The Question of Justice and Women's Rights

Abstract

What does it mean to do justice and especially to do justice to women? This article examines the difficulties of interpreting justice and women's rights on the international plane. The problems arise from the fundamental tension between the theoretical epistemological field and the practical "real life" scene, since the mediation between them does not reduce to a neat theoretical clarification of a general meaning of justice that then can be practically applied to our perceived reality to yield a certain set of political strategies. The argument presented here shows that the two planes interdepend and that a meaning of justice always necessarily is contextually bound and yet in its limitedness is always open for contestation and that it needs to remain contested in order not to slip into fundamentalism and ideological fanaticism. The context for this argument is the international political struggle for women's rights in the specific case of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). With this document as a starting point, it is possible to enter into a discussion of the questions of relativism vs. universalism, of a concept of democratic discourse, and of hermeneutical guidelines for the interpretation of the meaning of justice for women. This article therefore starts with this concrete historical and practical context and then asks whether it is possible and legitimate to claim a universal notion of justice or whether there can only be locally restricted interpretations that have to remain incommensurable with each other. The question that follows from this inquiry is how the notion of democratic discourse has to be shifted and opened up to allow for productive, fair, and inclusive deliberation about women's rights policies. This, however, cannot pursued without accounting for and contesting the hermeneutical guidelines that underlie the discourse and that cannot only be procedural but must be material as well, for example, as the capabilities approach by Nussbaum (2000) provides.