Gender-Based Violence in International Human Rights

Introduction

Gender-Based Violence is one of the clearest tests of whether international human rights law can protect people against systematic harm rather than isolated abuse. It is not a marginal issue within the legal order. It is a central problem of equality, dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, health, and life. The scale of the problem confirms that this is not a matter of rare misconduct, but a persistent pattern with global reach (World Health Organization, 2025).

The most recent global estimates published by the World Health Organization show that nearly one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, most often at the hands of an intimate partner (World Health Organization, 2025). Those figures are socially alarming, but they also matter legally. They show that Gender-Based Violence is recurring, structured, and foreseeable. Once harm becomes predictable at that scale, state omission is no longer easy to defend as mere policy failure.

International law did not always address this problem with clarity. For decades, violence suffered by women was often treated as a private matter, especially when it occurred within the household, in intimate relationships, or within community practices presented as cultural or domestic concerns. That older approach weakened accountability and narrowed the reach of human rights law. It also protected the legal fiction that the state bore responsibility mainly for what its own officials did, not for what it tolerated.

The early 1990s marked a decisive change. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action recognized violence against women as a human rights issue, and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women provided an influential definition that covered physical, sexual, and psychological harm in both public and private life (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a; United Nations General Assembly, 1993b). These instruments did not solve the problem on their own. They did, however, alter the legal vocabulary and closed much of the older distance between women’s lived experience and international legal recognition.

The core universal treaty framework remains the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Yet the treaty text itself does not contain a stand-alone provision expressly prohibiting violence against women. That point is important because it explains why Gender-Based Violence developed through interpretation rather than through a single clear textual rule (Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024). Weak analyses often miss this tension and present the law as either fully settled or fundamentally absent. Neither position is accurate.

The major interpretive breakthrough came with General Recommendation No. 19, which established that violence directed against a woman because she is a woman, or violence that affects women disproportionately, falls within the meaning of discrimination under CEDAW. General Recommendation No. 35 later deepened that position by treating Gender-Based Violence as a continuum of interrelated harms occurring across private and public settings, including digital environments, and by linking state duties to prevention, protection, investigation, prosecution, punishment, reparation, and monitoring (CEDAW Committee, 1992; CEDAW Committee, 2017). This body of interpretation is now indispensable to any serious legal analysis.

The development of the law also transformed the theory of responsibility. Traditional human rights models focused on direct abuse by state agents. Gender-Based Violence forced international law to confront a harder question: when does failure to act against private violence become an international wrong? The answer now lies in the doctrine of due diligence. States are expected to take reasonable and effective steps to prevent foreseeable harm, protect those at risk, respond seriously to complaints, and provide access to justice and remedies (Human Rights Committee, 2018; CEDAW Committee, 2017).

This shift matters because much of the most serious violence occurs outside formal state custody. Domestic violence, sexual violence, harmful practices, technology-facilitated abuse, and coercive forms of control often emerge in spaces once described as private. International law can no longer rely on that label to avoid responsibility. A state that knows of serious risk, or ought to know of it, may incur responsibility when its laws, institutions, or enforcement practices fail gravely and predictably.

Regional legal systems have pushed this development further. The Inter-American Convention of Belém do Pará, the Maputo Protocol, and the Istanbul Convention each address violence more directly than the universal treaty text does, although they differ in design and institutional structure (Organization of American States, 1994; African Union, 2003; Council of Europe, 2011). More recently, the African Union adopted the Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls in 2025, adding a new treaty to the regional framework. These developments show that the legal problem is no longer one of invisibility. It is now a problem of fragmentation, uneven implementation, and incomplete enforcement.

Conceptually, the subject also requires precision. Gender-Based Violence is not simply any violence experienced by women. International human rights law uses the concept to identify violence shaped by gender hierarchy, unequal power, discriminatory stereotypes, and structural subordination. That is why the subject cannot be reduced to a list of criminal offences. It must be examined as a legal expression of inequality, reinforced by institutional indifference, evidentiary bias, social norms, and failures of protection (Edwards, 2011; Ziniakova, 2021; Deane, 2024).

This article proceeds from a clear claim. International human rights law is no longer silent on Gender-Based Violence, but its protection remains uneven in form and effect. The legal framework is now substantial enough to impose real obligations on states, yet still fragmented enough to generate gaps in interpretation, compliance, and remedy. The discussion that follows examines how that framework was built, what obligations it now imposes, where its limits remain, and why Gender-Based Violence has become one of the defining questions of contemporary international human rights law.

1. Terms, scope, and method

This section clarifies the key terms used in the article and explains why they matter legally. Students often encounter these expressions as if they were interchangeable. They are not. Each term points to a different level of analysis, and if they are merged too quickly, the doctrinal structure becomes confused.

The article uses international human rights law as its primary framework. Within that framework, the most developed universal body of law still concerns women and girls, especially through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, General Recommendation No. 19, and General Recommendation No. 35 (CEDAW Committee, 1992; CEDAW Committee, 2017). For that reason, the discussion is centered on women and girls while still taking broader gender-based harms seriously.

Methodologically, the article distinguishes between treaty text, interpretive instruments, treaty-body practice, and regional developments. That distinction is important for students. A treaty provision, a general recommendation, and a judicial decision do not operate in exactly the same way, even when they are pointing in the same normative direction. The analysis also treats legal terms as historically shaped. Their meaning has changed as international law moved away from the idea that violence in the home or family is outside international concern.

1.1 Gender-based violence and violence against women

The first distinction is between violence against women, gender-based violence against women, and broader gender-based violence. These categories overlap, but they are not identical.

Violence against women is the broadest of the three in ordinary legal use. The 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defines it as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether in public or private life (United Nations General Assembly, 1993). At this level, the term identifies the victim group and the kinds of harm involved.

Gender-based violence against women is narrower and more analytical. It does not refer only to violence suffered by women. It refers to violence suffered by women because of gendered inequality, or violence that affects women disproportionately because of socially entrenched roles and hierarchies. General Recommendation No. 19 described it as violence directed against a woman because she is a woman or violence that affects women disproportionately (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 6). General Recommendation No. 35 retained that foundation and made the structural character of the concept even clearer (CEDAW Committee, 2017).

This distinction matters because not every assault against a woman is automatically classified in law as gender-based violence. The legal question is not only who suffered the harm, but also why the harm occurred, how social power shaped it, and why women are exposed to it in patterned and unequal ways. A rape used to punish female autonomy, repeated domestic abuse sustained by coercive control, or a killing following repeated threats ignored by state authorities all reveal gender hierarchy in operation. The category is meant to capture that structure.

The third expression, broader gender-based violence, goes beyond women and girls. It refers to violence linked to gender norms, gender identity, gender expression, sexuality, and the policing of what a society treats as acceptable masculine or feminine conduct. This broader category is doctrinally important even though the universal treaty framework is textually and institutionally far more developed for women and girls than for all persons affected by gendered violence. The point should be stated directly. At the universal level, CEDAW remains the most developed legal instrument in this field, and it is centered on women.

Even so, broader gender-based violence still matters for legal analysis. It helps explain that the engine of the violence is not biology alone, but gender hierarchy. It also prevents students from making a common mistake, which is to treat “gender” as a polite synonym for “women.” Gender is broader than that. It includes the social rules that reward dominance, punish deviation, and shape which bodies are treated as credible, respectable, or disposable. That wider perspective helps make sense of why violence against women, violence against lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex women, and violence against persons targeted for failing to conform to dominant gender expectations may arise from related structures of subordination (Ziniakova, 2021; González Hauck et al., 2024).

For the purposes of this article, the primary doctrinal focus remains gender-based violence against women. That choice is not ideological. It reflects where universal international human rights law has produced the densest body of norms, interpretations, and cases. At the same time, the broader category remains important because it sharpens the explanation of gender as a legal structure and not only as a descriptive label.

1.2 Sex, gender, and stereotyping

A second distinction concerns sex and gender. In legal writing, those words are often used loosely. They should not be.

Sex usually refers to a biological or formally classificatory category. Gender, by contrast, refers to socially constructed roles, attributes, expectations, and meanings attached to perceived sex differences. General Recommendation No. 28 describes gender as socially constructed identities, attributes, and roles for women and men, together with the social and cultural meaning assigned to biological differences, producing hierarchical relationships that advantage men and disadvantage women (CEDAW Committee, 2010, para. 5). This is a central point for students. Once gender is understood in that way, the law is no longer dealing only with difference. It is dealing with power.

That shift is crucial for the legal analysis of Gender-Based Violence. Violence does not occur only because individuals are male or female. It occurs within a field of expectations about obedience, masculinity, sexuality, family roles, honor, motherhood, dependence, and control. Those expectations influence both the act of violence and the institutional response to it. A police officer may minimize repeated abuse because he sees it as a family dispute. A prosecutor may doubt a rape complaint because the victim did not fight physically. A judge may treat reconciliation as evidence that the violence was not serious. In each example, gender is shaping the legal process.

This is why stereotyping is not a side issue. It is one of the main ways discrimination enters adjudication. Stereotypes tell institutions what a “real” victim looks like, how a “respectable” woman should behave, when fear is believable, how quickly a complaint should be filed, and what level of resistance counts as proof of non-consent. International human rights law has increasingly recognized that such reasoning distorts both evidence and judgment.

A well-known illustration is Vertido v Philippines, where the CEDAW Committee criticized judicial reasoning shaped by myths and stereotypes in the adjudication of rape (CEDAW Committee, 2010). The problem in cases like this is not only a wrong factual conclusion. The deeper problem is that stereotypes structure the way facts are selected, interpreted, and valued. That is why evidentiary bias is not merely a technical flaw. It is a form of unequal treatment.

Students should notice the doctrinal consequence. Once gender is treated as a social structure, the legal system itself becomes part of the analysis. Gender-based violence is not only the original harmful act. It also includes failures of recognition and response produced by institutions that rely on gendered assumptions. A court that expects visible injuries, immediate reporting, or sexual purity before it accepts a complaint is not neutrally applying neutral evidence law. It is reproducing inequality through adjudication.

The same logic applies to remedies. If gender stereotypes shape the state's response, a formal declaration that rights were violated is often not enough. Effective remedies may require specialized protection orders, survivor-centered procedures, trauma-informed health services, training for judges and police, evidentiary reform, and measures aimed at changing institutional culture. The role of stereotyping in legal analysis is one reason why international human rights law treats Gender-Based Violence as a substantive equality issue and not only as a criminal-law issue.

1.3 The public and private divide

The third foundational issue is the public/private divide. Historically, this divide was one of the main reasons why violence against women remained underdeveloped in international law.

Classical human rights law was built around the idea that the state is responsible mainly for what public authorities do. Violence in the home, within marriage, or inside the family was often treated as private conduct beyond international concern. That approach had major consequences. It made domestic violence appear incidental rather than structural. It also allowed states to present inaction as neutrality.

This older model helps explain an important feature of CEDAW. When the Convention was drafted in the 1970s, it did not include an express, stand-alone provision on violence against women, apart from article 6 on trafficking and exploitation of prostitution. Contemporary discussions and later scholarship show that violence against women, especially in the private sphere, was still widely treated as a private matter rather than a central human rights question (Edwards, 2011; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017). Students should understand that this omission was not accidental. It reflected the legal and political assumptions of the period.

Modern human rights law rejects that narrow position. The decisive move came when international bodies recognized that the state can violate rights not only through direct abuse, but also through failure to act with adequate seriousness against abuse committed by private persons. This is the doctrinal significance of the public/private divide. It was the problem that forced the law to move beyond negative obligations.

