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13 Feminist L. Stud. 1 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/femlst13 and id is 1 raw text is: Feminist Legal Studies (2005) 13:1-14 DOI 10.1007/s10691-004-1453-y © Springer 2005 JOANNE CONAGHAN and SUSAN MILLNS SPECIAL ISSUE: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS ABSTRACT. This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with a view to assessing its implications in terms of engen- dering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues. INTRODUCTION Within political and legal spheres, rights-based arguments appear to be enjoying a resurgence. In the U.K. this is evidenced in the steady infusion of rights approaches into mainstream legal dis- course following the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 (hereinafter the H.R.A. 1998). In the European Union (E.U.), rights are also assuming greater prominence, exemplified in par- ticular in current debate around the scope, content and eventual ratification of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe and the prominent show-casing within this text of the E.U.'s new Charter of Fundamental Rights. In a cross-national context, most notably in Canada and South Africa, the development of a pro- gressive constitutional jurisprudence of rights is generating the reassessment of 'embedded' rights as a tool for political and legal emancipation. Meanwhile, at an international level and in the face of increasing global inequality and the persistence of radically diverging life prospects depending on where people live out their lives as well as seemingly arbitrary factors such as race,

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