‘Go Back and Give Him What He Wants’1: The Limits of a Legal Rights Approach to Gendered Human Rights Violations

In advocacy and academic circles, ‘human rights’ are commonly interpreted narrowly as ‘legal rights’, with a government's fulfilment of its international human rights obligations expected to take the form of appropriate legal protections at the national level. Building on a comparative analysis of anti-domestic violence campaigns in Malaysia and South Africa, I argue that to reduce human rights to legal rights is to overstate the ability of legal change to translate into a transformation of the deeply held beliefs and values that often underlie gendered human rights violations. The international human rights framework, however, embodies far more than a source of legal rules and standards. To engage human rights fully holds the potential of informing more proactive, strategic responses to gender-based harms.