the movement for women’s human rights. The range of themes, from Bodily Integrity and Social Exclusion, underscores the degree to which women are expanding the scope of human rights ideas and practice. In the traditional human rights framework, for example, the primary focus would be on Political Discrimination and Persecution, and even then not on gender-specific violations such as rape as a form of torture. Therefore, the working sessions were structured to encourage a broad and transformative approach to human rights. Participants were asked to identify and discuss the human rights issues from their own perspectives within each theme and to consider how human rights ideas or practices might benefit or strengthen their work on specific issues in different arenas. The resulting discussions presented here are often overlapping and complimentary and highlight the interconnectedness and indivisibility of human rights from the perspective of women.