A negative obligation tells the state not to commit abuse. A positive obligation requires the state to take active steps to protect people against serious harm. Gender-Based Violence made positive obligations unavoidable. If most abuse occurs in relationships, homes, communities, workplaces, or digital spaces rather than in police stations or prisons, a purely negative model of rights protection is plainly inadequate.

The bridge between private violence and state responsibility is the doctrine of due diligence. Under this approach, a state may be responsible when it fails to prevent foreseeable violence, fails to respond adequately to complaints, fails to investigate and punish, or fails to provide effective protection and support. General Recommendation No. 35 states this clearly. States may be responsible for acts or omissions of non-state actors when they fail to act with due diligence to prevent violence, investigate it, punish perpetrators, and provide reparation to victims (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras. 21 and 24). This is one of the most important doctrinal developments in the entire field.

The point can be put simply for students. International law no longer accepts the argument that abuse inside the home is automatically a private matter. If the state knows, or should know, that serious violence is occurring and does not organize its laws and institutions in a way capable of addressing that risk, the state may breach international human rights law. That is why domestic violence became a decisive test case in the development of international doctrine.

This shift also changed the meaning of state action. The problem is not only whether the law criminalizes certain conduct. It is also whether police respond in time, whether courts issue effective protection orders, whether shelters and medical services exist, whether prosecutors take threats seriously, and whether repeated abuse is treated as a pattern rather than as isolated incidents. A state may have modern legislation and still fail the due diligence standard if implementation is weak or distorted by stereotype-driven practice.

The public/private divide remains important today because it still shapes argument, evidence, and policy. Claims about family privacy, cultural autonomy, or domestic harmony continue to be used to soften the legal response to violence. Modern international human rights law rejects that approach because it obscures the central point: violence in private life can destroy public equality. It restricts mobility, education, employment, political participation, health, and life chances. The violence may occur in a private setting, but its consequences are deeply public.

For that reason, private violence is not a marginal doctrinal problem. It is one of the main reasons why Gender-Based Violence reshaped international human rights law. It forced the law to recognize that equality requires protection, that formal neutrality can conceal structural bias, and that state responsibility extends beyond the acts of state officials to serious failures of protection against private harm.

2. Normative foundations in universal human rights law

Universal human rights law does not regulate this subject through a single rule or a single treaty provision. Its normative basis is built across several rights that address different dimensions of the harm. Equality and non-discrimination remain the main entry point, especially through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Yet the legal analysis is incomplete if it stops there. The same conduct may also violate dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, personal security, life, freedom from torture or ill-treatment, health, and reproductive autonomy (Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024).

This cumulative structure reflects the reality of the abuse itself. A single pattern of conduct may subordinate, degrade, confine, injure, traumatize, and endanger life at the same time. Universal law responds to that complexity by reading several rights together rather than forcing the problem into one narrow category. Equality explains the structural dimension. Life and torture capture the gravity of the harm. Health and reproductive autonomy reveal their continuing consequences and the broader obligations imposed on the state (CEDAW Committee, 2017).

2.1 Equality and non-discrimination

Equality and non-discrimination provide the strongest doctrinal starting point. The abuse is not only wrongful because force or coercion is used. It is also wrongful because it operates within and helps preserve unequal social relations. For that reason, the violence is not a marginal issue within equality law. It is one of the clearest ways in which inequality is maintained in practice.

The architecture of CEDAW is built around this logic. Article 1 defines discrimination against women broadly. Article 2 requires States parties to eliminate discrimination through legal, institutional, and policy measures. Article 2(e) extends that obligation to discrimination by any person, organization, or enterprise. Article 2(f) requires the modification or abolition of discriminatory laws, customs, and practices. Read together, these provisions show that the Convention is not limited to direct misconduct by state officials. It also reaches the wider legal and social arrangements that keep women in a subordinate position (CEDAW, arts 1–2; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017).

General Recommendation No. 19 supplied the decisive interpretive step. It stated that violence directed against a woman because she is a woman, or violence that affects women disproportionately, falls within the meaning of discrimination under article 1 of the Convention (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 6). That conclusion was foundational. It brought violence into the core of universal equality law without requiring a new treaty text.

General Recommendation No. 35 strengthened that position. It describes such violence as rooted in structural inequality, social norms, and institutions that sustain male dominance and female subordination. It also links the problem directly to state duties of prevention, protection, investigation, punishment, and reparation, including where the abuse is committed by private actors and the state has failed to act with due diligence (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 19, 21 and 24).

This equality framework explains why omission matters as much as direct abuse. A state may violate equality not only when its own officials commit violence, but also when police trivialize threats, courts rely on gender stereotypes, prosecutors fail to act on repeated complaints, or institutions leave survivors without meaningful protection. The wrong lies not only in the immediate assault. It also lies in the discriminatory structure that allows the pattern to continue.

This is why the issue should not be treated as a side question to equality. Equality is not satisfied by neutral legal language alone. A formally neutral system that leaves women exposed to recurring and foreseeable abuse still fails to deliver equal protection of rights. Violence reveals the practical limits of formal equality and exposes the need for substantive equality, which requires institutions to respond to lived conditions rather than abstract symmetry (Edwards, 2011; CEDAW Committee, 2017).

2.2 Dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, and security

Equality is the primary doctrinal route, but it does not fully capture the entire legal harm. The abuse also attacks dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, and personal security. These concepts explain why the law must address more than unequal treatment in the abstract.

Dignity matters because the abuse often humiliates and degrades as much as it injures. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treated violence against women and sexual exploitation as incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person (United Nations, 1993, para. 38). This is not merely rhetorical language. It identifies a basic legal point: the victim is treated as someone whose body, choices, and boundaries can be controlled by another person.

Bodily integrity is equally important. Many forms of abuse involve invasion, violation, or control of the body, including rape, sexual assault, repeated physical attacks, forced medical procedures, and coercive reproductive practices. Even where treaty language does not always use the exact expression “bodily integrity”, the idea is central to the protection of the person under international human rights law. If the analysis remains only at the level of discrimination, the physical seriousness of the harm can be understated.

Liberty and security of the person also play a major role. Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects the liberty and security of a person. In its interpretation of article 9, the Human Rights Committee has made clear that states must respond appropriately to patterns of violence, including violence against women and domestic violence (Human Rights Committee, 2014, para. 9). This broad reading matters because many abusive relationships are structured not only by assault, but by coercive control, threats, surveillance, and confinement.

Liberty in this field is not limited to detention by the state. It also concerns whether a person can move safely, work, study, seek medical help, maintain social relationships, and make personal decisions without domination by another person. Personal security is not restricted to protection against immediate physical attack. It also covers the ongoing condition of living under a serious and credible threat.

This part of the framework also affects remedies. If the wrong includes degradation, bodily invasion, fear, and coercive control, effective protection cannot be reduced to punishment after the fact. It may require emergency protection orders, secure reporting mechanisms, confidential services, safe accommodation, and procedures designed to avoid retraumatization. The legal content of the right shapes the legal content of the response.

2.3 The right to life and the prohibition of torture

A complete universal analysis must also move through the right to life and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. These are not secondary pathways. They are central to recognizing the severity of the abuse and the urgency of state protection.

The right to life is often associated with intentional killing by state agents. Modern human rights law is broader. In General Comment No. 36, the Human Rights Committee explained that states must protect individuals against reasonably foreseeable threats to life, including threats arising from patterns of violence. It also identified femicide as a particularly grave form of attack on the right to life (Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras 21, 23 and 61).

That interpretation is important because it brings protective duties into focus before a death occurs. If authorities know, or ought to know, that a person faces escalating threats, repeated assaults, or a serious risk of lethal violence, the legal problem is already present. The right to life is not engaged only at the final stage. It also requires effective preventive action where lethal danger is foreseeable.

The prohibition of torture and ill-treatment addresses another dimension of seriousness. Severe abuse may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, especially where it involves rape, sexual abuse, detention, interrogation, punishment, intimidation, or official control. This route is particularly important in cases involving state officials, detention facilities, military settings, or abuse in custody.

The analysis does not end there. The Committee against Torture has made clear that state responsibility may also arise where authorities fail to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, prosecute, and punish serious abuse by non-state actors. In General Comment No. 2, the Committee expressly connected this principle to domestic violence, rape, trafficking, and female genital mutilation. It added that serious official failure may amount to consent or acquiescence for the purposes of the Convention against Torture (Committee against Torture, 2008, para. 18).

This doctrine is one of the clearest rejections of the older public/private divide. A state cannot avoid responsibility simply by pointing to the private status of the immediate perpetrator. Where the abuse is grave, and the authorities respond with serious negligence or indifference, state passivity itself becomes legally significant.

The torture framework is especially useful in four situations. First, it captures sexual abuse and rape in custody or detention. Second, it applies to severe abuse in the home where official inaction is prolonged and grave. Third, it reaches coercive reproductive practices and non-consensual medical interventions in serious cases. Fourth, it recognizes that humiliation, threats, and domination can be part of ill-treatment even where the evidence is not limited to visible physical injury.

2.4 Health and reproductive autonomy

This field is also a matter of health and reproductive autonomy. If it is framed only as a question of crime and punishment, an important part of the harm disappears from view. The abuse often produces long-term physical, psychological, sexual, and reproductive consequences. It can also interfere with access to care and with the ability to make free decisions about one’s body and reproductive life.

The right to health in universal human rights law is broader than access to hospitals or emergency treatment. It includes physical and mental health, access to appropriate services, and freedom from practices that damage bodily and psychological well-being. The Vienna Declaration reaffirmed women’s right to accessible and adequate health care and to the widest range of family planning services on a basis of equality (United Nations, 1993, para. 41).

CEDAW practice reinforces this connection. General Recommendation No. 19 linked family violence to adverse effects on women’s health and to barriers to equal participation in family and public life (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 23). General Recommendation No. 35 went further by identifying barriers to sexual and reproductive health, coercive interventions, and discriminatory legal frameworks as factors that can intensify women’s exposure to abuse or form part of the broader pattern of subordination (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 29).

This health-based approach changes the legal response required from the state. A survivor may need emergency contraception, post-rape care, treatment for injuries and infections, mental health support, forensic services, confidential counseling, and safe access to pregnancy-related care. If those services are unavailable, inaccessible, or delivered in degrading conditions, the state may fail its human rights obligations even where criminal law formally prohibits the original assault.

Reproductive autonomy is central within this framework. Abuse often includes reproductive control: forced pregnancy, sabotage of contraception, forced sterilization, coerced abortion, denial of informed consent, or other forms of pressure over reproductive decision-making. These are not merely medical failures. They are violations of bodily integrity and autonomy that belong within the same legal field as other serious forms of coercion.

This part of the law also explains why trauma-informed care matters. A formal right to complain is not enough where the survivor encounters disbelief, judgment, breaches of confidentiality, or retraumatization in hospitals, police stations, or courts. A rights-based response requires services that are accessible, respectful, confidential, and responsive to the effects of trauma. Without that, the institutional response can deepen the original harm.

The broader doctrinal lesson is clear. Universal human rights law does not approach the issue through one isolated right. Equality explains its structural basis. Dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, and security explain the attack on personhood and autonomy. The right to life and the prohibition of torture capture their most severe forms and the urgency of prevention. Health and reproductive autonomy show why the legal response must extend beyond punishment and include care, consent, and long-term support. That cumulative framework is what gives the universal system its depth and explanatory force.

3. From silence to recognition

The present framework did not emerge all at once. It developed through a marked change in how the United Nations understood violence against women. Earlier human rights practice was not wholly silent on women’s equality, but violence was not yet treated as a central problem of the international legal order. The decisive shift came in the early 1990s, when the issue moved from the margins of women’s advocacy into the mainstream of the UN human rights project (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a; United Nations General Assembly, 1993b).

