Women's Rights - Human Rights

by Tatiana Zabelina & cartoon by Veronica Gagarina

Last December, the Russian adaptation of Julie Mertus' human rights training manual for women, Our Human Rights, made its official debut at a reception held by the NIS-US Women's Consortium. Publication of the Russian version, known as Women's Rights-Human Rights, was the end of a long, collaborative process between the American human rights lawyer and a group of Russian women activists who sought to adapt it to the unique circumstances of Russian women. Below, Tatiana Zabelina, managing editor of the Russian version, recounts the group's efforts to introduce women's rights to a broader Russian audience.

Julie Mertus and her collaborators, Mallika Dutt and Nancy Flowers, wanted to see their women's rights training manual used by Russian activists. To accomplish this they felt Our Human Rights needed more than a word for word translation; it needed to be adapted to Russian conditions, with Russian statistics and information on Russian laws, and geared toward training Russian women.

The Russians hoped to receive a teaching manual designed for a wide circle of readers, NGO activists, students and teachers, which would focus on the problems of women in the context of human rights while taking into account their culture.

The end product of their collaboration serves many functions. It is both a textbook and a directory, showing not only what to teach but how to teach it effectively. It also shows how to make use of international and Russian legal documents, judicial rulings and statistics to protect women's rights.

The literal translation of the book was completed very quickly, by a group of researchers at the St. Petersburg Center for Gender Studies, just in time for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women and the accompanying NGO forum in Beijing in 1995. The Russian speaking participants at the conference were able to familiarize themselves with the authors' ideas and methods in order to take this information home with them to apply to their work with Russian women. They decided to field test the translation by organizing seminars on women's rights in Russia and Ukraine.

The NIS-US Women's Consortium sent Julie Mertus and two other human rights educators to Russia and Ukraine to do training seminars using the materials and methods in the book. After the seminars, participants decided to publish Russian and Ukrainian adaptations. Nine participants of the Moscow seminar formed an editorial collective and began adapting the book's three parts.

Part I is an introductory course which helps women master the fundamental concepts of human rights. Part II examines the most important themes of women's rights as human rights with the principal goal of showing that human rights is not an abstract idea, but a subject that is directly connected to every woman's life. Part III is devoted to the principles and methods of conducting workshops. The book also contains an extensive appendix which includes fundamental UN documents on human rights.

Each member of the editorial collective worked to introduce helpful information on the unique problems of Russian women. Nadezhda Shvedova incorporated information on women's health statistics in Russia. Yevgenia Israelyan researched current law on refugees and migrants, in response to the thousands of refugee and migrant women who have no information about their rights or the responsibilities of government and international organizations to help them. Her chapter includes a list of telephone numbers of Russian and international organizations who help refugees and migrants.

The editors succeeded in creating a book that is perceived by Russian women as "their own," useful in Russian life, not something foreign imposed on them from the outside. It contains observations on common situations which Russian women encounter every day. It teaches women to reflect on problems, to lead discussions and to analyze legal documents to find their application in day-to-day life. In some ways, it is a textbook on conflict management for women. I strongly hope that Women's Rights-Human Rights will be widely used to conduct seminars and trainings to help Russian women feel empowered to change their lives.

Tatiana Zabelina is the Moscow co-director of the Center for Women, Family and Gender Studies in the Institute of Youth. Translated by Amy McVey. This project was supported by the Eurasia Foundation, the Network of East-West Women, and the NIS-US Women's Consortium.