The following are (personal) excerpts from some articles (quoted below) that can be used to frame the debate that we want to propose for a revision of the Peasants’ Charter.
1. Feminist Criticism of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
There are two main arguments in the criticisms of the Declaration. In the first place, its historical origin, born in the bosom of Western liberal thought that raises the concept of individualism to a higher level, not compatible with other cultures. From this point of view, it is recalled that alternative notions of morality exist in other non-Western cultures, which give more importance to the collective than to the individual. In this sense, it is easier to understand the position of (Latin American) indigenous peoples in the debate on land rights, according to which collective rights, which are the basis of their cultural identity and therefore indispensable for their survival, are above any individual rights (claimed, for example, by women).
The other argument refers to the basic vision of the Declaration, centered on the public sphere of the relationship between the (male) individual and the State. This left aside the private sphere, where women's subordination is most evident: the practices and traditions of everyday life, and the reproductive sphere.
Consequently, the demands of the feminist world are twofold: on the one hand, to extend the rights of the Declaration to private relations and, on the other, for women to be able to participate and really exercise their rights in the public sphere.
(Source: Deere, Carmen, D. & Leon, Magdalena: 2002, Género, Propiedad y Empoderamiento: Tierra, Estado y Mercado, PUEG-UNAM/FLACSO, Mexico).
2. Other criticisms of the Universal Declaration
In the middle of the last century, after the devastation of the two wars in Europe (with worldwide impact due to colonialism), human rights reached a high point with the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which ideologically supported the work of the UN.
Human rights, like the modern thinking from which they originate, were conceived from Europe and then projected to the rest of the world as the "universal" recipe for living in a better and fairer world, with constant emphasis on how backward the "underdeveloped" nations of the "Third World" are, and how they are violators of human rights and that only through what the UN defines as Human Rights will they be able to improve their quality of life, health, education, development, welfare, with a whole battery of technical tools to measure whether they are improving the standards of democracy and welfare according to the North.
The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 states: "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world". This is the liberal concept of human rights, whose origin is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, where women were not conceived as subjects of rights, but only white bourgeois men, in which all human beings are born with the same rights.
Article 1 of the UDHR states that: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and, endowed as they are with reason and conscience, should behave towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. According to this historic document, human beings are not subjects of time and space, but are subjects of rights. Once again, we are faced with the same problem as in the preamble, where it is assumed that all human beings are born in freedom and equality. The problem with considering human rights as the product of birth means that it depoliticizes human rights, which means that it removes human rights from the political realm, when in fact all aspects of human life are political.
[...]
It is possible to say that between 1948 and 1989, human rights were predominantly an instrument of the cold war, a reading that for a long time was in the minority. The hegemonic discourse of human rights was used by Western democratic governments to exalt the superiority of capitalism over the communism of the socialist bloc of the Soviet and Chinese regimes.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was seen as the unconditional victory of human rights. But the truth is that subsequent international politics revealed that, with the fall of the socialist bloc, human rights also fell. From that moment on, the kind of global capitalism that took hold since the 1980s (neoliberalism and global finance capital) promoted an increasingly narrow narrative of human rights.
It began by provoking a struggle against social and economic rights. And today, with the total prioritization of economic freedom over all other freedoms, and with the rise of the extreme right, civil and political rights themselves, and with them liberal democracy itself, are called into question as obstacles to capitalist growth. All this confirms the relationship between the hegemonic conception of human rights and the cold war.
Against this backdrop, two paradoxical and disturbing conclusions, and a demanding challenge, emerge. The apparent historical victory of human rights is leading to an unprecedented degradation of the expectations of a dignified life for the majority of the world's population. Human rights are no longer a conditionality in international relations.
[...]
The problem with the liberal concept of human rights is that it perceives rights as a product of laws, when in reality human rights are the product of social movements and struggles of oppressed groups for their rights.
The most important aspect of human rights is not necessarily the abstract theory, but the actual possibility for people to claim their rights. This means that what must be guaranteed above all are the conditions under which people are able to fight for the realization of their rights. The legal perspective of human rights as law would simply reduce it to a bureaucratic process, under which those who have been denied their rights must seek a favorable resolution from the Human Rights Commission. What really needs to happen is for people to have sufficient human rights education and also the individual and collective power to make their rights a reality.
The legal division and classification of human rights shows that there is a hierarchy and prioritization of rights. The three generations of human rights are 1) Civil and political rights (right to private property, freedom of expression, right to vote, freedom of assembly); 2) Economic, social and cultural rights (education, health, development, labor rights) and 3) Collective rights (right to peace, environmental rights, right to self-determination).
This hierarchy in the legal classification of human rights is quite problematic for several reasons: ... it perceives rights as belonging to separate categories and makes their interdependence invisible.