This change was political and legal at the same time. Politically, it altered what the international system treated as a matter of public concern. Legally, it supplied the language and institutional basis for later developments under CEDAW, treaty-body interpretation, regional instruments, and special procedures. The year 1993 is the key turning point because it produced both a general normative statement and a more specific declaration focused on violence against women.

3.1 Vienna 1993

The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action marked the turning point. Paragraph 18 states that the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of universal human rights. It also identifies the full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social, and cultural life, and the eradication of discrimination on grounds of sex, as priority objectives of the international community (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a, para. 18).

This language mattered because it changed the status of women’s rights within the UN system. Women’s claims were no longer presented as secondary, sectoral, or merely social-policy concerns. They were placed inside the core language of universality. That move was important for later legal reasoning because it made it harder to treat violence against women as an external or exceptional issue.

Vienna also addressed violence directly. Paragraph 18 refers to gender-based violence, sexual harassment, and exploitation as incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and states that such abuses must be eliminated (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a, para. 18). Paragraph 38 goes further by calling for the elimination of violence against women in public and private life and by addressing gender bias in the administration of justice, harmful customary practices, cultural prejudices, and religious extremism where these conflict with women’s rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a, para. 38).

This was a major shift. It rejected the older assumption that violence within the family or home could remain outside international concern. It also rejected the idea that cultural or religious framing could remove the issue from the ordinary reach of human rights law. Vienna did not yet provide a detailed operational framework, but it changed the legal and institutional position of the subject inside the UN.

The Declaration also pointed toward institutional follow-up. Paragraph 37 called for the equal status of women and the human rights of women to be integrated into the mainstream of the United Nations system-wide activity. Paragraph 38 welcomed the decision of the Commission on Human Rights to consider appointing a special rapporteur on violence against women (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a, paras 37–38). Recognition was no longer left at the level of principle alone. It was tied to machinery, reporting, and regular scrutiny.

3.2 DEVAW 1993

The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted later in 1993, gave the international system something it had lacked: a general definition. Article 1 defines violence against women as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life (United Nations General Assembly, 1993b, art. 1).

That definition was highly significant. It drew together forms of abuse that had often been treated separately. It also made clear that the problem extends across private and public settings. The text did not confine the issue to state custody, armed conflict, or public assault. Domestic violence, sexual violence, and other forms of coercive abuse could now be described within a common international framework.

The Declaration also stated the structural basis of the problem. Its preamble describes violence against women as a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women and as one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position (United Nations General Assembly, 1993b, preamble). This language is important because it links the abuse to hierarchy and not only to individual misconduct.

Article 4 then imposed a clear normative expectation on states. It states that governments should condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition, or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination (United Nations General Assembly, 1993b, art. 4). This was one of the clearest statements made at the universal level in 1993. It rejected cultural defense arguments in direct terms and placed the burden on states to act without delay.

At the same time, the Declaration had a clear legal limit. It was a General Assembly declaration, not a treaty. It supplied strong normative clarity, but not treaty force. It did not create a new binding convention or a dedicated complaint mechanism of its own. This limit should be stated carefully. Soft law is not legally irrelevant. In human rights law, it often shapes interpretation, guides institutions, and influences the development of customary argument and treaty-body practice. Even so, it does not carry the same formal status as a ratified treaty obligation.

That combination of strength and limitation explains the place of DEVAW in legal history. It provided a common definition, a clear statement of state responsibility, and a direct rejection of custom-based evasion. Yet it left enforcement dependent on existing treaties, political pressure, later institutional mechanisms, and subsequent interpretive developments under CEDAW and other human rights bodies (Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024).

3.3 The Special Rapporteur mandate

Recognition became institutionalized in 1994, when the Commission on Human Rights established the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in resolution 1994/45. This step mattered because it turned a newly recognized issue into a continuing subject of investigation, reporting, and agenda-setting within the UN system (Commission on Human Rights, 1994).

The value of the mandate lies in its structure. Unlike a treaty body, the Special Rapporteur is not confined to one convention and its ratifying states. The mandate can address thematic issues, conduct country visits, communicate with governments, examine emerging patterns of abuse, and connect doctrinal analysis with actual state practice. It has served as a bridge between legal principle and institutional follow-up.

This role has been important in several ways. First, the mandate has helped consolidate the due diligence framework by examining how state failures of prevention, investigation, punishment, and protection operate in practice. Second, it has brought attention to forms of abuse that were previously underdeveloped in doctrine, including killings of women, violence in the family, violence in detention, and later, technology-facilitated abuse and other emerging patterns. Third, it has connected violence against women with broader questions of culture, discrimination, health, migration, conflict, and access to justice (OHCHR, 2026).

The mandate has also helped give continuity to the field. General Assembly declarations can establish principles, but regular reporting is needed to keep an issue institutionally visible. The Special Rapporteur has provided continuity through thematic reports, country reports, communications with governments, and participation in broader UN discussions. In that sense, recognition did not remain a one-off achievement of 1993. It became part of an ongoing international process.

The mandate remains active today. OHCHR records show that it was created in 1994, has been repeatedly renewed, and in 2022 its title was updated to Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. The mandate was renewed again in 2025 (OHCHR, 2026). This continuity matters because it shows that the subject has not returned to the margins. It remains embedded in the UN’s human rights machinery.

The broader significance of the mandate is doctrinal as well as institutional. It helped transform the issue from a category of harm that required recognition into a field of law that required regular development. Through that process, violence against women moved from relative silence to formal recognition to sustained international scrutiny.

4. CEDAW as the core universal framework

4.1 Why CEDAW remains central

CEDAW occupies a difficult but central position in the universal framework. The difficult point must be stated plainly: the Convention does not contain an explicit, stand-alone provision prohibiting violence against women. Its text is organized around discrimination, equality, stereotypes, participation, family relations, and substantive access to rights. Yet, despite that textual absence, it remains the main universal treaty framework in this field (CEDAW, 1979; Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024).

That is doctrinally possible because the Convention was drafted broadly enough to support an interpretive expansion. Article 1 defines discrimination against women in wide terms. Article 2 requires states to eliminate discrimination through legal and institutional measures. Article 3 requires action for the full development and advancement of women. Article 5 addresses stereotyped social and cultural patterns, and article 16 deals with inequality in family life. Read together, these provisions make it possible to treat violence as one of the most serious ways in which discrimination is imposed and maintained (CEDAW, 1979; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017).

CEDAW also became central because it is not limited to direct abuse by public authorities. Article 2(e) requires states to take appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by “any person, organization or enterprise”. That clause is crucial. It allows the Convention to reach conduct by private actors, which is indispensable in a field where much of the abuse occurs in homes, families, intimate relationships, workplaces, and other non-state settings (CEDAW, 1979; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017).

A second reason for CEDAW’s centrality is institutional rather than textual. The Convention generated an active treaty body, a dense body of general recommendations, and, after the Optional Protocol, communications and inquiry procedures. These mechanisms allowed the Committee to transform general equality norms into more specific standards of prevention, protection, investigation, punishment, and reparation. Without that institutional practice, the Convention’s text alone would have remained much thinner in operational value (Optional Protocol to CEDAW, 1999; Deane, 2024).

The cost of this structure is textual imprecision. Because the Convention does not expressly prohibit violence in stand-alone terms, the legal prohibition had to be built through interpretation. That has produced a powerful body of doctrine, but it also means that the framework is less textually direct than a dedicated treaty would be. The law works, but it works through an indirect route. This has sometimes required the Committee to connect violent acts to discrimination, stereotyping, family relations, or other Convention provisions before addressing the abuse fully. Critics have argued that this indirectness can dilute the physical and psychological seriousness of the harm by forcing it first into the language of discrimination (Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024).

Even so, the practical importance of CEDAW is difficult to dispute. It remains the principal universal treaty through which violence has been interpreted as a matter of state responsibility, substantive equality, and institutional accountability. The framework is not textually ideal, but it is doctrinally central.

4.2 General Recommendation No. 19

General Recommendation No. 19 was the decisive interpretive breakthrough. Before it, the Convention did not speak clearly enough to make violence a settled part of the treaty framework. The issue was present in the background, especially through concerns about discrimination, family relations, and harmful practices, but it had not yet been framed as a core legal category under the Convention itself (IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017).

GR 19 changed that position. It stated that gender-based violence is violence directed against a woman because she is a woman or violence that affects women disproportionately, and that it falls within the meaning of discrimination under article 1 of the Convention (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 6). That statement transformed violence from an implied concern into a recognized form of discrimination. It is the key step that made the later jurisprudence and recommendations possible.

The importance of GR 19 lies in its structure. It did not treat violence as a separate branch detached from equality law. Instead, it showed that violence impairs or nullifies the enjoyment of rights already protected by the Convention and by general international human rights law. In doing so, it linked the problem to equality in education, employment, health, family life, political participation, and bodily security. Violence was no longer outside the treaty. It became one of the clearest ways in which treaty rights are denied in practice (CEDAW Committee, 1992; Edwards, 2011).

GR 19 was also important because it explicitly addressed domestic and family violence. Paragraph 23 describes family violence as one of the most insidious forms of violence against women and connects it to traditional attitudes, lack of economic independence, and barriers to equal participation in family and public life (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 23). This was a major step away from the older public/private divide. The Committee was no longer confining the Convention to public discrimination in a narrow sense.

The recommendation also broadened the locations and forms of abuse that international law had to recognize. It referred to family violence, sexual abuse, sexual harassment in the workplace, trafficking, exploitation, and harmful traditional practices. That breadth mattered because it showed that the problem was systemic rather than isolated. The Committee was not simply identifying a set of offences. It was identifying a pattern of subordination expressed through different forms of coercion and harm (CEDAW Committee, 1992).

GR 19 did not solve every problem. It still worked through the discrimination framework and did not produce a dedicated treaty norm of violence in its own name. Yet it remains the foundation of the modern universal doctrine. Without GR 19, later case law under the Optional Protocol and later recommendations under the Convention would have lacked their interpretive basis.

4.3 General Recommendation No. 35

General Recommendation No. 35 is the modern doctrinal center of gravity. Adopted twenty-five years after GR 19, it did not replace the earlier recommendation. It updated, systematized, and expanded it in light of the Committee’s later practice, developments in other human rights mechanisms, and changes in the forms and settings of abuse (CEDAW Committee, 2017; Deane, 2024).

One of its most important contributions is conceptual. GR 35 states that this violence occurs on a continuum of multiple, interrelated, and recurring forms, in a range of settings, from private to public, including technology-mediated settings, and that in the contemporary globalized world it may transcend national boundaries (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 6). That formulation is highly significant. It rejects any attempt to isolate domestic violence, workplace abuse, online abuse, conflict-related abuse, and other forms as if they were unrelated legal problems. The Committee treats them as part of one broader system of gendered harm.

GR 35 also gives much greater weight to intersectionality. It recognizes that women may experience aggravated or distinct forms of abuse because of the intersection of sex with other statuses and conditions, including disability, age, migration status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty, detention, conflict, and rural location (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 12). This is an important doctrinal development because it moves the analysis beyond a flat, single-axis model of discrimination.

A second major contribution of GR 35 is its operational detail. It turns general equality law into a framework of concrete state obligations. The recommendation sets out due diligence duties covering prevention, protection, investigation, prosecution, punishment, reparation, data collection, institutional coordination, and training. States are expected not only to criminalize serious abuse, but to adopt effective measures that work in practice. This includes risk assessment, immediate protection, access to justice, support services, shelters, medical care, and survivor-sensitive procedures (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 24–35).

