The State has the primary responsibility to ensure an enabling environment for all human rights defenders and to protect defenders from threats and attacks. The international community as well as UN presences on the ground also have a responsibility to support, engage meaningfully and protect them. Prompt investigation of intimidation, threats, violence and other abuses against women human rights defenders should be undertaken. In practice, however, WHRDs are often left without effective, inclusive and gender-responsive protection mechanisms.
The Women’s Rights Movement marks July 13, 1848 as its beginning. On that sweltering summer day in upstate New York, a young housewife and mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was invited to tea with four women friends. When the course of their conversation turned to the situation of women, Stanton poured out her discontent with the limitations placed on her own situation under America’s new democracy. Hadn’t the American Revolution had been fought just 70 years earlier to win the patriots freedom from tyranny? But women had not gained freedom even though they’d taken equally tremendous risks through those dangerous years.
