Session moderated by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge.
Each 30 minutepaper isfollowed by 10 minutes of discussion.
Since 1948, international human rights law has guaranteed a human right to share in science and its benefits (often abbreviated to , the human right to science ).Weakened by a more individualistic and passive reformulation when guaranteed by the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, this right has long been neglected in practice. Over thelast fifteen years, however, various efforts to reactivate the right have been underway at the United Nations, notably by UNESCO, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights. The issue of equal participation in science, and in particular the equality of women, is at the heart of these efforts. This contribution will begin by outlining the different types of obligations and responsibilities that this equality entails for States and international organizations, but also for scientific communities under the three components of the human right to science, which are : the right to access and participate in scientific practice ; the right to access and participate in the benefits of science ; and the right to be protected from the adverse effects of science. It will then deal with issues of discrimination against women in science that are specific to scientific practice and its normative and institutional structure, and which the UN bodies mentioned above have not yet sufficiently addressed. In dialogue with certain feminist philosophers of science, new interpretations of the human right to science for women will then be proposed