Its due diligence model is particularly important. GR 35 states that states may be responsible for private acts if they fail to act with due diligence to prevent violations of rights, investigate and punish acts of violence, and provide reparation. This makes the framework operational in exactly the settings where a purely public-law model would fail. The abuse may be committed by a partner, family member, employer, community actor, or online harasser, but the state still has positive obligations to organize protection and accountability (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 21 and 24).

GR 35 also broadens the legal field by recognizing settings that earlier doctrine treated less fully. It refers to family life, community settings, public spaces, workplaces, educational institutions, health services, politics, sport, and digital spaces. The inclusion of technology-mediated environments is especially important. It shows that the Committee understands contemporary abuse as extending beyond physical proximity into surveillance, harassment, threats, humiliation, and coercive control carried through digital means (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 20; Deane, 2024).

Another strength of GR 35 is that it links violence to wider structural conditions. It refers to stereotyping, ideology of male entitlement, austerity measures, conflict, displacement, globalization, corporate conduct, environmental degradation, and other contemporary factors that may intensify women’s exposure to abuse (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 14 and 19; Deane, 2024). This does not turn the recommendation into a political manifesto. It clarifies that the abuse is embedded in legal, economic, and institutional structures.

For doctrinal analysis, GR 35 is the main bridge between general equality law and operational state obligations. GR 19 established that violence is discrimination. GR 35 explains what follows from that conclusion in practical legal terms. It is the point at which the framework becomes detailed enough to guide legislation, adjudication, institutional design, and remedies.

4.4 Communications and inquiries

The strength of the CEDAW framework becomes most visible when doctrine is tested against concrete disputes. The communications procedure under the Optional Protocol allowed the Committee to move from abstract interpretation to case-specific findings. These decisions do not operate like judgments of an international court, but they are legally important because they show how the Committee understands the Convention’s obligations in practice (Optional Protocol to CEDAW, 1999; Edwards, 2011).

A.T. v Hungary was the early landmark. The author had been subjected to severe domestic violence and lacked effective protection under domestic law. The Committee found violations of articles 2(a), 2(b), 2(e), and 5(a), read with article 16, and emphasized the state’s duty to provide immediate and effective protection. It recommended protective measures, safe housing, access to support services, and legal reform. The importance of the case lies in its clarity: domestic violence was treated not as a private misfortune, but as a rights violation requiring urgent state action (A.T. v Hungary, Communication No. 2/2003, 2005).

Yildirim v Austria and Goekce v Austria developed the framework further in cases involving lethal risk. In both cases, the women had faced serious, repeated domestic violence and escalating threats. Austrian authorities had some knowledge of the danger but failed to act effectively enough to prevent the killings. The Committee concluded that the state had failed in its due diligence obligations under articles 2 and 3, read together with General Recommendation No. 19. These cases are important because they make the protective dimension of the Convention concrete. The legal issue was not only the homicide itself, but the earlier institutional failure to respond to known risk with sufficient seriousness (Yildirim v Austria, Communication No. 6/2005, 2007; Goekce v Austria, Communication No. 5/2005, 2007).

The Austrian cases also show that due diligence is not satisfied by the mere existence of legal tools. Protective laws and restraining orders are not enough if police, prosecutors, and courts fail to use them effectively. The Committee examined the functioning of the system rather than its formal appearance. That approach remains one of the strongest features of CEDAW practice.

Vertido v Philippines addresses a different doctrinal problem: rape adjudication and gender stereotyping. The author alleged rape, but the domestic proceedings were shaped by judicial assumptions about how a “real” victim behaves. The Committee found that the state had violated articles 2(c), 2(d), 2(f), and 5(a) by allowing stereotypes and myths to distort the adjudication of sexual violence. It called for effective remedy, compensation, and measures to ensure that legal proceedings in rape cases are not shaped by discriminatory assumptions (Vertido v Philippines, Communication No. 18/2008, 2010).

Vertido is especially important because it shows that the Convention reaches not only physical abuse but also discriminatory administration of justice. The violation lay partly in the assault and partly in the state’s handling of the complaint. The decision made clear that evidentiary bias, stereotype-driven reasoning, and judicial disbelief can themselves constitute forms of unequal treatment under the Convention.

Together, these communications show how the framework works in practice. A.T. v Hungary illustrates immediate protection in domestic violence cases. Yildirim and Goekce show that known lethal risk engages serious due diligence obligations. Vertido demonstrates that sexual violence cannot be adjudicated through gendered myths without breaching the Convention. The resulting picture is one of a treaty framework that, despite its indirect textual route, has developed real doctrinal precision through interpretation and application.

The inquiry procedure is also significant, even though the communications are often cited more frequently. Article 8 of the Optional Protocol allows the Committee to inquire into grave or systematic violations of Convention rights. This matters because it gives the framework a structural dimension beyond individual complaints. It allows the Committee to address not only single failures, but also patterns of institutional abuse, impunity, and systemic discrimination (Optional Protocol to CEDAW, 1999; Deane, 2024).

What emerges from this body of practice is not a perfect system, but a workable one. The Convention’s text may be indirect, yet the Committee’s recommendations, communications, and inquiries have turned it into the core universal framework for addressing violence against women as discrimination, as institutional failure, and as a matter of concrete state responsibility.

5. Due diligence and responsibility for private violence

5.1 From negative restraint to positive obligation

One of the most important developments in this field was the move away from a narrow model of state responsibility. Under the older approach, international human rights law focused mainly on direct abuse by public authorities. The central question was whether the state itself had violated a protected right. That model was too limited for a field in which much of the abuse occurs in homes, families, intimate relationships, workplaces, schools, communities, and digital environments.

The decisive doctrinal change was the recognition that a state may breach human rights law not only by committing abuse, but also by failing to act against serious and foreseeable abuse committed by private actors. This is the legal answer to the old public/private divide. Once violence in private life was accepted as a human rights issue, international law had to explain why state inaction could amount to responsibility. The concept that made this possible was due diligence (Edwards, 2011; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017).

CEDAW played a central role in this shift. Article 2(e) requires States parties to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by “any person, organization or enterprise”, and article 2(f) requires the modification or abolition of discriminatory laws, customs, and practices (CEDAW, 1979, arts 2(e)–(f)). These provisions already point beyond a narrow focus on official misconduct. They impose a framework of action against private structures that sustain women’s unequal enjoyment of rights.

General Recommendation No. 19 clarified the point by treating violence as a form of discrimination. General Recommendation No. 35 then stated the principle in direct terms: States may be responsible for private acts where they fail to act with due diligence to prevent violations of rights, investigate and punish acts of violence, and provide reparation to victims (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 21 and 24). The legal wrong is no longer limited to what a state officer did with his own hands. It also includes serious failures of protection.

Other universal bodies have developed the same logic. The Human Rights Committee has explained that States parties must respond appropriately to patterns of violence, including domestic violence and violence against women, as part of their obligations under liberty, security, and life (Human Rights Committee, 2014, para. 9; Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras 21 and 23). The Committee against Torture has gone further by stating that official failure to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, prosecute, and punish serious abuse by non-state actors may amount to consent or acquiescence for the Convention against Torture (Committee against Torture, 2008, para. 18).

This development changed the structure of the law in a profound way. The relevant question is no longer only whether the state refrained from abuse. It is also whether the state acted with sufficient seriousness once a foreseeable risk existed. A legal system that waits passively while known threats escalate is not neutral. It is failing in protection.

5.2 The content of due diligence

Due diligence is sometimes described too loosely, as if it were only a general expectation of seriousness. That is not enough. It is a concrete legal standard with identifiable components. In this field, the standard includes prevention, risk assessment, emergency protection, investigation, prosecution, punishment, victim support, and reparations (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 24–35; Deane, 2024).

Prevention comes first. States must address the structural conditions that make abuse predictable and recurrent. This includes criminal law reform where needed, but it also includes education, training, data collection, public policy, and measures directed at stereotypes and discriminatory practices. Prevention is not satisfied by general condemnation alone. It requires active institutional design.

Risk assessment is a distinct obligation, not a minor administrative detail. Where authorities receive complaints, reports of threats, evidence of escalation, access to weapons, or repeated violations of restraining orders, they must evaluate the seriousness of the danger in real time. The right to life framework is especially important here. It requires protective action against reasonably foreseeable threats, not merely reaction after fatal harm has already occurred (Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras 21 and 23).

Emergency protection means that the legal system must be capable of acting quickly. Protective orders, police intervention, safe shelter, emergency housing, relocation where necessary, and access to immediate medical and psychological support are part of this obligation. A state that offers only ordinary litigation pathways in a context of imminent danger is not meeting the standard of diligence.

Investigation must be prompt, serious, impartial, and capable of establishing the facts. It is not enough to open a file and leave it inactive. Repeated delay, failure to collect evidence, refusal to hear the complainant properly, or reliance on stereotype-driven assumptions can amount to a rights failure in themselves. In sexual violence cases, this point is especially important because procedural bias can undermine the possibility of justice from the beginning (Vertido v Philippines, 2010).

Prosecution and punishment also form part of the standard, but they must be understood carefully. Due diligence does not require conviction in every case. It requires a functioning system capable of responding effectively where evidence justifies action. Selective non-prosecution, trivial charges for serious abuse, or routine downgrading of repeated violence into minor incidents may show that the system is failing in substance even if it appears active on paper.

Victim support is also indispensable. Protection cannot be reduced to the criminal process. States must ensure access to health care, psychosocial services, legal assistance, shelters, crisis support, and procedures that reduce retraumatization. Where support systems are absent, inaccessible, or unsafe, formal rights become difficult to exercise in practice (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 31).

Reparations complete the framework. They include compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition, and, where appropriate, institutional reform. Reparations matter because the harm often extends far beyond the original act. Long-term trauma, loss of housing, loss of employment, damage to health, family disruption, and fear of repeated violence all require a response that goes beyond punishment alone.

A central point must be stressed here: symbolic legislation is not enough. Many states now have laws on domestic violence, sexual offences, or protective orders. That fact, by itself, proves little. Due diligence is measured by functioning institutions, not by statutory appearance. A state may have modern legislation and still breach its obligations if police do not enforce orders, prosecutors dismiss repeated complaints, judges rely on myths about “real victims”, shelters are unavailable, or rural areas are effectively left without protection.

Non-enforcement is not a secondary administrative problem. It is a human rights failure. Once the law recognizes serious abuse, but the institutions do not implement that recognition in practice, the gap itself becomes part of the violation. This is why communications under the Optional Protocol to CEDAW focus not only on legal text, but also on actual institutional response, especially in situations of repeated domestic violence and escalating lethal risk (A.T. v Hungary, 2005; Yildirim v Austria, 2007; Goekce v Austria, 2007).

5.3 Corporate and extraterritorial dimensions

Due diligence should not be confined to domestic violence in the narrow sense. Contemporary doctrine also opens space for addressing business actors, supply chains, online platforms, and harms connected to conduct beyond the state’s territory where influence or regulatory reach exists. This is one of the most important current developments in the field.

General Recommendation No. 35 already points in this direction. It refers to violence occurring in all spaces and spheres of human interaction, including technology-mediated settings, and it notes that such violence may transcend national boundaries in the contemporary globalized world (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 6). It also links state responsibility to abuse committed by “any person, organization or enterprise”, which means that private corporate actors are not outside the Convention’s logic (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 21 and 29).

This matters in several contexts. Workplace harassment, abuse in global production chains, exploitation of migrant women in domestic and care work, unsafe employer-provided housing, abuse linked to recruitment systems, and technology-facilitated harassment all show that private power is not limited to intimate partners or family structures. In many cases, business models, labour hierarchies, and platform design can intensify vulnerability and make remedies harder to obtain.

