An Analysis of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on Gender Inclusivity

Abstract

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the mother of all human
rights instruments internationally. Other subsequent documents such as the
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (1976),
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and so on emerged as responses to the
inadequacies and gaps within the parent document. While the document made
significant achievements in human rights upholding during its own time, this study
argues that the UDHR (1948) was never meant for everyone, but rather, it was a
patriarchal document designed to further the interests of grown-up men to the
detriment and exclusion of women and children. The thrust of the paper is to elaborate
the importance of the semantics approach to human rights, and how inconsiderate
language can cause irreparable damage to the rights of other groups in society.
Presented in the paper are facts gathered through desk research which is also
commonly known as document analysis. The study also employed interviews and
focus group discussions. The study interviewed 5 key informants who are lecturers at
a particular institution of higher learning. 30 students from the same institution
participated in 3 focus group discussions of 10 people each, to make a total sample
size of 35 participants. The study established that the UDHR (1948) contains 15
articles which used semantics referring to men “he, himself, and his” which clearly
exclude women. The study further established that the UDHR (1948) rarely used
gender neutral language specifying he or she, him/her, himself of herself, an action
which grossly indicated gender discrimination from the semantics approach to human
rights. Recommendations are made that policy formulators should always use gender
inclusive language to include everyone.