Violence against Women as Sex Discrimination: Judging the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies

Violence against women is one of the greatest threats to women’s equality and equal enjoyment of human rights worldwide. Yet, there is no single treaty provision explicitly prohibiting violence against women within any of the eight ‘core’ international human rights treaties, nor a binding international treaty specifically on the issue. In the work of the UN human rights treaty bodies, one of the approaches to recognising violence against women as a violation of human rights has been to subsume it within the guarantees to equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex. This article examines the meanings given to these concepts and inquires into whether this inclusion approach to what is an obvious gap in the international human rights framework is effective.