Human rights has over the past generation been perhaps the most exhaustively developed body of international law, and in no other area has the impact of the women's movement worldwide resulted in a more profound transformation. Today the primary issue is no longer the better elaboration of human rights law, but its enforcement. In this context, this reader has grown out of a series of post-graduate training courses for participants from the South.

The book aims to better equip human rights workers, teachers, lawyers, civil servants,
community leaders, students and academics; preparing them to address specific cases of gender inequality in their own countries, promote respect for the human rights of women locally, and contribute to women's empowerment by making more effective use of existing international standards.

The reader introduces and examines the international instruments that deal with the human rights of women and, in Part II, the specifically African experience in trying to implement them. Beginning with an explanation of the place of gender in modern international human rights law, successive chapters examine each of the international human rights covenants and conventions, the UN context, as well as humanitarian law. The European human rights system is explained as one among several regional systems. In the following Part, the book focuses on the African system for the protection of human rights, as it now stands, and certain specific topics including Muslim women's rights, polygamy, female genital mutilation, women prisoners, and the roles which NGOs and women's movements are playing today in the promotion of human rights in Africa.