In Conversation with Gita Saghal. Women's Rights and Human Rights in the context of the "war on terror"

Gita Saghal

Drawing on her experience as the former Head of Amnesty International's Gender Unit and a feminist and anti-fundamentalist campaigner, Gita Sahgal will describe the difficulties of making women subjects of human rights and ask what the universality of rights means today and who controls its meaning. While the instrumental use of human rights discourse and the promotion of women's rights by NATO have often been noted; far less attention has been paid to the use and abuse of human rights  and women's rights by supporters of fundamentalists and terrorists and  their Western allies in governments and in anti-war movements. Human rights organisations have also used the necessary defence of human rights standards, such as the absolute prohibition on torture, to legitimise the politics of fundamentalists and terrorists. They have also simultaneously fought those upholding women's human rights to exclude women from the protection of the same standards.

In conversation with Professor Deniz Kandiyoti, she will argue that the the global financial crisis, dirty deals at the end of the 'War on Terror' and the declaration of support for extreme Islamist politics by Amnesty Internatiional, signal a series of threats to the human rights of women. 'Gender mainstreaming' has failed as a strategy and women's rights are now clearly seen as either entirely marginal or threatening the stability of a new world order.

Biography

Gita Sahgal was formerly Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. She is a film maker and writer. For many years she served on the board of Southall Black Sisters and she was a founder of Women Against Fundamentalism and Awaaz : South Asia Watch. With Nira Yival Davis, she edited ,Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain ( London, 1992). Among her articles are ‘Legislating Utopia? Violence Against Women , Identities and Interventions’ in ‘The Situated Politics of Belonging (ed Yuval Davis, Kannabiran and Vieten).

During the 1980s, she worked for a Black current affairs programme called ‘Bandung File’ on Channel 4 TV. She made two films about the Rushdie affair, ‘Hullaballoo Over Satanic Verses’ and ‘Struggle or Submission’. She has also made  two programmes for Dispatches Channel 4, ‘The Provoked Wife’ on the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia an other women who killed their husbands and ‘The War Crimes File’ an investigation into allegations of war crimes in committed by members of the Jamaat I Islami in Bangladesh in 1971.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk