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CULTURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS 8/14/2006 12:16:03 AM
Should culture be protected, or should human rights be protected?
Should culture be protected, or should human rights be protected?
We Humans seem to use culture as an excuse for all sorts of Human shortcomings, primitivism, and stupidity. If you say that it is your culture to beat your wife on Fridays, it seems then to become acceptable behaviour for you, and other humans are then expected to be tolerant towards your behaviour. This acceptance of ‘everything goes if culturally mandated’ is crazy. I emphatically say, to hell with our precious Human culture, or rather cultures. Let us rid ourselves of this unproductive, strange, and primitive affliction – it is sickening.
There is a real tension between the aim of feminists to promote the equality of women and the aim of multiculturalists to promote the preservation of disadvantaged or endangered cultural groups.
Over the past 25 years, there has been increasing recognition that the earlier, post-World War II conceptions of human rights need to be radically reconsidered in order to address fully women’s human rights.
Let us think about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. This document states that women and men have equal rights. It is remarkable that the declaration should have said this at the time it was written because none of the states that signed and ratified it had equal rights for women. There were a number of things that were different and unequal, for men and women in England under the then legal system. French women could not even vote; in Switzerland, they could vote at certain levels of government but not at others.
If you read the declaration carefully, it becomes clear that it is one of those documents that were originally written for men. However, somebody then added women. Many of the rights it refers to have to do with male-headed households. For example, there is a clause about the family that says the privacy of the family is to be protected. Moreover, persons have a right to preserve the honour and integrity of the family. There are words that come up often in the context of women's sexuality, such as a daughter's sexual behaviour or even rape, which can be seen as affronts to the family's honour, for which the girl can be punished and sometimes even be killed. They have a lot to do with patriarchal cultures – where men are seen as the guardians of family honour.
In addition, all the rights asserted in the declaration are held to be rights against states specifically. For example, people have a right to physical integrity and not to be tortured by their government. Nevertheless, many times when women are physically violated or attacked it is not by the state; it is by men in their own environments, i.e. husbands, or boyfriends, or fathers. Therefore, the problem for women is not so much the state but other persons, yet the document is focused on the state as a violator of rights.
Thirty-one years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued, it was becoming obvious that many countries, if not all, had policies and laws that clearly discriminated against women. Therefore, a convention was put together, which is commonly known as the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women).
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, is often described as an international bill of rights for women. Consisting of a preamble and 30 articles, it defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination.
Whatever you think of the practical effectiveness of such documents, you can learn quite a lot by looking at countries’ reactions to them. Many countries, including the UK, have not ratified the CEDAW. Even among the signatories, many countries have objected, more than to any other international human rights document. They objected that they ‘…cannot abide by this particular part of the document’. Most of them base their objections on cultural and/or religious grounds. Of those that have signed or ratified the convention, a number – including India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Israel – have expressed certain reservations. In particular, they object to Article 16 of the convention that explicitly states that men and women are to have the same rights and responsibilities during marriage and at its dissolution.
Most of the countries that express this reservation state more or less explicitly that it is because their state marriage and divorce laws are in accord with religious law. In many cases, although not all, it is the Islamic Shariah. The Shariah specifies that husbands and wives have complementary rather than the same responsibilities, roles, and rights. As a result, it is said that Islamic states cannot abide by this clause.
In this context, it is worth noting that cultural or religious exemptions from international documents are by no means the usual modus operandi. When one looks at the cultural reasons for exemptions from international treaties one finds that such justifications stand notably more chance of being accepted when they are about the unequal treatment of women than when they deal with other issues. For example, there are no such reservations by countries signing the earlier 1965 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In addition, culturally based claims for exemptions or exceptions from treaties or conventions about other issues such as whaling or cutting down the rainforests have considerably more chance of gaining international acceptance than when the exemption is based on unequal practices regarding women. In short, culture does not generally triumph in cases like racial discrimination or whaling, but it does triumph, and is accepted as triumphing, when issues of women’s equality are concerned.
As some scholars have noted, women’s equality and the claims to rights of cultures and religions have been on a collision course ever since the 1948 Declaration because that document states both so boldly. The tension between the two was further increased when the rights of people of culturally distinct groups were promulgated in the UN Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights in 1966.
One could argue that as a prerequisite to any defence or protection of a cultural group, that group should be required to change its marriage and divorce laws in order to make women equal within them. Of course, this would be a major change for many religions and cultures. Nevertheless, it seems to me that any group seeking official recognition and rights within a liberal society, or seeking to be part of generally recognised human rights community, should at least have to reform its teaching and practices to bring them in line with basic equalities for men and women. [See Susan Moller Okin’s, ‘When Cultural Values Clash with Universal Rights: Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ Presentation on Oct. 29, 2001, was part of the Markkula Ethics Center Lecture Series.
