Women’s Human Rights Step by Step – A practical guide to using International Human Rights Law and Mechanisms to defend Women’s Human Rights seeks to “bring human rights into the home”.
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 established a new milestone in international relations by proposing to all UN member countries a charter of principles that, going beyond national borders and cultural, ethnic and religious particularities, established a minimum level of recognition and defense of the rights and dignity of the human person.
Representing a reaction against atrocities committed during World War II, this Declaration, of inestimable value, nevertheless reflected the post-war order where the very idea of humanity was structured from an abstract figure of man, based on the male individual and the dominant social class and ethnicity. Throughout these decades, and especially in the 1990s when a series of United Nations International Conferences on Environment, Human Rights, Population and Development, Habitat, as well as the Social Summit and the Fifth International Conference on Women took place, the concept of humanity was re-dimensioned starting with the recognition of diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age. At the same time, new dimensions of life such as health, environment, sexuality, were being introduced in the scope of human rights.
This process of broadening the concept of human rights has been accompanied by a series of conventions, treaties, declarations, and action plans that constitute the new international language of these rights. These instruments, of universal and regional scope, many of which are specifically aimed at women, are, as a rule, little known and rarely used.
CEPIA has proposed its translation into Portuguese.
Prepared by two important human rights organizations, Women, Law & Development International and the Women’s Rights Project of Human Rights Watch, which have made significant contributions to the advancement of the recognition of the human rights of women, this book makes an invaluable contribution to this cause. Presented in the form of a handbook, it teaches how to use the main international human rights instruments so that activists, legal operators, and the general population, can make use of them.”Direitos Humanos das Mulheres – Passo a Passo
