Rights and Humanity’s multi-faith, multi-cultural approach has proved helpful in addressing the friction all too often perceived to exist between religious and cultural values, on the one hand, and the rights of women, on the other.

Prior to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, we invited the women’s rights organisation, CHANGE, to co-host a workshop to promote a strengthening of the draft Platform for Action to be adopted at the Conference. The workshop in London, UK, confirmed that there is no religion that specifically denies women’s rights. Rather, problems of women’s inequality stem from cultural practices and extremist religious interpretations.

Pakistan Human Rights Commission
In 1996, Rights and Humanity was commissioned by the Pakistan Human Rights Commission to prepare an annotated bibliography on women’s rights under Islamic Law and to make recommendations for acquisitions for its library. Our Project Officer, Ms Aisha Bhatti, was primarily responsible for this work.

Fundamentalism  
In 1998, Rights and Humanity undertook research on the effect of fundamentalism on the enjoyment of women’s rights within the context of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Whilst there is now recognition of women's equality and human rights at the international policy level, worldwide millions of women face restrictions on their personal life and their ability to seek economic independence through employment outside the home.

In August, our President presented the conclusions of our research in a keynote paper “Defending Women's Rights in the Face of Fundamentalism: Some Strategies for Action” at the International Alliance of Women Conference held in Denmark. In her paper, she proposed strategies for action to combat fundamentalism and realise women’s rights.

The term fundamentalism was first used to describe a conservative movement among Protestant Christians in the United States, which began in the late 19th century. Before the advent of recent terrorist attacks, the term fundamentalism was most often associated in the West with the Islamic fundamentalism which entailed the subordination and disempowerment of women. But similar constraints on women's equality exist in religious movements which can also be found within Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism.
Fundamentalism frequently affects women by imposing family codes or personal status laws which subordinate women in matters of marriage, divorce, guardianship and child custody, inheritance and divorce, as well as standards of behaviour and dress. 

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