The broader UN business and human rights framework supports this reading. The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights distinguish between the state duty to protect and the corporate responsibility to respect human rights (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2011). Although the Guiding Principles are not treaty law, they reinforce the expectation that states must regulate, monitor, investigate, and provide access to remedy where business activity contributes to abuse.

Extraterritorial dimensions are also increasingly difficult to ignore. Human rights bodies have become more willing to accept that a state’s obligations may extend, at least in some circumstances, to harms connected to conduct outside its territory where it exercises effective control, regulatory authority, or decisive influence. In the field of business activity, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has stated that states should take steps to prevent corporations domiciled in their territory or jurisdiction from impairing rights abroad, especially where the resulting harm is foreseeable, and the state is in a position to influence corporate conduct (CESCR, 2017, paras 30–32).

The right-to-life framework also supports a broader approach. General Comment No. 36 stresses that states must take appropriate measures to address general conditions that may threaten life and must protect against foreseeable threats. That logic can apply to cross-border settings where state regulation, licensing, oversight, or corporate governance materially affects exposure to severe harm (Human Rights Committee, 2018, paras 21 and 23). The issue is not abstract universal control. The issue is whether a state has meaningful regulatory reach and fails to use it.

Online platforms raise a related problem. Technology-mediated abuse often crosses borders instantly. Threats, stalking, image-based abuse, coordinated harassment, and digitally enabled coercive control may be carried through infrastructures owned or operated by corporations subject to state regulation. The legal challenge is no longer only interpersonal violence. It is also the design, moderation, and accountability structures of digital environments. GR 35 is important here because it makes clear that technology-mediated settings are part of the same continuum of abuse, not a separate and lesser category (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 6).

The same point applies to supply chains. A state that benefits economically from corporate actors domiciled in its territory cannot treat abuse in foreign production sites as legally invisible where it has tools of regulation, disclosure, oversight, or remedy. The harder question is not whether every cross-border harm automatically engages responsibility. It is how far the state’s influence, knowledge, and regulatory capacity extend in a particular case. The contemporary trend is toward greater scrutiny of that question, not less.

This part of the doctrine remains less settled than the core due diligence obligations in domestic settings. Even so, the direction is clear. The universal framework is no longer confined to a model in which violence is imagined only as a local private act inside the home. It increasingly recognizes that private power can be intimate, economic, digital, and transnational at the same time. A current account of due diligence must include that broader terrain.

6. Specific manifestations and settings

The legal framework becomes clearer when examined through concrete forms of abuse. General principles such as equality, dignity, due diligence, and the right to life acquire real meaning only when applied to recurring settings in which harm occurs. The manifestations discussed below are not exhaustive, but they capture the main contexts that have shaped the doctrine: domestic abuse, sexual violence, harmful practices, digital abuse, conflict-related sexual violence, and lethal violence against women.

These manifestations should not be treated as isolated legal compartments. International human rights law increasingly approaches them as connected forms of abuse rooted in unequal power, gender stereotyping, institutional failure, and weak enforcement. The distinctions still matter, because each setting raises particular issues of proof, prevention, and remedy. The connections matter just as much because fragmentation can hide the structural character of the problem.

6.1 Domestic and intimate partner violence

Domestic and intimate partner violence was the manifestation that most clearly forced international law to confront repetition, foreseeability, and state inaction. For a long time, abuse within the family was treated as a private misfortune, a domestic dispute, or a matter best left to informal resolution. That approach shielded violence from serious legal scrutiny and allowed states to present inaction as neutrality.

Modern human rights law rejected that view. General Recommendation No. 19 described family violence as one of the most insidious forms of violence against women and linked it to traditional attitudes, economic dependence, and barriers to equality in family and public life (CEDAW Committee, 1992, para. 23). The key shift was conceptual: harm inside the home was no longer outside the law. It became one of the clearest examples of how discrimination, coercion, and unequal power operate in daily life.

Domestic violence also changed the logic of state responsibility. It revealed that the most serious failures often occur before a final assault or killing. Threats are repeated. Complaints are filed. Protection orders are ignored. Police know the situation is deteriorating. The legal issue is not only the final act, but the state’s failure to respond to escalating danger. This is why domestic violence became central to the doctrine of due diligence.

The communications under the Optional Protocol to CEDAW made this especially clear. In A.T. v Hungary, the Committee treated the absence of immediate protection and safe housing as a rights failure under the Convention (A.T. v Hungary, 2005). In Yildirim v Austria and Goekce v Austria, the problem was not only homicide. It was the inability of state institutions to act effectively despite known and escalating risk (Yildirim v Austria, 2007; Goekce v Austria, 2007). Domestic violence had become a paradigmatic human rights violation because it exposed how non-enforcement, delay, and minimization could be as legally important as the original abuse.

This setting also shows why formal law alone is not enough. A state may criminalize domestic violence and still fail if the police treat repeated complaints as family conflict, if prosecutors do not act on risk, or if courts issue orders that are not enforced. The doctrinal lesson is direct: private abuse becomes a human rights issue when the state knows, or ought to know, of serious danger and fails to organize protection with sufficient seriousness.

6.2 Sexual violence and rape adjudication

Sexual violence raised a different but equally important challenge. The core legal problems here are consent, credibility, and judicial stereotyping. Human rights law had to confront not only the violence itself, but also the way legal systems define, investigate, and adjudicate it.

One recurring difficulty has been the treatment of consent. Traditional approaches often focused on force, resistance, or visible injury. That method was too narrow. It risked suggesting that sexual violence is not proven unless the victim resisted physically or bore obvious signs of struggle. A rights-based approach asks a more precise question: whether there was free and genuine consent. The absence of consent cannot be reduced to whether the complainant fought back in a manner that fits judicial expectations.

Credibility has also been shaped by stereotype. Courts have often relied on assumptions about how a “real” victim behaves, how quickly a complaint should be made, how a victim should speak, or what level of distress should be visible. Those assumptions distort the assessment of evidence. They also reproduce inequality inside the justice process itself.

Vertido v Philippines is the clearest CEDAW example. The Committee found that the adjudication of rape had been affected by myths and stereotypes about how a victim of rape should behave and how her testimony should be evaluated (Vertido v Philippines, 2010). The case is important because it shows that the violation may occur not only through the assault, but also through the state’s handling of the complaint. A courtroom can become another site where violence is reproduced, this time through disbelief, humiliation, and stereotype-driven reasoning.

This part of the doctrine matters well beyond one case. Definitions of rape, evidentiary rules, prosecutorial thresholds, and judicial reasoning all affect whether the legal system recognizes sexual violence as a rights violation or reduces it to a dispute over credibility shaped by prejudice. The human rights framework insists that impartiality is not achieved by repeating old assumptions in neutral language. If consent is interpreted through stereotype, the law itself becomes part of the problem.

6.3 Harmful practices

Harmful practices sit at the intersection of equality, childhood, bodily integrity, and cultural defense arguments. This is one of the areas where the legal analysis must be careful. International law is right to reject culture as a shield for gender hierarchy, but it must also avoid simplistic claims that present some cultures as uniquely violent and others as fully emancipated.

The key point is that harmful practices are not protected because they are longstanding, customary, or socially accepted. When a practice causes physical or psychological harm, reinforces unequal status, restricts bodily autonomy, or places women and girls under coercive control, human rights law does not accept custom or tradition as a legal answer. DEVAW made this explicit by stating that states should not invoke custom, tradition, or religion to avoid obligations relating to the elimination of violence against women (United Nations General Assembly, 1993b, art. 4).

This issue becomes especially sharp where girls are involved. Child marriage, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and related practices engage not only equality law, but also rights relating to childhood, health, bodily integrity, education, and free consent. The law deals with more than cultural differences. It is dealing with institutionalized vulnerability and unequal power over developing bodies and lives.

At the same time, the legal analysis should not essentialize culture. The better approach is to identify the specific practice, the form of patriarchal power it expresses, and the concrete rights it violates. As feminist scholarship and Special Rapporteur practice have pointed out, patriarchy is not confined to one region, religion, or tradition. The problem is not “culture” in the abstract. The problem is the use of culture to defend domination, inequality, and harm (Coomaraswamy, 1994; Ertürk, 2007; Ziniakova, 2021).

This subsection is doctrinally important because it shows why cultural defense arguments must fail. Human rights law is not required to respect social arrangements that subordinate women and girls in the name of identity or tradition. Equality would become hollow if custom could always defeat protection.

6.4 Technology-mediated violence

Technology-mediated violence should not be treated as a separate legal universe. It is better understood as an intensification of older patterns of abuse through new means. General Recommendation No. 35 expressly recognizes that violence occurs across a continuum of settings, including technology-mediated settings, and may transcend national boundaries in the contemporary globalized world (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 6).

Digital abuse includes harassment, threats, stalking, surveillance, non-consensual distribution of intimate material, impersonation, coordinated attacks, and coercive control carried through phones, platforms, and networked devices. None of these harms is conceptually foreign to human rights law. They replicate older forms of intimidation, humiliation, isolation, and domination. What changes are scale, speed, permanence, and the difficulty of enforcement.

This setting raises familiar legal problems in sharper form. Evidence can be abundant but fragile. Messages, screenshots, metadata, and platform records may be crucial, yet difficult to preserve or authenticate. Jurisdiction becomes harder because the perpetrator, the victim, server, and platform may all be located in different states. Enforcement is also more complex, since abusive conduct may depend on corporate moderation systems, reporting mechanisms, algorithmic amplification, or deliberate design choices that make harassment easier to sustain.

The digital setting also blurs public and private boundaries. Abuse may begin within an intimate relationship and then be projected into public space through images, threats, or coordinated humiliation. That continuity supports the broader doctrinal point made by GR 35: the law should not isolate technology-facilitated abuse as if it were detached from domestic violence, sexual violence, or coercive control. It is often part of the same pattern.

This is one of the areas where the universal framework is still developing. Even so, the existing doctrine is already strong enough to treat digital abuse as part of the same continuum of discrimination, intimidation, and rights impairment. The novelty lies less in the legal category than in the evidentiary and institutional difficulties it creates.

6.5 Conflict-related sexual violence

Conflict-related sexual violence sits at the overlap of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and the women, peace and security framework. The human rights analysis should remain anchored in rights protection, while recognizing that armed conflict sharpens the legal questions and the consequences of institutional failure.

The Rome Statute gives this area particular legal visibility. It expressly lists rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and other forms of sexual violence of comparable gravity as war crimes and, in certain circumstances, as crimes against humanity (Rome Statute, 1998, arts 7(1)(g) and 8(2)(b)(xxii), 8(2)(e)(vi)). This matters because it removes any remaining doubt that such conduct is not incidental to conflict but can constitute one of its gravest international crimes.

The women, peace, and security framework also shaped the field. Security Council resolutions, especially Resolution 1325 and later Resolution 1820, helped move sexual violence in conflict into the center of international peace and security discourse (UN Security Council, 2000; UN Security Council, 2008). Their contribution was not to replace human rights law, but to reinforce the idea that violence against women in war is a matter of protection, participation, accountability, and state responsibility.

Human rights law still matters in this setting for several reasons. First, many acts of conflict-related sexual violence are committed or tolerated by state agents, militias, or armed groups operating in contexts where state institutions have collapsed or become complicit. Second, the duty to investigate and provide a remedy does not disappear simply because the abuse occurs during conflict. Third, the distinction between wartime and peacetime abuse is often less sharp than it appears. Patterns of domestic violence, militarized masculinity, and post-conflict impunity frequently show continuity rather than rupture.

This continuity is doctrinally important. It prevents the law from treating sexual violence in war as an exceptional atrocity wholly detached from ordinary structures of gender domination. Armed conflict intensifies vulnerability, weakens institutions, and magnifies impunity. It does not create patriarchy anew. A strong human rights analysis keeps both levels in view: the exceptional gravity of wartime abuse and its continuity with wider patterns of inequality.

