NORDIC JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

This paper presents a brief chronological and historical account of events leading up to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights (the Vienna Conference) and its intersection with women's human rights. It examines the objectives of the Conference and the underlying work of the human rights NGO movement, which together made the Conference a historical opportunity for women to advance the cause of their fundamental human rights.

This article explores the nature of states' duties to respect, protect and fulfill reproductive rights.It outlines the means to hold states accountable at the international level to implement reproductive rights. It analyzes how events-based and standard-based data can be used to show whether states are in compliance with or in violation of their obligations to implement reproductive rights and to determine the effectiveness of remedies.

This article notes that the process of articulating sexual rights in South Asia is fraught with obstacles, among which are taboos concerning the meaningful public discussion of sexuality, negative attitudes towards women's sexual autonomy and politics. Using the 1995 parliamentary debates on reforms to the Sri Lankan Penal Code, the article explores the challenges to realizing women's sexual autonomy in a multi-ethnic South Asian society.

The article notes that while the notion of a prescribed set of reproductive rights has been advanced in various contexts, particularly in the agendas for action adopted at the United Nations conferences held in Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995), these rights as a group remain controversial. In this article, the definition of reproductive rights in the Beijing Platform for Action is critically scrutinized, leading to the conclusion that only four of the so-called reproductive rights are provided in existing international human rights instruments.

Existing case law under human rights treaties, in particular Article 8 of the European Convention on Human rights,includes several findings and interpretations related to sexual rights.The sexual identity and orientation of a person, as well as his or her sexual autonomy and integrity have found protection under the right to respect for one's private and family life.

This article explores the systemic links between cross-border profit-making circuits, such as sex trafficking and labour migration, and the economic conditions in developing countries resulting from globalization. Women make up a majority of these circuits as households have become increasingly dependent on women for their survival. The author characterizes these circuits as examples of counter-geographies of globalization. This term is used to refer to trends that are not often included within discussions of globalization despite being directly or indirectly linked to its associated effects.