Social democratization emphasizes participative mechanisms that foster changes against authoritarianism, power inequity, and the unfair distribution of resources in public and private institutions. It likewise deals with processes that facilitate the integration of an ‘underclass’ that has been ignored or displaced because of gender, age, ethnic group, and other issues.
The human rights approach encourages advocacy of women’s and girls’ rights and of equality between the genders. Therefore, the core of this approach is gender equality and childhood and adolescence rights within a framework that furthers an articulation between the ethics of care and the ethics of rights.
The approach described is the backbone of the Centre’s ruling principles and will guide both the research and the interventions to be carried out, supported by the complexity of a vision that addresses the simultaneity of rights and the enlargement of citizenship.
Gender specification of human rights is acknowledged in CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), adopted by the United Nations Organization in 1979. The specification of human rights as from the moment of birth is documented in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1989).
The orientation proposed, based on the rights of social actors, introduces a new manner of approaching human rights. The novelty lies in the understanding that information and comprehension are only a step toward working on human rights in everyday practices. This marks a shift from an international conventions-and-covenants stance and gives way to a view based on subjects of law and their relations. This is why a combination between the ethics of justice and the ethics of care/responsibility has been considered, since such combination enables us to approach the efficacy of rights in the appropriate social spaces.
Acknowledgement and practice of rights are shaped by civil society struggles in an effort to achieve the enlargement of citizenship. Such struggles show the tensions between formal constructs and daily realities; in other words, rights stem from the particular contexts and histories of the different societies and are constructed through collective action.
