The Struggle for Cultural Recognition and Women's Human Rights: Lessons from the Experience of Irish Traveller Women

Abstract

The 1990s global campaign for women's human rights is most associated with achieving international recognition of violence against women as a human rights issue. However, the campaign has mostly side-stepped the issue of cultural rights, except to sound a note of caution that cultural rights are often invoked at the expense of women's human rights. This false dichotomy obscures the complex ways in which women's human rights claims and cultural rights claims are often interrelated, especially in advocacy efforts to secure the human rights of marginalized minorities. One example of this interrelation is found in the Irish Travellers movement where cultural rights and women's rights are treated as inseparable aspects of the same struggle.