A recently concluded “Human Rights Defenders Training for Students” provided around 25 students from the Asia-Pacific a human rights framework from a women’s rights perspective, highlighting how gender and culture interact with human rights issues.

The Human Rights Defenders Training for Students, held from June 18-23, 2007 in Manila, Philippines, provided students with the skills that will equip them in their human rights advocacy work as well as a human rights framework of analysis which entails looking at aspects of human rights issues from different perspectives.

One of the perspectives is looking at human rights issues from a women’s rights framework. Isis International-Manila's Raijeli Nicole and Marion Cabrera facilitated the training on this topic in the afternoon of June 20.

Cabrera started the session with basic gender concepts through lively activities that sparked discussions and debates on gender roles among the young participants. Cabrera emphasised that gender is socially constructed and is context-specific. Hence, gender, as well as the roles and characteristics associated with it, varies with culture, religion, ethnicity, class, and others. Nicole, pointed out that culture is dynamic and changes over time. Thus, women need to internalise and analyse how power is transferred in their respective culture, then find different recourses in challenging the existing systems.

Nicole also emphasised the “women's rights are human rights” as a framework of analysis, saying that “taking action on women's human rights entails examining human rights framework through a gender conscious lens and describing women's lives through a human rights framework.” “The human rights perspective,” she added “helps to illuminate the complicated relationship between gender and other aspects of identity such as culture, sexual orientation, among others.”

Learning from the workshop, 23-year old Hannah Angus from Australia noted that what she found most interesting and challenging is “[how] human rights interact with cultures...'this is my culture, I don't want to change' as opposed to 'I'm an oppressed person in this culture, I need something to give me power to support change.”

In addition, Nicole also briefed participants on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the principal legal instrument addressing women's rights and equality, and how CEDAW  demands that rights for women must be granted through legislative process. She also raised the issue that the reporting process is the government's responsibility, which excludes women in the process. She then underlined the importance of alternative reports given by NGOs  so that women's situation be adequately reported.

The training was organised by the World Student Christian Federation Asia Pacific (WSCF AP), a regional community of Student Christian Movements which provides spaces for dialogues between students of different traditions.