On 20 March 2025, the held a panel discussion entitled “Women Who Shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which focused on contributions to the Declaration made by women from the Global South. The moderator, Jayashri Wyatt, Chief of the Education Outreach Section in the United Nations Department of Global Communications, posed the following question to the panel: “How can we break down the systemic barriers that are still facing women today?”
Professor Manu Bhagavan of Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York responded, "All of us, there is no other way, we are the United Nations." We, as individuals, "must stand for these values and these principles" and "fight for the ideals which we believe are not just important but indeed critical to a future world of justice and peace”.
Human rights and peace can be advanced and protected by more actors than those in government, by civil society and through various rights movements. When united for peace and human rights, people have historically, and in the present day, engaged both politically and civilly towards social justice in local communities. The task seems daunting; overwhelming and worthy causes pile up, almost competing with each other in terms of urgency.
How can calls for human rights be enacted affirmatively?
Building on the knowledge that systemic injustices are caused by overlapping oppressive structures, and acknowledging that discrimination stemming from such structures affects people in numerous ways, intersectional analysis has helped researchers answer questions about how racism, sexism, , and heteronormativity reinforce each other. These systems place minority groups at greater exposure to the exploitative and damaging effects of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism.
But intersectionality has been critiqued for its use of essentialist social categories and for reifying the very norms that the targeting of prejudice and discrimination aims to upset. Moving from problematization to positive action thus seems as acute a challenge for critical and feminist scholars as for practitioners and policymakers wanting to contribute to increased social justice. The non-discrimination list of Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, points to this very idea: that we will not reach universal human rights and lasting peace so long as people are not treated with dignity, regardless of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”.
To complicate things further, power relations are not static, social categorizations are not essentialist and minority groups are not homogenous. Human beings are complex, human relations are under constant negotiation, and there are groups of people suffering from intersectional invisibility (usually children and youth) at the furthest edges of marginalized groups.
The CSW panel, organized by the United Nations Academic Impact initiative, the Human Rights team of the United Nations Department of Global Communications and the brought to public attention the women from former colonies who ensured in 1948, after the Second World War, that we had an inclusive Declaration, which listed the human rights that “we the peoples of the United Nations” should strive to realize. As a panellist, I seconded Professor Bhagavan and his important reminder that we are all the United Nations, suggesting that, in moving forward to face the global challenges of systemic injustices, we need to act with intersectional solidarity.
What can intersectional solidarity enable?
Historical human rights struggles that succeeded in pushing the boundaries in favour of the inclusion of social justice were based on intersectional solidarity. The very creation of CSW under the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which helped push the limits for inclusion in the language of UDHR in the founding years of the United Nations, can be seen as an example of intersectional solidarity. Women were in the minority in the Member States' delegations to the United Nations in 1946. This meant that gender equality and a more inclusive understanding of human rights as truly universal were not initially at the forefront of negotiations when UDHR came to life.
Women delegates in UDHR deliberations brought their experiences of multiple forms of discrimination to the diplomatic arena of the United Nations. Women from newly independent States that had formerly been under colonial rule, from different castes, classes and religious backgrounds, with various ethnicities, languages, nationalities and social status, came to the realization that unless they created a as members, the struggles women experienced in the field of social, economic, cultural, political and civil rights might be left unvoiced in UDHR.
By creating a separate commission, women who had experienced injustice due to sexism advocated through their specific understandings of discrimination what was needed for change, and how human rights were interdependent and indivisible. The right to vote, they argued, should not just be granted to white women or women who owned property; to be considered truly universal, suffrage should be enjoyed by all women, including those living in non-self-governing territories. The right to education was seen as interrelated with the freedom to choose when to get married, which included the abolition of child marriage.
Successful struggles for human rights have been based on different forms of intersectional solidarities. Women in Liberia, including , engaged in interfaith dialogue across religious divisions for peace, and succeeded in forcing male leaders to continue peace negotiations to end the civil war there. The first woman Head of State of an African nation, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, was democratically elected in 2006 following the civil war.
When women have acted in solidarity to end human suffering, and when young people who have been denied their rights have raised their voices in protest against systemic forms of oppression, change seems to have been inevitable. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in 1960s, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., gained momentum during in Birmingham, Alabama, when prisons were filled over capacity with child protestors. “Altogether on ‘D’ Day, May 2 [1963], more than a thousand young people demonstrated and went to jail”, Dr. King recalled in his book, .
Different forms of discrimination targeting women and children, ethnic, religious, language and national minorities, as well as indigenous people and members of the LGBTQ+ community, are generally discussed as “minority problems”. If we look at the number of people around the world affected by various forms of prejudice and discrimination based on, but not limited to, sex, gender, sexuality, class, social status, language, religion, race, nationality and age, we see that such forms of prejudice are felt by a majority worldwide.
Key United Nations conventions on human rights address several forms of discrimination; specifically, they serve to eliminate racial discrimination (the), discrimination against women (the ), discrimination against persons with disabilities (the ), and discrimination against children (the ). Human rights protective legislation against discrimination and hate speech are not mutually exclusive but strengthen each other. This is also why the derogation of one’s “minority group” rights limits the freedom of others, as well.
Intersectional solidarity is not only solidarity for the sake of others but for us all. Derogation of human rights legislation and international standards against discrimination, such as the aforementioned United Nations conventions, limits the scope of human rights in a democratic landscape. There are no fully developed democracies in the world, and the shared flaws of democratic processes can be estimated and calculated through the numbers we find of human rights violations against women, children, people belonging to different ethnic minorities, indigenous people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, migrants and more. When rights and freedoms are being questioned for some groups of people, these rights and freedoms will sooner or later be compromised for the presumably privileged “majority”, as well. Intersectional solidarity represents a push for rights and freedoms for all, envisioning the kind of society you would want to be born into if you had no idea what social status you would have. Intersectional solidarity is defending others’ rights and freedoms as your own.
In this article, I suggest that it was thanks to the intersectional solidarity between women with experiences of injustices caused by the Second World War, fascism and colonialism that today we truly have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We can carry their legacy further by enacting this call in solidarity with each other, regardless of what separates us and in recognition of what unites us—such as living on a planet facing environmental emergency and the effects of war—as members of the human family.
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