6.6 Femicide and gender-related killings

Femicide and other gender-related killings are the gravest manifestation of the field. They are important doctrinally because they connect lethal violence to prior patterns of abuse, state non-protection, and the right to life. Even where femicide is not universally codified as a separate offence, the concept remains legally useful.

Its usefulness lies in what it reveals. The term draws attention to killings that are not random but are linked to gendered domination, prior coercive control, intimate partner abuse, sexual violence, family violence, so-called honour claims, or repeated threats that authorities failed to address. It helps expose the continuity between “non-lethal” abuse and lethal outcome. In many cases, the killing is the final stage of a pattern that had long been visible.

The Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 36 is central here. It links gender-based violence to state duties under the right to life and identifies femicide as a particularly grave form of attack on that right (Human Rights Committee, 2018, para. 61). The legal importance of this position is that it moves the focus beyond the final death. The state’s obligation is engaged when the risk becomes foreseeable, not only when the killing has already occurred.

The concept is also useful in investigative terms. It encourages authorities to look at motive, relationship history, prior complaints, ignored protection orders, coercive control, threats, and institutional failure. A homicide investigation that treats the killing as an isolated event may miss the discriminatory and preventive dimensions of the case. The law needs a vocabulary that makes those dimensions visible.

Formal codification is not the only measure of legal value. A concept can be doctrinally useful even when treaty law has not turned it into a universal offence label. Femicide performs that function. It identifies a recurring pattern of lethal violence against women and girls, shows its connection to structural inequality, and strengthens the right-to-life analysis by insisting on prior warning signs, state omission, and the gendered context of the killing.

This is why the manifestations section should end here. Lethal violence is not a separate field detached from the rest. It is the sharpest reminder that domestic violence, sexual violence, harmful practices, digital abuse, and conflict-related sexual violence cannot be treated as minor or compartmentalized problems. The gravest cases often emerge out of the very patterns the law failed to interrupt earlier.

7. Intersectionality and subjects of protection

7.1 Why single-axis analysis fails

A purely sex-based account is too thin to explain how this field operates in practice. It can show that women are exposed to discrimination as women, but it cannot fully explain why some women face sharper, more frequent, or more institutionally neglected forms of abuse than others. Once the analysis remains fixed on sex alone, it risks flattening very different experiences into one undifferentiated category.

International human rights law has increasingly moved beyond that narrow approach. General Recommendation No. 28 states that discrimination against women is inextricably linked to other factors that affect women, such as race, ethnicity, religion or belief, health, status, age, class, caste, sexual orientation, and gender identity (CEDAW Committee, 2010, para. 18). General Recommendation No. 35 takes the same position in the context of violence by stressing that women are affected by intersecting forms of discrimination that heighten exposure to abuse and weaken access to justice and protection (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 12).

This development matters because the law must deal with compounded disadvantage, not merely with one protected ground at a time. A woman may face abuse not only because she is a woman, but because she is poor, disabled, indigenous, detained, racialized, displaced, or treated as socially disposable in more than one way at once. These factors do not simply add up mechanically. They interact. They can change the form of the abuse, the likelihood of state intervention, the credibility assigned to the victim, and the availability of remedy.

A single-axis model is also weak because it can make the legal response too abstract. If the law speaks only in general terms about women as a whole, it may fail to see that formal protections often work unequally. The same police system, court system, health service, or shelter network may be accessible to some women and practically closed to others. Intersectional analysis does not fragment the category of women beyond usefulness. It makes the category more accurate by showing how inequality is structured in real institutions.

This point is not merely sociological. It affects the content of state obligations. Prevention, protection, investigation, and remedy cannot be designed on the assumption that all women face identical barriers. A legal framework that ignores compounded disadvantage risks, treating equal treatment as sufficient even when the practical effect is continued exclusion. The move beyond single-axis analysis is one of the ways in which contemporary doctrine shifts from formal equality to substantive equality (Edwards, 2011; Deane, 2024).

7.2 Groups at compounded risk

The modern framework increasingly recognizes that some groups face compounded exposure to abuse and compounded protection barriers. This recognition should be approached carefully. It is not based on the idea that some women are inherently vulnerable by nature. Vulnerability in this field is better understood as a legal and social product of unequal institutions, discriminatory norms, and material disadvantage.

Disability is a clear example. Women and girls with disabilities may face heightened exposure to sexual abuse, coercive control, institutional confinement, forced medical interventions, and barriers to reporting. The problem is not disability alone. It is the combination of dependence, ableist assumptions, inaccessible services, lack of support for independent decision-making, and disbelief by authorities. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has stressed that women with disabilities face multiple and intersectional discrimination and are at particular risk of violence, exploitation, and abuse (CRPD Committee, 2016, paras 31–36).

Race and ethnicity are equally important. Racialized women may face not only gender-based abuse, but also discriminatory policing, reduced credibility, harsher stereotyping, and lower access to effective remedies. The legal issue is not simply that racism and sexism both exist. It is that institutions may respond differently depending on who the victim is perceived to be. This affects investigation, prosecution, sentencing, child protection, and access to social services.

Indigenous women often face a particularly severe combination of factors: colonial legacies, geographic isolation, weak state protection, poverty, under-policing when they seek protection, and over-policing in other areas of life. In such settings, violence cannot be understood adequately without reference to dispossession, historical marginalization, and the institutional devaluation of indigenous lives. The abuse may be interpersonal, but the setting in which it occurs is shaped by much wider structures of inequality (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 12; González Hauck et al., 2024).

Migration status creates another layer of compounded risk. Migrant women, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented women may fear reporting violence because of deportation, detention, language barriers, economic dependence, or lack of legal status. A formal right to complain means little if contact with the authorities may lead to immigration consequences, family separation, or loss of livelihood. The same pattern appears in labour migration, especially in domestic work and care work, where abuse may be enabled by isolation and dependence on employers.

Poverty also intensifies exposure and limits exit. Economic deprivation may force women to remain in abusive relationships, accept unsafe work, or forgo legal action because they cannot afford transport, childcare, legal aid, or alternative housing. Poverty is not merely a background context. It shapes whether protection is materially possible. In that sense, economic inequality is not external to the legal analysis. It helps explain why formal rights are often inaccessible in practice.

Age matters at both ends of the spectrum. Girls may face abuse in conditions of dependence, family control, and limited legal capacity, while older women may face neglect, financial exploitation, coercive control, and institutional invisibility. The law must be capable of seeing how age changes both the form of the harm and the institutional response to it.

Rural location also matters. Women in rural or remote areas may face long distances to police, courts, shelters, and medical care. Services may exist on paper but remain unreachable in practice. Geographic inequality turns formal protection into partial protection. The same legal rights produce different outcomes depending on where a woman lives.

Detention is another setting of compounded risk. Women deprived of liberty may face sexual abuse, invasive searches, coercive medical practices, humiliation, retaliation for complaints, and a lack of independent reporting channels. In detention, the imbalance of power is extreme, and the ordinary barriers to protection become sharper. The law is especially demanding in this context because state control is direct and the risk of abuse is intensified by dependence and confinement.

The broader lesson is that exposure to abuse is structured by institutions. Vulnerability should not be treated as a fixed trait that belongs to certain women as an essential characteristic. It is more accurate to understand it as a product of social and legal arrangements that distribute protection unevenly. This is why intersectional analysis is indispensable. It identifies how institutions create or intensify risk and how apparently neutral systems can fail particular groups repeatedly (Fineman, 2008; CEDAW Committee, 2017; Deane, 2024).

7.3 Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex women

The universal framework remains built around women and girls. That point should be stated clearly. CEDAW is a treaty on discrimination against women, and its architecture still turns on that category. At the same time, current doctrine is wider than the treaty’s original framing. General Recommendation No. 35 expressly recognizes that gender-based violence may affect women throughout the life cycle and that intersecting forms of discrimination include sexual orientation and gender identity (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 12).

This recognition is important because it makes clear that lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex women are not outside the protective logic of the Convention. They may face abuse linked to gender non-conformity, sexuality, reproductive control, family rejection, public harassment, corrective violence, institutional mistreatment, or exclusion from services. The violence may be shaped simultaneously by sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and intersex discrimination. A framework that ignores those intersections would be incomplete.

The opening in current doctrine is real, but it has limits. The universal framework has widened through interpretation, especially in the language of intersecting discrimination. Yet it has not fully converted into a general post-binary treaty framework. CEDAW still speaks in the language of women, and its central doctrinal route remains the elimination of discrimination against women rather than a general treaty prohibition of all gender-based violence across the full gender spectrum.

This limit should be described precisely, not polemically. The Convention can and does protect lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex women where they fall within the scope of women affected by intersecting discrimination. But that is not the same as saying that universal treaty law has already been rebuilt around a fully post-binary conception of gender. The interpretation has widened the framework, but the text and institutional architecture still reflect a women-centered model (Ziniakova, 2021; Deane, 2024).

That women-centered model remains valuable in many respects because it preserves focus on the structural subordination that motivated the treaty in the first place. The difficulty lies in ensuring that the category of women is not interpreted so narrowly that it excludes those whose experiences clearly fall within the same field of gendered harm. General Recommendation No. 35 moves in the right direction by recognizing that discrimination and abuse are shaped by intersecting factors, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

The present position can be stated in balanced terms. Universal doctrine is no longer limited to a rigid, single-axis account of women’s experience. It now recognizes that some women face violence through multiple and intersecting forms of disadvantage, and that this includes lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex women. Yet the framework has widened through interpretation rather than through treaty redesign. It remains more inclusive than before, but not fully transformed in conceptual or textual terms.

8. Regional regimes and cross-fertilization

Regional law is essential to understanding the present state of the field. At the universal level, the legal framework had to be built indirectly through equality, due diligence, and treaty-body interpretation. Regional instruments show what happens when violence is addressed in more direct terms. They define the harm expressly, identify the right to live free from violence, and attach clearer duties of prevention, protection, prosecution, support, and monitoring (OAS, 1994; African Union, 2003; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

This regional material should not be treated as a decorative comparison. It performs an important doctrinal function. It reveals what the universal system still handles indirectly and what dedicated treaty design can achieve more explicitly. It also shows that the older habit of discussing only three regional treaties is now incomplete unless the 2025 African Union convention is added to the analysis (African Union, 2025).

8.1 Belém do Pará

The Inter-American Convention of Belém do Pará remains one of the clearest examples of what a dedicated treaty can do. It defines violence against women directly, recognizes women’s right to live free from violence, and treats such violence as a violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms. It also makes explicit that the abuse can occur in the private sphere, the public sphere, or through conduct perpetrated or condoned by the state or its agents (OAS, 1994; OAS/MESECVI, 2026).

Its normative design is notably direct. The Convention does not require the same degree of interpretive reconstruction that CEDAW required at the universal level. It defines the problem in article 1, identifies its forms and spheres in article 2, and states in articles 3 to 6 that women have the right to be free from violence and to enjoy a range of connected rights, including life, integrity, liberty, dignity, equality before the law, and effective recourse to a court (OAS, 1994).

The treaty also sets out express state obligations. States must refrain from violence, apply due diligence to prevent, investigate, and impose penalties, adopt legislative and policy measures, modify laws and practices that sustain violence, ensure access to justice, provide effective remedies, supply specialized services, collect data, and promote public awareness and training (OAS, 1994; OAS/MESECVI, 2026). This is a good illustration of how a dedicated treaty can move quickly from definition to operational duties.

