A human rights-based approach to immigrant women’s issues

Launch of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights

The Honourable Catherine Branson QC

13 April 2011

I would like to begin by joining other speakers in acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet. I pay my respects to their elders, both past and present.

May I also acknowledge the Hon. Robert McClelland, the Attorney General and Senator the Hon. Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration & Multicultural Affairs, and Maria Dimopoulos, who will be launching the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights campaign against family violence.

I thank Tasneem Chopra, President of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, Joumanah El Matrah, Director of the Centre, and the Board for the invitation to be here today.

1 Women’s rights are human rights

I am delighted to be here with you all. It is inspiring to see so many women, and some men, here celebrating this occasion.

Let me begin with a simple, but perhaps contentious statement: women’s rights are human rights, but not all women struggle for the same human rights.

The words of Zahida Manzoor, the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner and Legal Services Ombudsman for England and Wales, will have resonance, I suspect, for many here:

“For women generally we talk about the glass ceiling, but for ethnic minority women, particularly Muslim women, we’re talking about breaking the concrete skirting board. It is that difficult.”^[1]

Women struggle world wide for the right to participation, the right to safety, the right to employment, health, education and housing – all components of basic equality. We also know that for some women these battles are far more difficult than they are for others - that their attempts to find work, housing, and justice, and feed, clothe and educate their children are thwarted by race and other forms of discrimination.

I do not use the word “we” to subsume the complex, difficult and ongoing struggles of diverse women into the mainstream women’s movement, but rather to recognise that, if we are to achieve genuine equality between women and men, the struggles of immigrant, minority and vulnerable women must be included and taken up by the mainstream.

This means that when we speak of human rights, and the importance of realising rights and responsibilities, we cannot do so without acknowledging that some groups, at different times and in different contexts, encounter forms of exclusion and discrimination that those from the mainstream do not experience.

The struggles common to all women are human rights struggles; struggles for equality, for justice, for full participation and a voice and for inclusion.

But the struggles specific to immigrant women in Australia have a different character from the struggles of Australian women generally. Their struggles are not only about being marginalised as women – but also about being women with diverse, complex and often contradictory identities and experiences.

We know that some immigrant women face a complex range of barriers and disadvantages. The Commission’s own research has shown, repeatedly, that limited English, insecure resident status, poverty, financial dependency, homelessness, limited access to education, unemployment, isolation, discrimination - all of these things - can impede immigrant women’s access to equality. The work of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights has also highlighted this.

What is to be done?

Australia’s first comprehensive multicultural policy since 1996, the People of Australia, released in February of this year is a welcome redress of a major policy gap, and a welcome signalling of the Australian Government’s commitment to a multicultural Australia. However, as Senator Lundy has today acknowledged, the imperative for multicultural policy is to take cultural diversity as the starting point, and incorporate into that policy a human rights framework and human rights principles.

We need to recognise that “racial discrimination does not always affect women and men equally or in the same way. There are circumstances in which racial discrimination only or primarily affects women, or affects women in a different way, or to a different degree than men. Such racial discrimination will often escape detection if there is no explicit recognition or acknowledgement of the different life experiences of women and men, in areas of both public and private life”.^[2]

So while we can situate Muslim and immigrant women’s rights struggles as part of both gender and multicultural struggles, we need to go one step further. The only way we can truly recognise and meet the demands of complex identities is through a human rights approach.

Empowerment is a critical aspect of such an approach. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Navi Pillay, observed only a few days ago:

“Empowerment is predicated on the removal of discriminatory laws and harmful practices that hold women back, frustrate their resourcefulness, and curtail their access to a fair share of the common wealth.

Empowerment requires their active participation in public life, their freedom of expression, association and movement. Empowerment demands firm communal commitments to defeating fear, want and exclusion.”^[3]

2 Renaming the Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights

The Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, and its stated aim of building human rights approaches into community and welfare sectors, is a welcome move towards making human rights for all an Australian reality.

It is a timely and powerful recognition of the importance of human rights, and the limitations of welfare approaches. It recognises, if you will allow me to highlight the Commission’s logo, that human rights are for ‘everyone, everywhere, everyday’.

You do not need me to say that Muslim women have been, and continue to be, strong advocates of human rights – but it is a point that can be made again and again without losing its power and its importance.

And the renaming of the centre demonstrates, clearly and irrevocably, that being Australian, being Muslim, being female and being a human rights practitioner are not mutually exclusive.

By moving from a welfare-based approach to one informed by a human rights framework, the Centre clearly reinforces that if identities are based on multiple intersections of race, culture, religion, gender, sex, language and country of origin, so must interventions that seek to redress inequity.

The name change demonstrates a commitment to working with the complex, often contradictory and competing demands on identities and working in areas where rights can compete. It recognises that we cannot be effective and achieve respect for human rights without understanding the complexities of the multiple aspects of identity that shape individuals and communities.

The renaming of the Centre strengthens the voices of Muslim women and their sisters. It should add to the voices of those who have taken to the world stage to proclaim the power and courage of Muslim women and to show the way forward. It should focus the impact and power of women who fight and advocate in their communities for women’s rights, for the right to speak, to be heard and to be safe.

The name change reflects an appropriate recognition of the long tradition of activism and human rights practice by Muslim women - a part of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights around the globe. How wonderful it is that we have seen women at the forefront of the recent and ongoing protest movements in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has long been committed to playing a part in the ongoing struggle to achieve equality between women and men in Australia. We are pleased to be able to stand with the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights and, so far as we can, support your work in ways that you identify to ensure that equality between women and men is a reality for all in our country.

Thank you.

^[1] Equality and Human Rights Commission (United Kingdom) Muslim Women Power List. At http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/key-projects/muslim-women-power-list/ (viewed 5 April 2011).
^[2] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, General Recommendation No. 25: Gender related dimensions of racial discrimination 20/03/2000 UN Doc A/55/18, annex V (2000), para 1. At
http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/76a293e49a88bd23802568bd00538d83?Opendocument (viewed 7 April 2011).
^[3] High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay (Speech delivered at the Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia of Heaven and Earth - A Forum on Faith, Belief, and the Advancement of Women’s Human Rights, 4 April 2011). At http://www.ohchr.org/ru/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=10920&LangID=E (viewed 12 April 2011).