Human rights apply to all humans, so why do some complain about human right volition so frequently? Despite Article 1 and 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 14, 15 and 16 of the constitution of India guaranteeing to all the Right to Equality and the Right against discrimination numerous sects of society have expressed displeasure with the way these rights are implemented. Despite constituting about half of the world's population women are considered a social minority and have faced grave discrimination across time.

Although human rights are regarded as universal by definition, a multitude of feminist scholars have criticized the human rights discipline for excluding women . This critique claims that human rights have been founded upon exclusively male experiences, and as a result of this structural condition, serve only a superficial function for women. Further, it is to be noted that human rights as they exist today have failed to recognize the different kinds of discrimination and violations women encounter, and the fact that women’s rights are often not thought of as human rights reflects a perturbing reality.

To begin with, it is important to conduct an analysis of how the human rights framework has consistently failed to take into consideration the specificity of the conditions in which the majority of women’s rights violations take place; the home. Along with another structural criticism, which sustains that human rights focus far too much on the actions of the state .

If any other group other than women was subjected to such violations, it would undoubtedly spark a civil and political emergency as well as acknowledgement of the crimes as a gross violation of the victims’ humanity. This point illuminates what seems to be the focal issue of the majority of feminist critiques of human rights; that human rights are in fact men’s rights. Although human rights are intended to be universal, by examining the category of ‘human’ in relation to ‘men’ and ‘women’ we can see that the appearing universal and non-gender-differentiated ‘human’ is in actuality distinctly ‘androcentric’, that is, focused on male experience and assuming an implicit bias towards men as the norm. This argument will be explored in more detail in the following section but it is important to mention at this point because it provides the first indication of a structural bias within human rights. For now, I want to focus on an empirically more noticeable structural dimension that has effected the exclusion of women from human rights: the oversight of the private sphere.

The feminist tradition is well known for drawing attention to what happens within the home, and exposing its political significance. Okin stresses the importance of viewing the family as political and within the realm of justice. The failure to consider what happens in the home as political leads to human rights serving only a superficial function for the majority of women. This is because, traditionally, the human rights framework is modeled in such a way that it excludes the particular kinds of violations that women habitually encounter. Since the focus of human rights has chiefly been on state action, and not on the structural conditions in place that actually legitimize and perpetuate these kinds of violations.

Liberal states are hesitant to interfere with the private lives of citizens, at least in the case of women, because frequently the types of discrimination and violations that occur are directly connected with ‘private’ cultural practices or attitudes. This makes it difficult for states, because they do not want to infringe on peoples civic liberties, but at the same time they have a duty to do so. Still, states interfere with private issues all the time; abuse cases are a prime example. So the issue is not that we think that the family should be completely sealed off from the political. Rather, the family is part of the basic structure of society and is shaped by the political, take the examples of marriage laws, for instance. Evidently, the family has dramatic effects on clearly political matters such as income inequality and life prospects. Therefore, it would seem that considering the family as political is a necessary condition for justice. The purpose of the discussion above is to show how human rights have inadequately dealt with the issues that are central to women’s lives. Some advances appear to have been made, like Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women or CEDAW, but many feminists argue that this nowhere near enough in order for there to be real change in women’s lives. Which is why the first step forward is accepting that the private sphere needs to be considered as political, especially in the realm of human rights.Lot of questions arises to related point with regard to human rights and its focus on the state and the fact that the dominant political actor is male. ‘Of course, women sometimes suffer abuses such as political repression that are similar to men. In these situations, female victims are often invisible, because the dominant image of a political actor in our world is male. Women also experience sexual abuse in situations where their other human rights are being violated, as political prisoners or members of persecuted ethnic groups. So, an evident but useful analogy would be how an indigenous man will be discriminated against for being indigenous, but never for being male, however, women encounter a variety of violations distinctly connected with being female on top of other kinds of discrimination and violations. And it is these kinds of violations that are often ignored.

Men are permitted to be individuals, so can be violated as individuals. If you are hurt as a member of a group, the odds that the group will be considered human are improved if it includes men. Under guarantees of international human rights, as well as in everyday life, a woman is ‘not yet a name for a way of being human.

