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The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
Esmeralda Herrera Monreal – at Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The death of at least 370 women had been reported over a period of ten years.136 The city, at the border between Mexico and the United States, has been called the ‘city of migrants’ and, from the 1960s onwards, saw the establishment of maquiladora (or maquila) factories in which the majority of the murdered women had worked. The Asociación Nacional de Abogados Democráticos A.C., the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights, the Red Ciudadana de No Violencia y por la Dignidad Humana and