Resistance to Anti-Discrimination Law in Central and Eastern Europe–a Post-Communist Legacy?

Havelková, Barbara

doi:10.1017/s2071832200021386

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…58 As seen in the previous section, there is primary and secondary EU legislation which protects sexual minorities from discrimination though, admittedly, there are still lots of gaps in the protection afforded to LGB persons and same-sex couples under EU law. National implementation of the EU's anti-discrimination legislation, nonetheless, is quite problematic 59 and varies greatly between Member States. 60 Moreover, although it is clear 61 that all EU legislation needs to be read in a way Transsexuality under the European Convention on Human Rights: A Queer Reading of Human Rights Law (Hart 2019) which respects fundamental human rights, some EU Member States still insist on implementing pieces of EU legislation in a way which disregards the rights of sexual minorities.…”

Section: The Enforceability Conundrummentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and sexual minority rights in the EU: navigating a political minefield

Tryfonidou¹

2020

Research Handbook on the Politics of EU Law

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Few issues incite as much controversy in contemporary politics as the recognition and protection of the rights of sexual minorities. The dominance of heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of sexual orientation and the silencing of all other discourses of sexuality have traditionally legitimised exclusionary laws and policies which completely ignored the existence of sexual minorities and relegated them to a second-rate position. In Europe, the first, tentative, steps towards the formation of an organised lesbian and gay liberation political movement were taken in the 1970s. Nonetheless, in the EU context, it took this political movement almost three decades before its efforts had begun to come to fruition, when the EU introduced its first legally binding instrument protecting sexual minorities from discrimination. This and other instruments have been interpreted by the CJEU in rulings which give mixed signals regarding the EU judiciary's commitment to the protection of the rights of persons with non-heterosexual sexualities. In fact, it is not merely the EU judiciary's stance on the rights of sexual minorities that has been mixed -overall, the EU's approach to this issue has been ambivalent, which reflects the pressures exerted by the Member States in this field. This is due to the fact that the rights of sexual minorities are a contested terrain where the struggles between the competing visions of 'Europeanness' and human rights, on the one hand, and national identity, morality, and tradition, on the other, take place. This chapter will have as its main aim to examine the reasons that lie behind the EU's ambivalent stance on the recognition and protection of the rights of sexual minorities. In particular, after analysing the protection currently offered to sexual minorities under EU law, the chapter will consider how the EU has navigated this political minefield and will seek to identify the main sites of interaction between law and politics when it comes to the recognition, respect, and protection of the rights of persons with non-heterosexual sexualities. I would like to thank Paul James Cardwell and Marie-Pierre Granger for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. All errors remain mine.

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Section: The Enforceability Conundrummentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and sexual minority rights in the EU: navigating a political minefield

Tryfonidou¹

2020

Research Handbook on the Politics of EU Law

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“…Abu-Lughod argues against a singular focus on whether or not Southern women "have rights," as this view neither captures nor addresses the complexity of women's lives. The framework of rights, she maintains, is untena-15 For a discussion of somewhat similar discourses around class and gender in Central and Eastern Europe, see Havelkova (2016).…”

Section: Lila Abu-lughod: Abandoning the Principles Of Rights And Fre...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethics of Transnational Feminist Research and Activism: An Argument for a More Comprehensive View

Rajan¹

2018

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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An Argument for a More Comprehensive View T he ethics of feminist research and activism undertaken by global Northerners operating in the global South has been a topic of ongoing debate for a number of years. 1 Research or commentary undertaken by individuals from or based in the global North into issues such as rape, domestic violence, forced marriage, honor killings, the seclusion or veiling of women, or female genital cutting occurring in the global South is fraught with ethical questions around the misunderstanding of local viewpoints and the ethnocentric imposition of alien norms. 2 Scholars have noted that the notion of individual rights does not necessarily accord with the cultural values of a number of societies, in which conceptions of the individual do not rest on ideas of deep autonomy and relative detachment from one's community (Kalev 2004;Abu-Lhugod 2013). Others argue that fighting for women's rights or gender equality is not necessarily what their communities need. 3 However, as Alison Jaggar notes, outsiders' desire to refrain from criticizing specific practices in the name of cultural relativism may reveal "misplaced concern for 'the community' as a whole at the expense of some women within it." In the end, "ignoring the plight of such women [may be] racist or ethnocentric, insofar as it suggests a moral double standard according to which high levels of abuse and exploitation are regarded as 'culturally acceptable' for some women but not for others" (Jaggar 1998, 10).Much has been written about these dilemmas and about how to ethically engage in transnational feminist research and practice. In this article, I describe and interrogate the various arguments that have been proposed. I then propose an alternative argument, drawing on the most promising positions of other scholars and adding to these to arrive at a more comprehensive proposal.Categories such as "global North" and "global South" themselves warrant problematization, as such conceptions do not always reflect the reality

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“…While the socialist bloc supported UN initiatives that called attention to racial and sex discrimination in the capitalist West, socialist countries did not typically develop anti-discrimination norms or institutions in domestic law, since they argued that equality under socialism was being achieved through substantive rather than procedural measures. 66 This was amplified, Barbara Havelková has suggested, by Marxist analyses of inequality and an essentialist understanding of gender difference. 67 From the perspective of socialist international lawyers such as Oeser, the quest for equality was inseparable from the construction of a strong state and the pursuit of self-determination.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…66 This was amplified, Barbara Havelková has suggested, by Marxist analyses of inequality and an essentialist understanding of gender difference. 67 From the perspective of socialist international lawyers such as Oeser, the quest for equality was inseparable from the construction of a strong state and the pursuit of self-determination. 68 This understanding of self-determination as inextricably linked to human rights -particularly economic, social and cultural rights -provided the basis for alliances between East European states and countries in the global South during the 1960s.…”

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Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

Donert

2023

Gender & History

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This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth‐century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self‐determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.

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Resistance to Anti-Discrimination Law in Central and Eastern Europe–a Post-Communist Legacy?

Cited by 5 publications

References 10 publications

Law and sexual minority rights in the EU: navigating a political minefield

Law and sexual minority rights in the EU: navigating a political minefield

The Ethics of Transnational Feminist Research and Activism: An Argument for a More Comprehensive View

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

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