The two major international human rights issues discussed in this paper are:
             John Lennon once wrote a song, which said, "Women are the niggers of the world..." The words, unfortunately, are an accurate description of the plight of women since times immemorial.
             The biological differences between the male and female human species have obviously been the root cause behind the traditional discrimination against women in most societies. The child-bearing ability and physically weaker bodies of the females have resulted in relegating them to a restricted role as mothers and wives. On the other hand, the male who did not have to suffer from the 'disadvantage' of bearing children and possessed greater physical strength, assumed the role of the 'provider' outside the home, and began to dominate the women. The widespread belief that women were intellectually inferior to men also contributed to their lowly status in the society, which was even accepted by the women themselves until as late as the 19th century when the first stirrings of the women's rights movement were felt in the Western world.
             Since then, women in Western societies have managed to win several key rights such as the right to vote, their individual legal status, the right to own property in their name, and economic as well as reproductive independence.1 Millions of women in the underdeveloped and the developing world, however, are still denied their basic human rights only because of the reason that they are women. Even in the Western world, gender equality has not been fully achieved with issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace, unequal pay, and invisible 'glass ceilings' often confronting the working women.
             In some countries such as India, the gender bias against women is so pronounced that it is not unusual for middle class women to opt for abortion if the sex of the unborn baby has been determined as female...