Why Human Rights fail Global Southern Women

by Celiwe Mxhalisa | 8 Dec 2025

Following a tumultuous start to her role as first lady of the United States of America, wherein she was accused of destroying ‘family values’ and promoting ‘militant feminism’,^[1] Hillary Clinton delivered a much-lauded speech condemning Chinese abuses of human rights and calling for the protection of women.^[2]

This speech came sixteen years before she would gloat over her role in the assassination of Libya’s Gaddafiand 29 years before she joined the line of people ‘condemning Hamas’ for ‘brutally’ attacking Israeli women. The usurpation of Libya’s president plunged the country into a state of disaster, marked by the infliction of harm against women on a mass scale and a thriving slave trade. She never condemned the well-documented, systemic abuses of Palestinian women and girls at the hands of Israel nor did she revise her statements in light of the fact that certain Hamas sexual violence claims have since been debunked.

There is a clear discrepancy between Clinton’s words and conduct. This inconsistency provides an impetus for the broader question as to whether all women’s rights are synonymous with human rights. This reflection argues that the international human rights regime is incapable of adequately protecting women in the Global South. This is because a) the human rights regime epistemologically excludes Global Southern women from the categories ‘human’ and b) perpetuates European dominance. In addition to advancing these claims in the next two sections, this reflection will detail instances wherein the human rights regime failed to afford Global Southern women adequate protection.

Who’s the ‘human’ in human rights?

Law organises society and indeed the world in ways that make it easier for Eurocentric culture to take its dominance.^[3]

There is some debate on the ‘origins’ of ‘human rights’, with some western revisionist scholars locating it in 1970s, those employing a more ‘traditional’ approach locating it in the British slave abolitionist tradition, others accrediting it to developments in the European Middle Ages and still others connecting it with various critical junctures in the 1900s.^[4] This reflection is concerned not with when, exactly, the dominant human rights regime started, but where they come from and the implications of this locality.

Today’s human rights emerge from a distinctly European context. Whatever conclusion is reached regarding the preponderant human rights regime’s ‘true’ temporal origins, there is little doubt that its intellectual tradition and predilections are Europeans. It thus goes without saying that it is largely informed by European thought, particularly its promotion of equality amongst white people over non-white people under the auspices of liberalism.^[5] In addition to liberalism, human rights are driven by individualism, desacralisation and capitalism.^[6]

All of these epistemological mechanisations leave the European man at the apex of the global (legal) order that he created; here, he answers to no one and is the ultimate authority on how all others must behave.^[7] In spite of (or perhaps, because of)^[8] this, human rights are construed as ahistorical, apolitical, universally applicable, and inherently rational.^[9]

The Western tradition defines ‘human’ as synonymous with ‘European man’ and oppositional to all ‘Other’ non-humans and lesser humans.^[10] From this definition, the rights of the ‘Other’ – such as indigenous rights – are construed as the exception to the ‘universal.’^[11] Human rights, then, create ‘non-humans, or lesser humans, as well as super-humans’ who are then organised into a hierarchy.^[12] This hierarchy accords the white male the ability to act as a final arbitrator of who is and isn’t ‘human’ and to determine the laws applicable to the ‘Other.’^[13] It is clear that women in the Global South fall into the category of ‘Other.’ They are thus made to accept ‘universal’ laws which do not consider their particular experiences, histories, or thoughts.

What’s the ‘right’ in human rights?

Because of the context from which they arise, human rights do not challenge the power of the West or bemoan distinctly Western forms of exploitation.^[14] As a matter of fact, they protect Western hegemony to the detriment of the Global South by strictly delineating ‘acceptable forms of resistance to white oppression and domination,’ obfuscating social issues, and hiding the politics that determine the outcomes promoted by the law.^[15] Implicit in human rights promotion of Western hegemony, of course, is its promotion of the subjugation of the ‘Other.’ In a word, then, the ‘right’ in human rights can be thought of as the European right to retain its global hegemony.

Despite the entrenchment of ‘universal’ human rights, abuses directed at peoples across the world abound.^[16]This casts doubt on the assertion that human rights brought an end to oppression and harm.^[17] Truly, human rights have been used to sanitise the disorder, violence, and suffering that the West exports to the Global South.^[18] An example of this is the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. After conducting a ‘war on terror’ (which was construed as being synonymous with a war on Islam), the countries that fought against Afghanistan took recourse to human rights to legitimate their war, replacing:

the language of evil, darkness and crusades that permeated the initial representation of the military conquest [with] the gentler tones of women’s rights, peace, religious freedom and democracy that ultimately provided legitimacy for the intervention.^[19]

Human rights and Global Southern women

The woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer.^[20]

The supposed universality of human rights falls apart when they come into contact with the ‘Other.’^[21] This is because, firstly, the rights require ‘Other’ communities to assimilate into Europe for them to enter the international community and enjoy human rights.^[22] In this way, human rights are inherently limited and limiting.^[23] Secondly, these human rights could only be rendered universal by delegitimising rights-production in other parts of the world.^[24] And thirdly, these human rights require the dehumanisation of all that is not European.^[25]

