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Women's Rights, Human Rights and the Criminal Law or, Feminist Debates and Responses to [De]Criminalization and Sexual and Reproductive Health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2019

Aziza Ahmed
Aziza Ahmed*
Affiliation:
Northeastern University School of Law.
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Extract

My comments today seek to highlight how social and economic rights advocates, particularly those concerned with the right to health, engage with ongoing debates about the role of criminal law in human rights. In particular, I emphasize how many “right to health” campaigns fight for the decriminalization of laws that result in the arrest of marginalized communities or health workers. This trend within right to health advocacy complicates what has been called the anti-impunity turn in human rights. In other words, although many scholars have correctly highlighted the rise of a carceral agenda in human rights, there is also ongoing, and perhaps growing, emphasis on decriminalization in the context of social and economic rights. This presentation gives a brief overview of the fight for decriminalization in the context of the right to health, highlights the challenges faced by advocates of in those campaigns, and reflects on some cautionary tales emerging from these fights for decriminalization.

Type
Criminalization and International Human Rights: A Roundtable of Perspectives on the Uneasy Linkages, with Attention to the Regulation of Sexuality, Gender, and Reproduction
Information
Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting , Volume 112 , 2018 , pp. 87 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © by The American Society of International Law 2019 

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References

1 Engle, Karen, Anti-Impunity and the Turn to Criminal Law in Human Rights, 100 Cornell L. Rev. 1069 (2015)Google Scholar.

2 I detail this account in Ahmed, Aziza, Trafficked? AIDS, Criminal Law and the Politics of Measurement, 70 U. Miami L. Rev. 96 (2015)Google Scholar.

3 Linda Cusick defines a harm-reduction policy or program as one “(1) where the primary goal is the reduction of drug related harm rather than drug use per se; (2) where abstinence-oriented strategies are included, strategies are also included to reduce the harm to those who continue to use drugs; and (3) strategies are included which aim to demonstrate that, on the balance of probabilities, it is likely to result in a net reduction in drug related harm.” Cusick, Linda, Widening the Harm-Reduction Agenda: From Drug Use to Sex Work, 17(1) Int'l J. Drug Pol'y 3 (2006)Google Scholar; Marlatt, G. Alan, Harm-Reduction: Come as You Are, 21 Addictive Behaviors 779 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burris, Scott, Harm-Reduction's First Principle: “The Opposite of Hatred,” 15(4) Int'l J. Drug Pol'y 243 (2004)Google Scholar. See also Erdman, Joanna, Harm Reduction, Human Rights, and Access to Information on Safer Abortion, 118(1) Int'l J. Gynecology & Obstetrics 83 (2012)Google ScholarPubMed; Hyman, Alyson, Misoprostol in Women's Hands: A Harm Reduction Strategy for Unsafe Abortion, 87(2) Contraception 128 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Bernstein, Elizabeth, Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The “Traffic in Women” and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights, 41 Theory Soc'y 233, 235 (2012)Google Scholar (coining the term “carceral feminism”); see also Engle, Karen, “Calling in the Troops”: The Uneasy Relationship Between Women's Rights, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Intervention, 20 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 75 (2007)Google Scholar.

5 Shannon, Kate, al., et, Global Epidemiology of HIV Among Sex Workers: Influence of Structural Determinants, The Lancet (2014)Google ScholarPubMed (“Decriminalisation of sex work would have the greatest effect on the course of HIV epidemics across all settings, averting 33–46% of HIV infections in the next decade.”).

6 Nour, Lisa B. Haddad & Nawal M., Unsafe Abortion: Unnecessary Maternal Mortality, 2(2) Rev. Obstetrics & Gynecology 122 (2009)Google Scholar. Ziraba, Abdhalla Kasiira, et al. , Maternal Mortality in the Informal Settlements of Nairobi City: What Do We Know?, 6 Reproductive Health 1 (2009)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7 Kaiser Family Foundation, The U.S. Government and International Family Planning & Reproductive Health Efforts (Jan. 28, 2019), at https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-u-s-government-and-international-family-planning-reproductive-health-efforts.

8 President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Pub. L. 108–125 (2003).

9 Planned Parenthood Federation of America v. USAID, 915 F.2d 59 (2d Cir. 1990); Singh, Jerome, et al. , Trump's “Global Gag Rule”: Implications for Human Rights and Global Health, 5(4) The Lancet e387 (2017)Google ScholarPubMed.

10 Chuang, Janie A., Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, 108 AJIL 609, 609–10 (2014)Google Scholar.