[...]
... the right to property is treated as a right to be guaranteed immediately, whereas the right to a fair wage, a pension, a good education and medical care are second-generation rights and must therefore be guaranteed in the long term.
Another important reason is the differentiation between the first two generations with respect to the third generation of human rights. The idea that environmental rights and the right to peace are considered of lesser importance than the right to private property and the right to development again makes it clear that the subject of human rights is the white male member of the bourgeoisie.
The second generation of rights (economic, social and cultural), mandates the right to development and work within the current economic system, but does not discuss the possibility of choosing in which economic system workers wish to participate. It automatically assumes that the only type of development under which people should live is the capitalist system.
3. About the CEDAW Convention
Article 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) states that:
For the purposes of the present Convention, the term "discrimination against women" shall mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex....
This has been a monumental document in women's struggle against patriarchy. Indeed, it obliges States to eliminate all forms of discrimination in both generations of human rights (civil and political, as well as economic, social and cultural). The problem with this idea of discrimination is that it only sees patriarchy as the form of oppression faced by women.
[...]
Feminism's shift in focus must include not only the visibility of patriarchy, but also "multiple oppressions."
[...]
What Lugones is asserting is that the forms of oppression for indigenous and Afro-descendant women have been very different from the forms of oppression faced by white women. This is not in opposition to white feminism, in fact, quite the opposite. What is being discussed is the fact that while white bourgeois women were oppressed and forced to be "sexually pure" and "passive" and in service to the white bourgeois male, the struggle of Native American women and women of African descent was for their very existence, because their humanity was in question.
Therefore, in creating a document like CEDAW that envisions the struggle of all women, it is very difficult to consider a universal concept of "woman," because women in different contexts have had to face a different set of obstacles, and that must be visible when talking about women's rights.
[...]
By way of conclusion, we must begin to think about human rights that build a transmodern world, where at last the center and the periphery can dialogue horizontally, putting respect for the autonomy of peoples at the center of the table, in order to build a pluriverse, not a universe, of human rights. Inspired by the Zapatista motto: for a world of rights where many rights fit. This means that we would no longer discriminate between which rights are more important than others, because this exclusive hierarchization is the root of many human rights violations. To this end, the intersectional vision is fundamental, as multiple oppressions are posited as a way in which human rights are to be complexified in the way they are fulfilled. Until now, human rights treaties have perceived class, race and gender separately and without making visible the structural violence behind them. Intersectional human rights should be conceived to protect vulnerable groups against forms of oppression and exploitation that are vestiges of colonialism.
(Buenaventura De Sousa Santos, 2020. Para una nueva declaración universal de los derechos
(Zaki Habib Gomez, 2020. Hacia la descolonización de derechos humanos y el feminismo. Tabula Rasa, 38,)
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... it is pertinent to ask whether the States Parties can really comply with the more general recommendations made to them by the Committee under the communications procedure, in a globalized world context under the mandates of the market and where large transnational corporations and private companies do not assume responsibility for human rights.
(Note: in order to implement CEDAW as it should be implemented, it is indispensable the existence of a strong welfare State with sufficient resources and democratic institutions to comply with the recommendations made by the Committee. A neoliberal State, organized only to guarantee the free market, with privatized health, education and information systems, has neither the institutional framework nor the resources to fulfill its obligations).
The question is: how can a State demand that a private sector, whose size and power are growing every day, assume the obligation to respect, protect and, above all, guarantee the human rights of its citizens?
To ask the same question in the context of one of the ten cases just analyzed, how can a State Party that has privatized its health system require the various companies that sell services related to this sector to assume the responsibility, as recommended to Hungary in Communication No. 4, that all competent personnel in its health centers know and apply the relevant provisions of the Convention and the Committee's General Recommendations Nos. 19, 21 and 24 concerning women's reproductive health and rights?
It is also worth asking whether the UN, in this neoliberal context and with its present financial problems, would or could invest the human and financial resources to enable the Committee to do its work in the best possible way. Or, now that the Committee is in Geneva under the secretariat of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and no longer under the secretariat of the DAW, it is possible to ask whether it will be able to improve its gender-sensitive human rights analysis.
The answers to these and other questions will be answered in the course of time. For now, what is known is that the Committee has 23 experts who, without fees and for only three meetings a year, must monitor the implementation of CEDAW in 190 States and be available to receive communications from 90 States that have ratified the Optional Protocol to date, as well as make use of its power to initiate inquiries in those States that allow it to do so.
Against this backdrop, a strong women's movement is needed, organized around their human rights, which can demand from each State, as well as from the community of States, that it is time to eliminate discrimination and inequality against women once and for all. It is already known that all kinds of strategies are required to achieve substantive equality between women and men, but one of these must be the use of instruments that women themselves have achieved before the UN.
