On Human Rights- Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993
Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace- Catharine A. MacKinnon- Pages 84-93
• “Victory (usually compromised, often pyrrhic)” pg. 84
• “Behind all law is someone’s story- someone whose blood, if you read closely, leaks
through the lines”
• “The question…is whose experience grounds what law”
• “HR principles are based on experience, but not that of women”
• “When women are violated like men who are otherwise like them…this is not
recorded as the history of human rights atrocities to women”
• When things happen to women that also happen to men…the fact that they
happened to women is not counted in, or marked as, human suffering” pgs. 84-85
• “(Female exclusive atrocities) overlooked entirely in the record of human suffering
because the victims are women and it smells of sex.”
• “Too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too
human to be female or too female to be human”
• “Violated in many ways men are not”
• “This abuse occurs in forms and settings and legal postures that overlap every
human rights convention but is addressed, effectively and as such, by none”
• “Abuses of women as women rarely seem to fit what these laws and their enforcing
bodies have in mind; the more abuses there are, the more they do not fit.”
• “Whether in war or in what is called peacetime”
• “What does it mean to recognise a principle called human rights that does not really
apply to the systemic and systematic violations of over half the human race?”
• “Beings whose reality of violation, to the extent is somehow female, floats beneath
international legal space.” Pg. 86
• “Rape, forced motherhood, prostitution, pornography, and sexual murder, on the
basis of sex and ethnicity together, have not been the horrors which so “outraged
the conscience” of the relevant legal order” pg. 87
• “Not only in wartime, but also on a daily basis in one form or another in every
country in the world”
• “Practices widely permitted as the liberties of their perpetrators”
• Western “cultural supports are more likely to provide the basis for exempting states
from their reach than the foundation for a claim of sex discrimination” Link to
favouring of Israel- national interest, but also ideas of state sovereignty (also favour
West?). Contrast with Heywood, human rights developments.
• “All state parties are apparently covered by most of the relevant international
human rights guarantees and laws of war, certainly by customary international law.
But nothing has yet been invoked to stop the abuses described in the
communication or to hold the perpetrators accountable”
• “To the accompaniment of much international wonderment that people cannot get
along and pious clucking at the behaviour of “all sides.” Pg. 88. Recognise stone-
throwing etc… of Palestinians, however use stats to enforce idea that more atrocities
are committed by Israelis. Ignorance intentional or non-intentional
• “The point seems to be to obscure…exactly who is doing what to whom and why.”
Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace- Catharine A. MacKinnon- Pages 84-93
• “Victory (usually compromised, often pyrrhic)” pg. 84
• “Behind all law is someone’s story- someone whose blood, if you read closely, leaks
through the lines”
• “The question…is whose experience grounds what law”
• “HR principles are based on experience, but not that of women”
• “When women are violated like men who are otherwise like them…this is not
recorded as the history of human rights atrocities to women”
• When things happen to women that also happen to men…the fact that they
happened to women is not counted in, or marked as, human suffering” pgs. 84-85
• “(Female exclusive atrocities) overlooked entirely in the record of human suffering
because the victims are women and it smells of sex.”
• “Too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too
human to be female or too female to be human”
• “Violated in many ways men are not”
• “This abuse occurs in forms and settings and legal postures that overlap every
human rights convention but is addressed, effectively and as such, by none”
• “Abuses of women as women rarely seem to fit what these laws and their enforcing
bodies have in mind; the more abuses there are, the more they do not fit.”
• “Whether in war or in what is called peacetime”
• “What does it mean to recognise a principle called human rights that does not really
apply to the systemic and systematic violations of over half the human race?”
• “Beings whose reality of violation, to the extent is somehow female, floats beneath
international legal space.” Pg. 86
• “Rape, forced motherhood, prostitution, pornography, and sexual murder, on the
basis of sex and ethnicity together, have not been the horrors which so “outraged
the conscience” of the relevant legal order” pg. 87
• “Not only in wartime, but also on a daily basis in one form or another in every
country in the world”
• “Practices widely permitted as the liberties of their perpetrators”
• Western “cultural supports are more likely to provide the basis for exempting states
from their reach than the foundation for a claim of sex discrimination” Link to
favouring of Israel- national interest, but also ideas of state sovereignty (also favour
West?). Contrast with Heywood, human rights developments.
• “All state parties are apparently covered by most of the relevant international
human rights guarantees and laws of war, certainly by customary international law.
But nothing has yet been invoked to stop the abuses described in the
communication or to hold the perpetrators accountable”
• “To the accompaniment of much international wonderment that people cannot get
along and pious clucking at the behaviour of “all sides.” Pg. 88. Recognise stone-
throwing etc… of Palestinians, however use stats to enforce idea that more atrocities
are committed by Israelis. Ignorance intentional or non-intentional
• “The point seems to be to obscure…exactly who is doing what to whom and why.”
