Confronting Hidden Biases in International Human Rights Law
Thoughts on Gender, Poverty, and Urbanisation
While the UN human rights framework enshrines that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, looking at the world we can not help but ask ourselves: Can we call rights universal, while millions of people appear to remain excluded from their protection?
In this piece, I argue that we need to confront the hidden biases of international human rights law which are rooted in neoliberal economics, patriarchal structures, and Eurocentric views, if human rights are to become a meaningful tool for everyone.
The Promise vs. the Reality of Human Rights
International human rights law and more precisely the United Nations with its Conventions and Treaties, was largely established “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women …”.[i]
Hence, human rights law promises rights to everyone: universal and equal.
In principle, the framework recognises civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and places obligations on states to respect, protect, and fulfil them. Every individual is a rights-holder.
But this promise of universality obscures a more uncomfortable truth: international human rights law is not neutral.
Historical, economic, and cultural biases have determined who is considered a rights-holder, what is considered a right or violation and whose rights are prioritized. Structural factors, such as globalized neoliberal economic policies, gendered and racialized social hierarchies, and historical inequalities shape who has access to rights, and what lived experiences are considered human rights issues and how rights are implemented.
The result is a gap between the legal framework and lived reality. Many of the most pressing challenges people face are not fully visible within human rights law.
Using the example of gender-based poverty in urban areas, a growing concern worldwide, the article highlights biases within the UN human rights law.
Gender Bias in Human Rights Law
One of the most persistent biases lies in how international human rights law understands gender.
Early human rights instruments, such as the ICCPR and ICESCR use only the pronoun “he”, not referencing any other pronoun, yet alone using “she”. The “universal” subject of rights was male. This has led to the issue of a male comparator, which suggests that women need to conform to a male “normal” and are therefore constructed as the “other”.[ii] The male “normal”, so Tamale, is white, middle-class, able-bodied, christian and heterosexual.[iii]
Critiques further argue that the creation of a specific mechanisms for human rights for women with CEDAW, while it created important protections, has also resulted in the exclusion of women’s issues and a lack of protection within the mainstream human rights instruments.[iv]
Gender bias persists in more subtle ways as well.
For example, feminist scholars such as Charlesworth, Chinkin and Otto have highlighted the problematic framing of women as vulnerable and victims rather than human rights holders and agents.[v] Women are often framed as vulnerable due to local cultural practices or patriarchal norms, particularly in the Global South.[vi]
Mutua highlights that men in the global South are often framed as perpetrators and violent, creating a victim, savage, saviour metaphor.[vii] Similarly, Mohanty highlight how Western-centric feminist perspectives have at times homogenized women in the Global South (a term critically reflected on here) as passive victims.[viii]
For example, General Comment No. 28 of the Human Rights Committee mentions that: “Inequality in the enjoyment of rights by women throughout the world is deeply embedded in tradition, history and culture, including religious attitudes.”[ix] This framing reduces complex structural issues to questions of individual vulnerability, obscuring the broader political, economic, and historical causes of inequality. It ignores intersectional factors such as class, race, urban/rural location, and economic status.
Even when international law attempts to address women’s rights, it often reduces women to reproductive roles or “caregiver” functions, emphasizing empowerment programs over structural reform. This instrumentalization treats women as tools to achieve development goals or economic growth rather than as rights-holders in their own right.
For example, empowerment initiatives such as microcredits, while well-intentioned, frequently fail to address systemic inequalities and can even increase the burden on women by positioning them as responsible for poverty alleviation.[x]
Missing Human Rights Approach to Poverty
A second major limitation lies in how international human rights law treats poverty.
Poverty is largely looked at as a social concept, often equated narrowly with income or material deprivation rather than linked to human rights.
Looking at the Conventions, General Recommendations as well as the Concluding Observations of the UN treaty bodies and regional human rights organs it is clear that within the human rights framework (gender-based) poverty has largely been seen as a development issue and only in a second instance as an issue connected to human rights obligations.
This narrow understanding ignores the multidimensionality of poverty, which includes an income dimension, development dimension as well as exclusion dimension.
Within the international human rights framework, poverty is not conceptualised as a stand-alone human rights violation, but rather as a condition addressed through a fragmented set of mostly economic, social, and cultural rights. The UN human rights framework largely focusses on a few specific economic, social, and cultural rights. Only the provisions of CESCR as well as Article 14 CEDAW address gender-based poverty directly and in its instrumental role. In relation to civil and political rights (gender-based) poverty has seldomly been recognized to be an issue of their realization or violation.[xi]
The lack of recognition of poverty as a stand-alone human rights issue shows how deeply power relations influence the development of international human rights law, shaping which experiences are recognised as rights violations and which are rendered invisible or merely “development concerns.”
Urbanisation, economic growth and so-called progress
A third challenge lies in how the human rights frameworks engages with urbanisation.
In the international human rights framework poverty is largely equated to the rural global South, implying that rural combined with global South means poor.[xii] Hence, urbanisation is frequently celebrated as a marker of progress with economic growth often assumed to be inherently beneficial, offering pathways out of poverty and creating the conditions for human rights fulfilment.[xiii]
The assumption that urbanisation and economic growth naturally lead to human rights fulfilment overlooks rising inequality and poverty in urban areas.[xiv] Namely de Schutter has sharply criticized the UN human rights dependency on growth to fight poverty.
Urbanisation is often marked by increased privatisation of basic services, cost of housing, and restricted access to public spaces, which can have a negative impact on the realisation of human rights with a disproportionate effect on people affected by gender-based poverty.[xv] Without addressing inequality in urban areas, economic growth in the city does not automatically lead to the realisation of human rights for all.
