There is also a video of Helen Stacy who teaches at the law school at Stanford,
commenting upon human rights and
the structure of human rights at the United Nations.
I'm very happy to welcome Akila Radhakrishnan to our course today.
Akila is with the Global Justice Center, which is based in New York,
an organization that works on human rights issues.
It may seem a little strange to start a course on International Women's Health
with a discussion of human rights.
But in this course, we want to introduce a lens of human rights at the very
beginning of the course.
Many people who are interested in empowering women,
supporting women's education, and health, and
that sort of thing are interested in it because such efforts increase and
improve society's economies, and obviously, benefit women.
But our approach in this class has much more to do with justice and
human rights for women.
Women being human beings having a right to health.
And so we begin the class talking a little bit about this human rights lens.
So Akila, I'm delighted to have you here.
Thank you for coming.
We'd love to hear your thoughts about the general question of using human rights as
a lens, particularly in connection with women's health, and then a little bit
about the work of the Global Justice Center and your work in particular.
>> I think what's really important is that the development of the human rights
framework has really helped to propel women's rights to a different level.
I think oftentimes, when you talk about women's rights,
people don't take it seriously.
They don't understand it as something that's entitled to a human being And
I think that framing it as the right to health, the right to bodily integrity,
the right to be free from torture, are things that people can understand.
Giving it a gender lens and saying that this is what it means for
women, helps people to raise the profile of the issue and to take serious action.
I think your book very carefully documents how not, I think,
adequately responding to women's needs and
understanding what they are, how it seriously harms society.
I think we can see it with things like maternal mortality, which,
the cause of maternal mortality can almost entirely be preventable.
And it's really about understanding it within this broader framework that helps
to bring people to appreciate what that means.
>> Some people say that the human rights movement,
which is really very popular now, and many people are talking about human rights.
Some people say that the human rights movement is the mainstreaming of feminism.
Think I agree with that.
I think that people concerned with women's rights, or
women's empowerment, women's education, and so
on, always came back to the importance of the way people treated each other.
Which is what I think human rights is all about.
And so I've sort of liked that at that