The Inter-American system also developed a monitoring structure around the Convention. The creation of MESECVI in 2004 added a follow-up mechanism focused specifically on implementation. That institutional design is important because it gave the treaty a specialized review process rather than leaving it entirely dependent on general human rights supervision. The result is a model in which the right to live free from violence is not only declared, but also monitored in a field-specific way (OAS/MESECVI, 2026).

8.2 Maputo Protocol and the 2025 AU Convention

African regional law can no longer be described only through the Maputo Protocol. The Protocol remains foundational, but it is no longer the full story. A current account must add the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls, adopted on 10 February 2025. Its adoption adds a new continent-wide, dedicated treaty layer to Africa’s normative architecture (African Union, 2025).

The Maputo Protocol was already unusually strong on violence. Article 4 protects women’s rights to life, integrity, and security of the person and requires States parties to enact and enforce laws prohibiting all forms of violence, including unwanted or forced sex in private and public life. It also requires legislative, administrative, social, and economic measures for prevention, punishment, and eradication, and calls for action against traditional and cultural beliefs and stereotypes that legitimize or exacerbate violence. Article 5 then addresses harmful practices in express terms, including legislative prohibition of female genital mutilation and support for victims (African Union, 2003, arts 4–5).

The Protocol also deserves attention because it links violence to other protected groups and contexts. It includes special protection for elderly women, women with disabilities, poor women, women in distress, and women in detention, and it guarantees remedies and implementation through the African Commission reporting structure. This gives the Protocol a broader social reach than a narrow criminal-law model would allow (African Union, 2003, arts 22–26).

Even so, the Maputo Protocol is not a dedicated anti-violence treaty. It is a broad women’s rights instrument within which violence occupies a major place. The 2025 AU Convention changes that position. It creates a treaty focused specifically on ending violence against women and girls, with its own definitions, objectives, guiding principles, enforcement expectations, service standards, and reporting structure (African Union, 2025).

The 2025 Convention is notable for several reasons. Article 1 defines violence against women and girls broadly, including verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, and economic harm, threats, arbitrary restrictions on fundamental freedoms, violence in private and public spheres, and violence in cyberspace, in peace, armed conflict, transition, post-conflict, disaster, and post-disaster settings. It also defines femicide and adopts a victim-centred approach (African Union, 2025, art. 1).

Article 2 states expressly that every woman and girl has the right to be free from all forms of violence. Article 3 confirms that the Convention applies in public and private spheres and in cyberspace. Article 4 sets out objectives that include coordinated response mechanisms, integrated services, gender-disaggregated data, prevention through social norm change, support services, and stronger enforcement in health, social welfare, and justice systems. Articles 10 to 12 then deal with prevention, protection and support, and access to justice in unusually detailed terms, including legal aid, safe homes, immediate medical and psychosocial services, fair evidentiary rules, fast-track processes, privacy protection, restitution, compensation, and reparation (African Union, 2025, arts 2–5, 10–12).

This makes any older “three-regional-treaty” discussion outdated. African regional law now contains both a broad women’s rights instrument with strong violence provisions and a dedicated anti-violence convention. That dual structure is distinctive. It combines the wider rights architecture of the Maputo Protocol with the more direct and service-oriented design of the 2025 Convention (African Union, 2003; African Union, 2025).

8.3 Istanbul Convention

The Istanbul Convention remains the most detailed regional anti-violence treaty in terms of conceptual precision, due diligence, and integrated policy. Its value begins with its definitions. Article 3 defines violence against women as a human rights violation and a form of discrimination. It defines domestic violence separately, defines gender as socially constructed roles and attributes, and defines gender-based violence against women as violence directed against a woman because she is a woman or violence that affects women disproportionately (Council of Europe, 2011, art. 3).

That definitional clarity is one of the Convention’s greatest strengths. It states directly what the universal framework often had to establish through interpretation. It also places the link between violence, discrimination, and structural inequality at the center of the treaty text rather than leaving it to later treaty-body reconstruction (Council of Europe, 2011, preamble and arts 1–4).

The Convention is also detailed in institutional design. Article 1 sets out its purposes in terms of protection, prevention, prosecution, equality, and integrated policy. Article 5 combines negative and positive obligations by requiring states to refrain from violence and to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, punish, and provide reparation for acts covered by the Convention. The treaty also covers prevention, protection, support services, substantive law, investigation, prosecution, procedural law, migration, and asylum. In practical terms, it is the most fully elaborated regional template for a coordinated anti-violence regime (Council of Europe, 2011, arts 1–5).

Its monitoring mechanism is another major feature. Article 66 establishes GREVIO, a dedicated expert body that monitors implementation. This gives the treaty a specialized supervision system focused on the specific field rather than relying only on a general human rights review. Monitoring design matters because detailed obligations without specialized follow-up often remain underenforced (Council of Europe, 2011, arts 66–70).

The Convention is also useful because it applies in peace and in situations of armed conflict, and because its non-discrimination clause explicitly lists grounds including sexual orientation, gender identity, migrant or refugee status, disability, and age. This makes it especially useful for conceptual work on inclusion and compounded disadvantage within a women-centred framework (Council of Europe, 2011, arts 2 and 4).

8.4 What regional law teaches universal law

Regional law is most useful when treated as a source of comparison rather than as a list of instruments. The real question is what these treaties solved directly that the universal framework still handles indirectly. Four areas stand out: definitions, institutional monitoring, express duties, and service design (OAS, 1994; African Union, 2025; Council of Europe, 2011).

Definitions are the first lesson. Belém do Pará, the Istanbul Convention, and the 2025 AU Convention define violence directly and place the right to live free from violence inside the treaty text. The universal system, by contrast, had to reach that position through GR 19, GR 35, and broader human rights interpretation. Regional law shows the value of naming the problem expressly rather than deriving it through anti-discrimination provisions alone (CEDAW Committee, 1992; CEDAW Committee, 2017; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

Institutional monitoring is the second lesson. MESECVI and GREVIO are specialized follow-up bodies created for this field. The 2025 AU Convention also embeds reporting through the African Commission framework and gives the African Commission an interpretive role. The universal system relies heavily on CEDAW’s broader treaty-body machinery and the Special Rapporteur. Regional law shows the advantage of field-specific monitoring, where implementation is reviewed through a dedicated lens rather than through general reporting alone (OAS/MESECVI, 2026; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

Express duties are the third lesson. Universal law now imposes due diligence obligations, but much of that content had to be elaborated interpretively. Regional treaties state these duties more directly. They identify prevention, protection, investigation, prosecution, punishment, service provision, data collection, training, legal aid, and reparations in the treaty text itself. That directness reduces ambiguity and makes failures easier to identify (OAS, 1994; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

Service design is the fourth lesson. The regional instruments are particularly strong in linking rights to institutional architecture. The 2025 AU Convention’s references to safe homes, legal aid, immediate medical and psychosocial services, privacy protection, and specialized justice processes are a clear example. The Istanbul Convention is similarly detailed on integrated policy and assistance structures. Universal law has moved strongly in this direction through GR 35, but regional law still handles these issues with greater textual specificity (CEDAW Committee, 2017; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

Regional regimes also show that direct treaty design does not eliminate the need for interpretation. The instruments still require implementation, jurisprudence, and institutional practice. Even so, they make visible what the universal framework had to build indirectly: the explicit right to live free from violence, clearer definitions, more detailed state duties, and specialized oversight. That is the main lesson of cross-fertilization. Regional law has not displaced universal law, but it has clarified and accelerated parts of the doctrine that universal law reached more slowly.

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9. Enforcement, implementation, and evidence

9.1 Treaty bodies, regional courts, and soft-hard interaction

The enforcement structure in this field is layered rather than unitary. It operates through treaty text, general recommendations, individual communications, inquiry procedures, concluding observations, country reviews, regional judgments, special procedures, and political follow-up within the United Nations and regional organizations. That mixed structure gives the field a wide range of normative tools, but it also produces uneven authority and uneven compliance (OHCHR, 2026a; OHCHR, 2026b).

At the universal level, treaty bodies remain central. CEDAW is the most important body in this field, especially through General Recommendations Nos 19 and 35, the Optional Protocol communications, and the inquiry procedure. Other treaty bodies also contribute, including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Each body speaks through a different treaty and a different institutional method. The result is doctrinal depth, but also fragmentation.

This fragmented structure is not necessarily weak. General recommendations can clarify treaty meaning, communications can apply that meaning to concrete disputes, and concluding observations can connect doctrine to country practice. Special procedures, especially the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, add thematic reporting, country visits, and agenda-setting across the UN system. Regional courts and monitoring bodies add another layer, often with more direct findings on state responsibility and institutional failure (Commission on Human Rights, 1994; OHCHR, 2026c).

The same diversity that gives the system reach also creates hierarchy problems. Treaty text carries the strongest formal status. General recommendations are authoritative interpretations, but they are not treaties. Communications under optional protocols are highly persuasive and legally important, yet they do not always receive domestic treatment equal to binding judgments. Special Rapporteur reports shape standards and visibility, but they do not have the formal force of adjudication. Regional courts may issue stronger decisions, though only within the states that accept their jurisdiction.

This means that enforcement depends heavily on interaction between hard and soft forms of norm production. Soft law often supplies precision where treaty text is general. Hard law gives institutional grounding and legal obligation. The field has advanced precisely because these layers have worked together. At the same time, compliance remains uneven because states may accept the general norm while resisting its practical implications in policing, adjudication, budgeting, and service provision.

Regional regimes make this interaction even more visible. The Inter-American system combines Belém do Pará, MESECVI follow-up, and the Inter-American Court’s case law. Europe combines the Istanbul Convention, GREVIO monitoring, and European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. Africa now combines the Maputo Protocol, African Commission processes, and the 2025 AU Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls. These regional systems do not replace the universal framework. They sharpen it by making certain duties more explicit and by turning general norms into more targeted supervision (OAS, 1994; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2003; African Union, 2025).

The practical consequence is straightforward. The law is strongest when several layers reinforce each other. A treaty norm stated in general form becomes more operational when interpreted by a treaty body, applied in an individual communication, echoed in a regional judgment, and reinforced through reporting and monitoring. The same structure can also make accountability uneven, since not every state accepts every procedure, complies with every recommendation, or implements every judgment.

9.2 Access to justice, institutional design, and non-revictimization

Enforcement is not only a question of legal standards. It is also a question of institutional design. Rights cannot be effective where the institutional path to protection is inaccessible, unsafe, or shaped by stereotype. This is why access to justice is a central part of implementation rather than a secondary procedural issue (CEDAW Committee, 2015; CEDAW Committee, 2017).

Access to justice in this field requires more than the formal right to file a complaint. It depends on shelters, legal aid, interpreters where necessary, restraining orders, emergency response, trained police, functioning prosecution services, medical care, psychosocial support, and procedures that protect privacy and reduce retraumatization. If these elements are missing, delayed, or geographically inaccessible, the system may appear lawful on paper while failing in practice.

Shelters and emergency accommodation are not welfare add-ons. They are part of the protection architecture. A right to leave an abusive setting is hollow if there is nowhere safe to go. Legal aid is equally important. Many survivors cannot navigate criminal, civil, family, migration, or child-protection processes without assistance. A system that assumes equal ability to litigate or report is not neutral. It rewards those who already have resources and leaves others exposed.

Restraining orders and emergency protection measures illustrate the difference between symbolic law and functioning institutions. Protection orders are meaningful only if they are rapidly available, enforced by police, and backed by credible sanctions for breach. The communications under the Optional Protocol to CEDAW show this clearly. In A.T. v Hungary, Yildirim v Austria, and Goekce v Austria, the problem was not only violent conduct by private actors. It was the inability or unwillingness of institutions to translate known risk into effective protection (A.T. v Hungary, 2005; Yildirim v Austria, 2007; Goekce v Austria, 2007).

