Women, Law, and Land at the Local Level: Claiming Women's Human Rights in Domestic Legal Systems

This article begins with a review of the value of using law and legal systems to improve women's status. The second section examines issues involved in developing the human rights construct in domestic legal systems. These issues include establishing the principle of nondiscrimination, using nationally based definitions of human rights, invoking constitutional human rights norms, and referring to international instruments and legal developments in other countries. In the final section of the paper, the author presents three strategies for using human rights norms in national legal systems: using the courts, addressing other branches of government, and developing the women's rights construct through applied research. In elaborating on these strategies, the author gives examples from African countries, including cases from Botswana, Tanzania, and Kenya, law reform examples from Zimbabwe. Several of these examples deal with African Indigenous women accessing their rights.