Human rights fail to account for ‘victims’ who do not need or want (Western) ‘saviours’ and ‘saviours’ who do not act due to some sense of benevolence.^[26] One area where this matter is particularly prevalent is that of gender essentialism. Gender essentialism was used to justify the colonial project and persists to this day in, for instance, anti-trafficking laws which infantilise and victimise women in the Global South.^[27] These laws wrongly painted Nepali women as victims of human trafficking, which resulted in them being ‘saved’ and losing their access to better job opportunities in other countries.^[28] Human rights law’s wholesale presentation of women in the Global South as hapless victims justifies western interference in the affairs of countries in the Global South and the restriction on the ability of individual actors in the Global South to exercise their agency. Denied access to better job opportunities, these women may fall victim to systems of abuse within their societies.

Human rights violations are presumed to occur exclusively in the Global South and the former communist bloc, not the West.^[29] Take for instance, the ‘issue’ of the hijab. In Algeria, the French claimed that wearing hijabs was symbolic of backwardness and patriarchal dominance.^[30] France then ‘liberated’ hijabis from the patriarchy by ridding them of their hijabs.^[31] However, despite this ‘liberation’ many of these women went back to wearing their hijabs.^[32]

The vision of the veiled woman disrupts the Western preoccupation with scrutinising women’s bodies.^[33]Borne of the Western literal and metaphorical obsession with bodies,^[34] the fact that European men could not ‘see’ Muslim women’s bodies warranted the erasure of Algeria’s unique socio-cultural expression and the imposition of the western ‘universal’ – that is, a woman with her body on display. Operating under the banner of ‘human rights’ a western power imposed its own ‘universal’ perception of women’s liberation on an African country and attempted to override the particularity of that country^[35] to ‘break’ Algerians.^[36]

This liberation was one France believed it needed to export to Algeria, even as it has failed to liberate its own women. In the last step, human rights instruments, like the International Court of Justice, are presented as being ill-equipped to remedy the harms Algerian (and other Global Southern) women suffered at the hands of colonial powers since these human rights abuses occurred before their establishment.^[37] But what is perhaps a more apt, though not uncontroversial, assertion is that these instruments (like the soothing balm ‘women’s rights’ are supposed to create in the Global South) function this way in order to protect Western hegemony and, in particular, the dominant position of European men,

Conclusion

By discussing the context from which human rights originate and their complicity in bolstering Western hegemony, the reflection cast doubt on the claim that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ on the basis that this area of law fails to protect Global Southern women properly. This is not to say that the human rights regime’s inadequacies are limited to Global Southern women or that human rights can’t be used to make social, political and economic welfare gains. It is to say human rights are not universal, promote a specific understanding of ‘human’ with an entitlement to certain rights and that there is a need to reassess our affinity for the human rights regime.

^[1] Rose Helens-Hart ‘Heeding the call: Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric of identification and women’s human rights at the Fourth World Conference on Women’ (2015) 53 Ohio Communication Journal 70, at 70.

^[2] Helens-Hart (2015) 71, 74-75.

^[3] Nunn (1997) 351.

^[4] Philip Alston ‘Does the Past Matter – On the Origins of Human Rights’ (2013) 126 Harvard Law Review 2043, at 2043-2044; Christopher McCrudden “Human Rights Histories” (2015) 35:1 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 179, at 179-180.

^[5] Colin Samson, The colonialism of human rights: Ongoing hypocrisies of western liberalism (John Wiley & Sons, 2020) 4, 12 & 15; Charles Mills The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press 1997) 9-17; Nunn (1997) 324-325; Walter Mignolo ‘Who speaks for the “human” in human rights?’ (2011) 3:5 Cadernos de Estudos Culturais 157, at 157; Makua Mutua ‘Human rights in Africa: the limited promise of liberalism’ (2008) 51 African Studies Review, at 22; Davinia Gómez Sánchez ‘Transforming human rights through decolonial lens’ (2020) 15 The age of human rights Journal, at277 & 280.

^[6] Sánchez (2020) 282.

^[7] Kenneth Nunn ‘Law as a Eurocentric enterprise’ (1997) 15 Law & Inequality, at 350.

^[8] Nunn (1997) 334-337.

^[9] Ratna Kapur ‘Human rights in the 21st century: Take a walk on the dark side’ (2006) 28 Sydney Law Review, at 675.

^[10] Mignolo (2011) 164.

^[11] Ibid 167.

^[12] Kapur (2006) 681; Samson (2020) 35.

^[13] Mignolo (2011) 160 & 163.

^[14] Mutua (2008) 31; Nunn (1997) 358.

^[15] Sánchez (2020) 280; Nunn (1997) 357 & 364; Samson (2020) 6; Kapur (2006) 674.

^[16] Kapur (2006) 665.

^[17] Kapur (2006) 669.