Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights

Gender mainstreaming is a strategy for achieving gender equality that emerged in the United Nations in the 1970s and consists of integrating gender equality issues into all public policies. In the 1990s, the same strategy began to be applied to human rights to draw attention to the fact that the enjoyment of human rights is different for men and women, and that some human rights violations specifically affect women. This is a reflection and a result of the patriarchal organization of society and men’s position of dominance over women. The European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights have begun to incorporate gender mainstreaming or a gender perspective in some judgments, especially in cases of violence against women.