This false narrative about urban areas has also lead to the gap in formal protection within CEDAW, where gender-based poverty is largely addressed through Article 14 CEDAW which references rural women (a challenge that I have discussed here).
Towards a More Inclusive Human Rights Framework
This article highlighted some assumptions that underly the UN human rights framework, which lead to the challenge that for many the UN human rights framework does not fully resonate with lived realities.
Despite its universal aspirations, it is often perceived as distant, selective in its application, and ineffective in addressing structural inequalities shaped by colonial histories, global economic inequalities, and uneven power relations.
In the current political context, these tensions are becoming increasingly pronounced. Rising inequality, shrinking civic space, ongoing legacies of colonialism, and the UN budget crises have exposed the limits of a human rights framework that does not adequately engage with questions of power, inequality and exclusion. At the same time, the language of human rights is at risk of being instrumentalised or selectively invoked, further weakening its legitimacy.
For the UN human rights system to remain functional, it is therefore essential not only to defend the human rights system, but to critically engage with these longstanding critiques. This requires a deeper rethinking of whose knowledge counts, whose experiences shape norms, and how human rights can better respond to structural inequality and challenges in practice.
Only by confronting its critiques and engaging critically with its own biases can international human rights law become genuinely grounded in the diverse realities of those it seeks to serve. Doing so will help transform its structural limitations, even within the constraints of its limited resources.
written by Kelly Bishop, 19.03.2026
[i] See Preamble UN Charter here Preamble | United Nations.
[ii] Van Leeuven Fleur, Women's rights are human rights. Antwerp: Intersentia 2010 (cited Van Leeuven), pp. 10-11; HRC, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Political economy of women’s human rights, 2009, A/HRC/11/6, para 22; Charlesworth Hilary/Chinkin Christine/Wright Shelley, Feminist Approaches to International Law. American Journal of International Law 85(4), 1991, pp. 613–645. (cited Charlesworth/Chinkin/Wright) p. 615.
[iii] Tamale Sylvia, Decolonization and Afro-feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press 2020. (cited Tamale), p. 213.
[iv] Tamale, p. 203; see Van Leeuven, p. 7-9, with further references in FN 40.
[v] Charlesworth Hilary, Not Waving but Drowning: Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights in the United Nations. Harvard Human Rights Journal 18(1), 2005, pp. 1–18. (cited Charlesworth); Charlesworth/Chinkin/Wright; Chinkin Christine, Gender and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In: Golay C, Riedel E and Giacca G (eds) Economic, social, and cultural rights in international law: Contemporary issues and challenges. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press 2014, pp. 134–160; Otto Dianne, The Exile of Inclusion: Reflections on gender issues in International Law over the last decade. Melbourne Journal of International Law 10(1), 2009, pp. 11–26; see also Reilly Niamh (ed), International human rights of women. Singapore: Springer 2019, p. 49.
[vi] Nash Kate, The political sociology of human rights. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2015, p. 126; CCPR, GC No. 28, 2000, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.10, paras 5, 31; CESCR, GC No. 16, 2005, E/C.12/2005/4, para 5, 19, 28, 31, 36; CCPR, CO, Nepal, 2014, CCPR/C/NPL/CO/2, para 8.
[vii] On the construction of “savage” culture in the international human rights law, see Mutua Makau, Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights. Harvard International Law Journal 42(1), 2001, pp. 201–245.
[viii] Mohanty Chandra Talpade, “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(2), 2003, pp. 499–535; Mohanty Chandra Talpade, Feminism without Borders. Duke University Press 2003.
[ix] CCPR, GC No. 28, 2000, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.10, para 5.
[x] See for example: A Feminist Critique of Micro Credit – Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) and How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it | Nancy Fraser | The Guardian.
[xi] Oette Lutz, The Prohibition of Torture and Persons Living in Poverty: from the Margins to the Centre. International and Comparative Law Quarterly 70(2), 2021, pp. 307–341, p. 314; General Assembly, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, 2017, A/72/502, paras 6-8.
[xii] Pruitt Lisa R., Deconstructing CEDAW's Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference. William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 17, 2011, p. 379.
[xiii] Petel and Putten namely criticize that the CESCR assumes economic growth to generally improve the realisation of ESC rights, see Petel Matthias/Putten Norman Vander, Economic, social and cultural rights and their dependence on the economic growth paradigm: Evidence from the ICESCR system. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 39(1), 2021, pp. 53–72.
[xiv] See for example Bugra Ayse, Current perspectives on global poverty: rights, capabilities and social exclusion. In: Davis M, Kjaerum M and Lyons A (eds) Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty: Edward Elgar Publishing 2021, pp. 37–52, p. 50; Ravallion Martin, The economics of poverty: History, measurement, and policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016, pp. 336-339; Nowak Manfred, Human Rights or Global Capitalism: The Limits of Privatization. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Inc. 2016, p. 43, 175; Pogge Thomas, Are We Violating the Human Rights of the World's Poor. Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal 14(2), 2011, pp. 21-25; McCorquodale Robert/Fairbrother Richard, Globalisation and Human Rights. Human Rights Quarterly 21(3), 1999, pp. 735–766; Oluduro Olubayo, The Link between Environmental Pollution and Poverty in Africa. In: Durojaye E and Mirugi-Mukundi G (eds) Exploring the link between poverty and human rights in Africa: Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) 2020, pp. 115–142, p. 129; HRC, Preliminary study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the promotion of human rights of the urban poor: strategies and best practices, 2011, A/HRC/AC/8/5, paras 4, 7, 10.
[xv] See for example CESCR, CO, El Salvador, 2007, E/C.12/SLV/CO/2, para 24 in relation to privatization and its effect on the realization of the right to health.
