Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

Development of Western Women Human Rights in Globalisation

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Development of Western Women Human Rights  in Globalisation

The present status of women in society is a challenge for human rights. Women form nearly half of the human capital  but in terms of gender equality and gender equity, they remain the most deprived and long neglected segment of society, despite the constitutional guarantee for equal rights and privileges for men and women. In modern times all are given liberties and rights, freedom of expression as well as right to get education. Despite this women are fighting for crisis such as dowry, female infanticide, sex selective abortion, health, poverty, education, sexual harassment, domestic violence, etc. In this era of Globalisation the growing attention is considered as a strategy for survival, competition and growth. As a result of this a new economic environment has been created wherein only self-reliant and self-regulated economic enterprises, including women enterprises will survive.  Empowerment of women is the theme of the time and the general trend is towards improvement, however the achievements have still fallen short of expectation.
Development of the Concept and background
Today human rights are universally accepted as those conditions of social life which allow the full development of human personality. They refer to a wide continuum of values that are universal in character and in some sense equally claimed for all human beings. We claim for these rights all over the world simply by being human. The term ‘human’ is itself a vague since the life cycle of a human being ranges from conception to death and decay. Even before conception, sperm and eggs exist that contain human genetic material but decision is made easily on the issue because they are human cells and not human beings. In between the discussions and controversies various groups hold the view that there is some special quality of human life that provides a basis for possessing rights; when that quality is acquired, so are rights.  This approach is favoured by many since it allows for the distinction between humans and other animals. Human rights are rights particularly to human beings, thus the basis of the claim to rights should be something that differentiates humans from other animals.
Likewise the Western philosophical tradition manifests, from the ancient times, the stories of an inevitable conflict between the concept of individual rights and state authority. In the writings of great Greek individual’s right to resistance against sponsored terror was highly glorified. In the later periods the theme of humanity was carried out in the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle who attempted to protect the citizens and non-citizens under a scheme of justice. Another Roman thinker Cicero first gave a philosophical foundation to the concept of rights and its association with the idea of natural law. The concept of natural right as a precondition for human development had received further staunch support in the works of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, who believed that the state as an institution is the most effective instrument for protecting the rights of the individual against the oppression of the rulers. The concept of human rights found its further elaboration and promotion in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and Karl Mark (1818-1883), the revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century.
Evolution in modern times
However, in the evolution of modern human rights the ideas of liberal humanism and universalism played a significant role. For instance John Rawls (1921-2002), who although did not assign the label of universalism to the concept of human rights, but attached a special status to it. ‘These rights do not depend on any particular comprehensive moral doctrine or philosophical conception of human nature …but basic human rights express a minimum standard of well- ordered political institutions for all peoples who belong, as members of good standing, to just political society of peoples.  He also made the human rights distinct from the constitutional rights, or the rights of democratic citizenship, or from other kinds of rights that belong to certain kinds of political institutions, both individual and associations. Jurgen Habermas, another important contributor, called it a part of the post-modern agenda and believed that human rights and the principle of popular sovereignty constitute the sole idea that can justify modern laws.  In today’s society, human rights have become the necessary condition of a regime’s legitimacy and of the decency of its legal order.
Present propositions
In the phase of globalisation, privatisation and liberalisation, the concept of human rights has been defined and analysed by Amartya Sen, the philosopher-economist and Tony Evans, the noted theorist of international politics. Dr. Sen has viewed rights usually in terms of political power and according to him the invoking of human rights tends to come mostly from those who are concerned with changing the world, rather than interpreting it. In the final analysis he concludes that human rights may or may not be reflected in a legal framework through specific human rights legislation, but there are also other ways of implementing human rights that includes, public recognition, agitation and monitoring. While Tony Evans linked the concept of human rights and its universalisation aspect with the issue of power and hegemony.  For him, it is an instrument for empowering people in their fight against persecution and injustice. Evan’s understanding of hegemony provides a new insight into the post-war politics of rights, particularly in the context of the emerging role of US as the leader of human rights.
The theoretical discussions held so far on the human rights, predominantly reflect that it is not citizens rights, but often a thinking about an abstract universal community and imposing political structures, conceptions of individual and peculiar relationships between individual and community that are not generally shared.  In the present there are three categorisation of right based on three major generations of the concept. The first generation of rights refers to the traditional or classical notion of rights denoting different political and civil rights. The second generation of rights mainly includes different types of socioeconomic rights, while the third generation of rights emerges in course of the worldwide anti-imperial movement in different parts of the world and includes cultural rights, environmental rights, right to development, minority rights, etc. All these rights are essential not only because of our existence, as human being but these are needed also to make each one of us an ideal human being.

Dr. Rajkumar Singh is Professor and Head of P.G.Department of Political Science BNMU, West Campus, P.G.Centre, Saharsa-852201. Bihar, India.

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