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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. Situating Women’s Rights in Everyday Life: The EMPOWER Women’s Human Rights Report

Author : Juanita Elias

Published in: Demanding Justice in The Global South

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter explores why it is that women’s organizations seek to engage rights-based approaches in contexts where activists are conscious of the limitations of human rights activism for delivering meaningful outcomes for women. I explores this puzzle through the example of the Malaysian women’s advocacy group EMPOWER who produced the 2011 Malaysian Women’s Rights Report Equality Under Construction (EMPOWER 2012). EMPOWER (or Persatuan Kesedaran Komuniti Selangor) is a feminist activist non-governmental organization (NGO) engaged in a range of programmes and advocacy activities focusing on issues broadly related to women’s empowerment—including activities such as working to build women’s political participation and supporting poor women working in the informal sector. The economic and political focus of EMPOWER’s grassroots work is reproduced in its advocacy strategy (often undertaken in collaboration with other women’s NGOs) that have focused on issues such as developing a women’s political agenda and, as is discussed in this chapter, developing campaigns and initiatives around women’s human rights and democratic governance in Malaysia more generally (http://empowermalaysia.org/ n.d.).

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Title: Situating Women’s Rights in Everyday Life: The EMPOWER Women’s Human Rights Report
Author: Juanita Elias
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Demanding Justice in The Global South
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38820-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-38821-2

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38821-2_6