To substantiate the argument, I want to examine the way law of rape is formulated. Rape law is thought of as being explicitly concerned with the interests of women. But the way it is structured and practiced reflects an implicit partiality toward a male point of view. Rape law ‘reflects both the defendant’s interpretation of the sexual encounter (a view encapsulated in the recognition of a man’s subjective mistake about the other person’s consent as a defense) and a masculine view of the nature of female sexuality (for example in rules of evidence which construe the sexual history of the victim as potentially relevant to her credibility in alleging rape)... the issue here can be identified in terms of a critique of neutrality: in moving to a model based on the reasonable person rather than the reasonable man, have women’s perspectives and interests really entered the law, or have they rather been yet more effectively buried from view? This shows how disciplines such as law and human rights are governed by men’s principles and men’s reality.Violations against women are scarcely recognized now, moreover, when they are recognized, the way in which they are recognized embodies a distinctly male ideology. The upsetting statics prove that even in Western, fully developed, pro human rights countries , the legal, social and political framework is utterly deficient when it comes to dealing with violations against women. Similarly, human rights do not seem to be fairing much better. The urgency for a radical re-shaping remains underdeveloped and for the most part. Here we can realise that the problem is more deep-rooted than structural and institutional flaws, the problem is cultural. The society in which we live in is a patriarchy, with power concentrated in the hands of men. This structure actively prevents women from becoming autonomous and complete human beings. Women have been persistently denied rights, such as access to economic resources, political power, and control of their own reproduction. It seems that until some drastic changes are made in the way we think and function within society, human rights have no chance of achieving real change for women..

Objections to CEDAW: the concept of ‘women’s rights’ as detrimental for women. One palpable concern about CEDAW, although not explicitly a feminist one, is that it excludes men. It points out two important factors that the convention,

1) despite its focus on women’s rights, is also the preeminent treaty on gender inequality. But the narrow and exclusive focus on women, undercuts the purpose of achieving gender equality.

2) CEDAW does not attempt to define its central subject, ‘women’. This might not have been considered problematic at the time of CEDAW’s adoption, but now the complexity of sex and gender is recognized in a variety of contexts.

Some feminists have argued that the concept of universal human rights makes the specific problems women face as a group, invisible. Therefore, conventions and treaties, such as CEDAW, can actually assist in cementing and legitimizing and the subordination of women by reinforcing traditional gender roles in the home and the workplace. There is another way that feminists have argued against special rights for women. This criticism is more wide-ranging, and brings to light how certain articles which accord formal rights in conventions and laws may have very distinct implications for men and women. So, for example, in order for there to be genuine equal opportunity for employment, there would have to be a genuine reformation to childcare arrangements added to traditional approaches of human rights in order to make women more visible and so that human rights both conceptually and practically, can take better account of women’s lives. This conceptual re-structuring is fundamental in shaping the way that society treats the central issues of women’s lives

The focus on state action and the resistance to consider the private as political has, for the most part, ignored the specific kinds of violations women habitually encounter. Due to the fact that human rights are based on state action, and are enforced internationally predominantly between states, enforcement is channeled through publicity, moral force and international pressure, which in a way, guarantees the non-enforcement of human rights. The problem that women’s rights have not been considered human rights means that when men use their civil liberties socially to deprive women of theirs, it does not look like a human rights violation. But, when government deprives men of theirs, it does. Men’s violations fit the paradigm of human rights violations because the paradigm has been based on the experiences of men. The fact that human rights principles have been based on the experience of men , means that what women need for equality has not only not been guaranteed, but much of women’s inequality was guaranteed in the form of men’s individual liberties. These structural conditions have led to women being excluded from human rights, not only have the specific violations against women not been recognized, but the lack of enforcement and the failure to incorporate women’s perspective into law and human rights has produced ‘the biggest gap between principle and practice in the known legal world’. These structural deficiencies have to be transformed by incorporating women’s perspectives into the model of human rights or getting rid of ‘gender’ all together. Under the current framework, the majority of women are unable to exercise substantive rights. Once a women’s human rights framework is in place, then women will be able to express and analyse their experiences of degradation, discrimination and abuse .