Posted by ccld201
14 May 2025Democracy is not just about elections, mechanisms of representation, and accountability of those in power. Since the promise that ‘all human beings are born equal and free in dignity and in rights’ made under Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], democracy is also about human relationships of equality and reciprocity. In the wake of International Women’s Day and 30 years after the Beijing Declaration, it is suggested here that considering democracy from the perspective of women’s dignity illuminates new features of democracy.
What does human dignity mean in human rights law and how does it affect women and girls?
The EU Charter on Fundamental Rights opens with a whole chapter dedicated to dignity and containing a set of absolute prohibitions. Reading it with women and girls in mind brings into sharp relief the fact that victims of dehumanising treatments – including killing and preventable deaths – are in their majority women and girls. Women’s and girls’ right to life (Article 2) is breached in ways that cannot be compared with men’s. Femicide is not new, but as awareness of it grows so does the realisation of its scale[2]. In the UK alone 80 women are reported to have been allegedly killed by a man in 2024. Childbirth is another cause of death exclusive to women. Maternal death rates are high around the world, and seemed to be on the increase in the UK in 2024. When abortion is illegal, women can die from it as in Poland under the Law and Justice government. Article 3 EU Charter protects the right to mental and physical integrity and prohibits human reproductive cloning. If human clones still belong more to fiction than reality, this prohibition is significant as an indicator that women may not be instrumentalised and reduced to their womb to gestate clones generated in vitro. This points to women’s reproductive rights which remain ‘the most contested rights’ in the EU today according to the EU Parliament. Furthermore, women’s and girls’ rights not to be subjected to torture, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment (Article 4) are also breached in ways and scales not comparable to men. Consider rape, FGM and domestic violence that disproportionately affect women more than men. Finally, victims of servitude, slavery and human trafficking, practices absolutely prohibited under Article 5 EU Charter, are, in their vast majority, women and girls. Almost all victims of sexual exploitation (96%) in the world are women.
Quality of democracy and the experience of women and girls
Acknowledging this reality invites us to reflect on the correlations between women and girls’ experience in a democracy and the quality of democracy. The significance of human dignity as the foundation of human rights law reaches out in two directions. Firstly, the law is clear: no one in a democracy should be subjected to treatments that take away their humanity and make them feel less than human. Systemic attacks on and violations of girls’ and women’s dignity are typical evidence of the non-democratic quality of a government as e.g. can be seen in Afghanistan and Russia. In the EU, the commitment to human dignity and democracy under Article 2 Treaty on the European Union (TEU) means that the above set of absolute prohibitions constitutes the red line between democracy and non-democracy. Therefore, even if supported by an electoral majority, government and political parties may not promote such violent agendas. Implementing them against anyone living in the EU, including women, would be not just unlawful, but also undemocratic. Secondly, while breaking away from these dehumanising treatments and accessing justice are challenging for the victims, the explicit commitment to human dignity in its various components is essential to make visible, at the heart of human rights law and democracy, human beings who are in practice too often invisible for the law and for their fellow humans.
Democracy is for everyone equally, not just for men and voters. It is time to start re-imagining and re-conceptualising democracy from the perspective of all those who have been made invisible from its very beginning, going back to Athens in 500 BCE[3]: women and girls, slaves and foreigners.
Moreover, acknowledging women’s dignity and protecting it shed light on democracy as a process of civilisation as was held by the ruling on ‘marital duties’ delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on 23 January 2025. The ECtHR held that the applicant’s failure to fulfil her ‘marital duties’, i.e. her refusal to have sex with her husband, could not be considered as a fault justifying their divorce. The unanimous judgment is based on the right to private and family life under Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), namely on sexual freedom, the right to bodily autonomy and the Contracting States’ positive obligation to combat domestic and sexual violence. At the heart of the reasoning lies the wife’s dignity. With reference to its marital rape ruling delivered in 1995, the Court emphasised that consent to marry does not automatically imply consent to sexual relations during marriage. It repeated the commitment to human dignity that it made for the first time in the 1995 ruling: ‘[w]hat is more, the abandonment of the unacceptable idea of a husband being immune against prosecution for rape of his wife was in conformity not only with a civilised concept of marriage but also, and above all, with the fundamental objectives of the Convention, the very essence of which is respect for human dignity and human freedom. (para 44)’. (para 91).
The reiteration of the Court’s commitment to protect human dignity and human freedom thirty years after its first mention highlights the particular significance of human dignity as a legal tool for protecting women and girls against violent and dehumanising treatments, even and especially within the most intimate of relationships. While the 1995 ruling was about rape, which the Court has found to be a breach of Article 3 prohibiting inhuman and degrading treatment since 1997, the 2025 ruling is about the refusal of sexual intercourse. It is therefore above all about the fundamental acknowledgement that wives are human beings and that they matter as much as their husbands. By promoting a concept of marriage where women are no longer assumed to be their husbands’ sexual object, the Court is also constructing a ‘civilisation’ characterised by mutual respect and human relationships of equality and reciprocity. Finally, this illuminates the instrumental role that judges have played in promoting, developing and protecting the dignity of all human beings and thereby democracy[4].
All female victims of dehumanising treatments finding the courage and determination to take their case to courts, as Gisele Pelicot successfully did recently, contribute to changing expectations and attitudes towards female victims of (domestic) violence. In upending centuries of social construction of women and girls as mere objects for men to use as they please[5], women are not just asserting their equal and free humanity. They are also contributing to constructing democracy as a process of civilising human relationships, for which human dignity offers an effective toolkit and ultimate barrier against dehumanisation. At a time when democracy is being challenged in an unprecedented manner and when an independent and impartial judiciary is also subjected to attacks, even in countries like France or Italy, closer attention needs to be paid to women and girls’ experience of democracy.
If women and girls are the main victims of the dehumanising treatments absolutely prohibited on the ground of human dignity, women and girls can also be essential actors in keeping democracy away from inhumanity.
Catherine Dupre is Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at Exeter Law School and the editor of the Dignity&Democracy Blog.
[1] Erin Daly and James May, Advanced Introduction to Dignity Law (Edward Elgar, 2020).
[2] Christelle Taraud (ed), Feminicides. Une histoire Mondiale (La Decouverte, 2022).
[3] Catherine Malabou, Changer de difference. Le feminin et la question philosophique (Gallilee, 2009); Paulin Ismard, Le Miroir d’Oedipe: Penser l’Esclavage (Seuil, 2023).
[4] Catherine Dupre, The Age of Dignity: Human Rights and Constitutionalism in Europe (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2015).
[5] Michelle Perrot: ‘le genre masculin s’est construit dans l’idee de la possession du corps des femme.’ Le Monde 8 February 2025, see also Les femmes ou les silences de l’histoire (Flammarion, 1998).