Interrogating international law and scholarship for the missing narratives on religious misogyny in South Asia

International Human Rights Law, with its linear approach, addressed discrimination through the prohibition of its practice based on certain identified and mutually exclusive criteria. Such an approach resulted in masking the intersectional discrimination occurring from subjecting rights under one identified criteria to another, either within the same instrument or in related instruments. It also allows member-States to adopt reservations or use limitation clauses in a manner that often leaves the rights of little value to a section of the population. Given the preoccupation with looking at an emancipatory role for international law and democratising spaces, international law scholarship has made a minimal address to this intersectional aspect of discrimination in the context of gender. This research explores the absence of specific guidance from international law and its scholarship streams of TWAIL and FtAIL to understand the ways in which the intersectional discrimination flowing from religion works in the space of women’s rights and the possible methodology to address it.