International response to DV

Here are the stories of two women – one, a young immigrant Indian woman in the US, and the other, a woman in Bangladesh; both are in abusive relationships that they would like to leave, but both are let down, variously, by the laws of the country they live in. In Bangladesh, there is a lack of legislation and legal structure that even addresses the issue of DV. The US does have anti-DV legislation, but it is not comprehensive enough to protect victims of DV adequately.

Since individual countries cannot or do not live up to the responsibility of protecting its citizens, Zakia Afrin, a professor of law (and legal consultant for Maitri!), argues that we need to have a globally binding framework that will protect the rights of women who are victims of DV.

Until recently, women’s rights were considered to be covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” It was only in 1993 that the UN General Assembly specifically addressed the issue of women’s rights in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. Adoption of this resolution obliges states to combat violence against women, and prohibits states from invoking any custom, tradition, or religious consideration in order to avoid that obligation.

In 1999, the UN General Assembly further adopted the Convention on Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) which requires signatories to undertake a series of measures to end discrimination against women, such as incorporating gender equality into existing legal systems. (The US has not signed this treaty).

It was only in 2006 that the UN Secretary General’s office recognized that “the most common form of violence experienced by women globally is intimate partner violence, sometimes leading to death” and recommended that the “United Nations should take a stronger, better coordinated and more visible leadership role to address violence against women.”

In spite of these increasingly strongly worded statements from the UN, however, Afrin points out there has been no law that explicitly prohibits domestic violence, and only 44 countries have adopted legislation condemning DV. Some observers view this as a failure of the global approach. They argue that international treaties cannot overcome local attitudes towards women, and suggest that DV has to be tackled at the local level. Afrin counters this argument by proposing that international treaties, in fact, have not gone far enough. She shows that such treaties and resolutions can be and have been used to mobilize support for women’s rights at the local level; she suggests that formally recognizing DV as a human rights violation provides a much needed moral force to these movements.

[For more information, see: Afrin, Z. (2010). Domestic Violence and the Need for an International Legal Response. In M. K. Sinha (Ed.), International Criminal Law and Human Rights (359-373). New Delhi, India: Manak Publications.]