Police response is another decisive point. Delayed attendance, minimization of threats, refusal to register complaints, informal encouragement to reconcile, or failure to enforce orders can all become part of the rights violation. Prosecutorial standards matter in the same way. A pattern of non-prosecution, downgrading serious abuse into minor charges, or treating repeated violence as isolated incidents can turn legal protection into a formal shell.

Gender-sensitive procedures are indispensable in sexual and domestic violence cases. It includes careful evidence handling, confidentiality, avoidance of degrading questioning, recognition of trauma, and rejection of myths about how a “real” victim should behave. Vertido v Philippines remains important here because it showed how courtroom reasoning itself can reproduce discrimination and deny effective remedy (Vertido v Philippines, 2010). The justice system is not external to the abuse when its procedures are structured by stereotype.

A related issue is the role of informal or alternative dispute mechanisms. Mediation, family settlement, customary negotiation, and similar processes may appear less adversarial, but they are not appropriate where they displace formal justice and undermine protection. GR 35 is clear that alternative dispute resolution procedures should not be mandatory or replace access to judicial remedies in cases of violence against women, especially where power asymmetry, coercion, or safety risk is present (CEDAW Committee, 2017, para. 32). This point is crucial because private ordering can reproduce the same hierarchy that made the abuse possible.

Non-revictimization should also be treated as a legal requirement, not only as good practice. Survivors should not be forced to relive abuse repeatedly through duplicative interviews, public exposure, humiliating questioning, unnecessary medical procedures, or institutional disbelief. A system that punishes reporting through retraumatization weakens enforcement at its source. Protection fails when the cost of seeking justice becomes another form of harm.

9.3 Data, observatories, and femicide monitoring

A serious legal framework requires evidence architecture. Without reliable data, prevention and accountability become rhetorical. GR 35 makes this explicit. It calls on states to collect, analyse, and publish statistical data on complaints, prosecutions, convictions, and service use, disaggregated by relevant factors, and to improve knowledge of the causes, consequences, and prevalence of violence against women (CEDAW Committee, 2017, paras 49(c) and 49(d)).

Disaggregation is essential because aggregate numbers can conceal unequal patterns. Data should not only count incidents. It should show age, disability, ethnicity, migration status, location, relationship between victim and perpetrator, setting of the abuse, and, where possible, the outcome of institutional response. Without that level of detail, it is difficult to measure whether some groups are left outside effective protection or whether institutions are failing at particular stages of the process.

Gender-related killings show the importance of evidence architecture most sharply. The Special Rapporteur on violence against women called for national femicide watches or observatories to collect and analyse data on gender-related killings of women. The proposal was not merely statistical. It was linked to accountability, annual review, and prevention, including closer analysis of the circumstances of each killing and of prior state failures (Special Rapporteur on violence against women, 2016; Special Rapporteur on violence against women, 2018).

Femicide monitoring matters because lethal violence is often preceded by visible warning signs: repeated complaints, breaches of restraining orders, escalating threats, prior injuries, access to weapons, stalking, coercive control, or institutional inaction. A system that counts killings without reviewing their context loses the preventive value of the data. This is why femicide observatories and domestic homicide reviews are legally important. They convert individual tragedies into institutional learning.

Recent UNODC and UN Women work has reinforced this point by developing a statistical framework for measuring gender-related killings of women and girls. The aim is not only comparability across states, but also more accurate identification of intimate partner killings, family-related killings, and other forms of gender-related homicide. Better classification supports better prevention, since policy response depends on understanding patterns rather than relying on undifferentiated homicide totals (UNODC and UN Women, 2024; UNODC, 2025).

Evidence systems also matter for non-lethal violence. Service data, prosecution data, attrition rates, time-to-order statistics, rural access figures, and repeat-offender patterns all help show whether the legal framework is functioning or merely symbolic. A state may report strong legislation while the data reveal non-enforcement, institutional delay, or systematic dropout at key stages of protection.

This is where monitoring becomes measurable rather than declaratory. Data, observatories, and review mechanisms do not replace legal judgment. They make it more concrete. A state that cannot identify where abuse occurs, who is least protected, how cases move through the system, or how many women are killed after prior warning signs is not in a strong position to claim compliance. Evidence architecture is part of due diligence because prevention depends on knowing what the institutions are actually doing.

10. The universal treaty-gap debate

10.1 The case for a dedicated universal treaty

The argument for a dedicated universal treaty is stronger than its critics sometimes admit. It begins with a basic structural point. CEDAW is central, but it is indirect. It was not drafted as a violence treaty. Its authority in this field depends on a broad reading of discrimination, substantive equality, stereotyping, family relations, and due diligence. DEVAW supplied conceptual clarity, but it is a General Assembly declaration rather than a binding convention. The result is a system that works, but works through reconstruction rather than direct textual design (Edwards, 2011; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017; Deane, 2024).

Supporters of a dedicated treaty argue that this indirectness has real costs. A stand-alone convention could define the subject expressly, state obligations in direct terms, and eliminate the recurring need to justify the issue through other categories before the analysis can begin. That kind of treaty could also reduce fragmentation by placing prevention, protection, investigation, punishment, support services, reparations, data systems, and international cooperation within one coherent instrument rather than across multiple interpretive layers.

A second argument concerns monitoring. At present, supervision is dispersed across CEDAW, other treaty bodies, special procedures, regional mechanisms, and soft-law reporting processes. A dedicated treaty could create a single focal point for reporting, monitoring, communications, inquiry, and follow-up. That would not guarantee compliance, but it could reduce duplication and make failures easier to identify and compare across states.

A third argument concerns symbolic and pedagogical force. An explicit treaty can change what states, courts, and institutions perceive as the legal core of the problem. DEVAW was important because it named the abuse directly. A binding universal convention would do this at a stronger level. It would state plainly that violence against women and girls is not merely an implication of equality law, but an expressly prohibited subject of international obligation in its own right.

The persistence of treaty-reform debate reflects real structural dissatisfaction with the current patchwork. That dissatisfaction is not based only on impatience or advocacy preference. It reflects the view that the universal framework still lacks the textual precision, institutional unity, and direct normative design that regional instruments such as Belém do Pará, the Istanbul Convention, and the 2025 African Union Convention now provide more clearly (OAS, 1994; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2025).

10.2 The case for strengthening existing law

The counterargument is more difficult and, in several respects, stronger. Existing international human rights law already imposes extensive obligations. CEDAW, read together with General Recommendations Nos 19 and 35, is not normatively empty or vague in any simple sense. It already covers prevention, due diligence, protection, investigation, prosecution, punishment, reparations, support services, stereotype reform, and data collection. Other treaty bodies reinforce the same framework through the rights to life, liberty, security, health, and freedom from torture or ill-treatment (CEDAW Committee, 1992; CEDAW Committee, 2017; Human Rights Committee, 2018; Committee against Torture, 2008).

This position gains force from regional law as well. States are not operating in a legal vacuum. In many regions, detailed treaty frameworks already exist. Belém do Pará, the Maputo Protocol, the Istanbul Convention, and now the 2025 AU Convention all provide more direct models of obligation. The problem, on this view, is not that international law lacks standards. The problem is that states often fail to implement standards that already exist.

There is also a serious institutional objection to treaty multiplication. A new convention could create the appearance of progress while leaving the underlying problem untouched. Reporting burdens would increase. States might ratify selectively, reserve heavily, or delay implementation in the same way they already do under existing instruments. Another committee or reporting cycle would not automatically produce better policing, safer shelters, fairer evidentiary rules, stronger prosecution, or more reliable data systems.

This counterargument also stresses that treaty innovation can distract from enforcement. It is easier for states to discuss future normative architecture than to fund present obligations. Shelters, legal aid, femicide monitoring, risk assessment protocols, survivor-centred health services, and judicial training require budgets, institutional discipline, and political will. Those failures are not solved merely by drafting new text.

The harder version of the implementation argument is not that a new treaty would be useless. It is that existing law is already thick enough to ground serious responsibility, and that much of what is described as a “gap” is in fact a gap in compliance, capacity, or political willingness rather than a gap in legal norm creation (Edwards, 2011; IWRAW Asia Pacific, 2017; Deane, 2024).

11. Conclusion

International human rights law has undergone a clear doctrinal transformation in its treatment of gender-based violence. What was once marginalized as a private matter, a social misfortune, or a secondary question within women’s equality has become a recognized field of legal obligation. The shift was gradual but decisive. The framework moved first toward formal recognition in Vienna and DEVAW, then toward treaty-based interpretation under CEDAW, and later toward a more operational model built on due diligence, risk assessment, protection, investigation, prosecution, support, and reparation (United Nations General Assembly, 1993a; United Nations General Assembly, 1993b; CEDAW Committee, 1992; CEDAW Committee, 2017).

That development also changed the structure of responsibility. The law no longer turns only on whether the state itself inflicted abuse. It also turns on whether the state acted with sufficient seriousness against foreseeable violence by private actors. That shift was the answer to the old public/private divide. It made domestic violence, sexual violence, harmful practices, and other non-state harms central to international legal analysis rather than peripheral to it (Edwards, 2011; Committee against Torture, 2008; Human Rights Committee, 2018).

The modern framework is also more structural than before. It no longer treats violence only as a set of isolated criminal acts. It connects abuse to discrimination, stereotyping, unequal institutions, compounded disadvantage, and failures of enforcement. It recognizes that the same harm may implicate equality, dignity, bodily integrity, liberty, security, life, health, and reproductive autonomy at the same time. It also recognizes that some women experience sharper exposure to abuse because sex interacts with disability, race, indigeneity, poverty, migration status, age, detention, rural exclusion, sexual orientation, and gender identity (CEDAW Committee, 2010; CEDAW Committee, 2017; Deane, 2024).

Yet the framework remains marked by serious limits. Its universal foundation is still fragmented. CEDAW is central, but it is indirect. DEVAW is normatively important, but non-binding. Other treaty bodies reinforce the field, but through different rights, procedures, and institutional logics. Regional treaties have provided greater textual clarity, more specialized monitoring, and more direct service obligations, but those gains are unevenly distributed across legal systems (OAS, 1994; Council of Europe, 2011; African Union, 2003; African Union, 2025).

Implementation deficits remain equally serious. Many states now possess legislation, protective orders, criminal offences, or policy plans. That has not guaranteed effective enforcement. The deeper failures often lie in police inaction, weak risk assessment, inaccessible shelters, inadequate legal aid, prosecutorial passivity, stereotype-driven adjudication, poor health response, and the absence of reliable data systems. A system may look legally modern while still failing women in practice. The difference between symbolic compliance and functioning protection remains one of the central weaknesses of the present order (A.T. v Hungary, 2005; Yildirim v Austria, 2007; Goekce v Austria, 2007; Vertido v Philippines, 2010).

The framework also remains conceptually incomplete beyond the women-centered treaty text. Doctrine has widened through intersectionality and through recognition of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex women, yet the universal structure has not been fully redesigned around a broader post-binary concept of gender. The law has become more inclusive by interpretation, but its core universal architecture still rests on instruments built primarily around women and girls. That limit does not erase the progress already made, but it does show that the conceptual development of the field is still unfinished (CEDAW Committee, 2017; Ziniakova, 2021).

The central legal question is no longer whether gender-based violence is a human rights issue. That point is settled. The harder question is how international law should be interpreted, enforced, and, where necessary, redesigned so that prevention, protection, accountability, and reparations become routine features of legal order rather than exceptional responses to institutional failure. The future of the field depends less on restating recognition and more on making the existing framework work with greater clarity, stronger monitoring, deeper institutional capacity, and more honest attention to the conditions under which violence becomes predictable, tolerated, and repeated.

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