That is why it is also time to get down to work and take more cases to the Committee. But it must be used strategically, and this can only be achieved by being informed about what the implementation of each of the articles of CEDAW really means, which is nothing other than the implementation of equality between all women and men in all spheres and levels of their lives. And this means understanding that equality in the framework of human rights, and specifically in the framework of CEDAW, is not equality synonymous with "identical treatment" but equality of results, which obviously includes differentiated treatment because it is based on the diversity between women and men.
This, in turn, means understanding that equality between the sexes can only be achieved by putting an end to all the structures of patriarchy that maintain or support the different forms of oppression and discrimination suffered by all women. Therefore, in order to achieve equality between men and women it is not only necessary to eliminate sexism, but it is absolutely indispensable to eliminate racism and all discrimination based on the idea that there are human beings who are the model of what is human and, therefore, superior to others. The struggles must be based on the conviction that all human beings are equal/identical in dignity and rights, but are very unequal to each other in terms of access to these rights, for reasons that can be remedied precisely through the use of human rights principles and instruments.
Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos. 2009. El protocolo facultativo de la convención sobre la eliminación de todas las formas de discriminación contra la mujer: análisis de los casos ante el comité de la CEDAW / Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos
4. An other worldview: a contribution from Mesoamerica - parity versus equality
For indigenous subjects, the fusion of opposites in fluidity is a fact that they perceive and live as coherent.
Heirs to a philosophical lineage in which women and men are conceived as an inseparable, mutually constitutive pair, indigenous women frequently demand parity.
In ancient Mexico, the dual feminine-masculine unity was fundamental to the creation of the cosmos, its (re)generation and sustenance. The fusion of the feminine and the masculine in a bi-polar principle is a recurrent feature of Mesoamerican thought. This principle, at the same time singular and dual, is manifested through representations of pairs of gods and goddesses, beginning with Ometéotl, the supreme creator, whose name means "double god" or dual divinity.
The life/death duality, which dominates the Mesoamerican world, contains both aspects of the same dual reality. Duality, as the essential force of the order of the cosmos, was reflected in the organization of time.
In a cosmos constructed in this way, there would be little room for a "hierarchical" pyramid-like ordering and stratification.
In the Mesoamerican cosmovision there is no concept of equality. The entire cosmos is conceived of elements that balance against each other -through their differences- and thus create a balance. This balance is in constant change. Equality" is perceived as something static, as something that does not move.
Those of us closely associated with the indigenous movement have come to understand that "walking evenly" is the metaphor that indigenous women use to work toward a just relationship with their men. The concept of balance is beginning to appear as an alternative to equality.
The veneration and spirituality that the land arouses in indigenous women is almost never taken into consideration. It is almost always reduced to the right to possess the land or the right to inherit it. It is translated as if "land" meant only a raw material or a commodity. In today's world, where one can own a piece of land, indigenous women want to own or inherit a piece of land. In a society that has deprived indigenous peoples of the right to collective property, this demand is understandable and indispensable.
However, indigenous women demand the right to land as a place of origins, as a sacred place and as a symbol that merges with their identity.
(Marcos, Sylvia. 2021. Las mujeres zapatistas reconceptualizan su lucha. Tabula Rasa, 38)
5. On the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP).
On December 17, 2018, the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). The fruit of a more than 17-year struggle, the Declaration is now an international legal instrument, and global agricultural movements are mobilizing to support regional and national implementation processes. The participatory process that led to the creation of UNDROP, in which peasant movements (La Via Campesina, FIAN and CETIM (Europe-Third World Center) played a leading role in the formulation of these new human rights, has also been praised.
Despite these achievements, UNDROP fails to recognize several crucial issues for women and gender equality:
- Women's equal rights to inherit land;
- Temporary special measures (including gender equality quotas) to achieve gender equality;
- Explicit recognition of women's sexual and reproductive health and rights;
- Discrimination of farmers on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
La Via Campesina's (LVC) reaction to the reduction of these provisions in the UNDROP was as diverse as the movement itself. LVC and other participating rural groups (such as pastoralists, fisherfolk or indigenous peoples) saw the UNDROP as a way to assert their collective rights to land, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. Gaining recognition of these rights was the movement's priority and the LVC negotiating team clearly did not want to risk losing this battle to advance women farmers' rights. The time pressure towards the end of the negotiations in 2018 meant that some of the final revisions to the draft UNDROP went largely unnoticed by social movement actors and NGO allies.
(https://www.geneva-academy.ch/joomlatools-files/docman-files/Women%20are%20Peasant%20Too.pdf#:~:text=The%202018%20UN%20Declaration%20on%20the%20Rights%20of,provisions%2C%20such%20as%20women’s%20right%20to%20inherit%20land.)
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