A/69/368 identity, but also a practice whereby people are able to meaningfully participate in shaping their societies through the exercise of their citizenship rights. 3 Citizenship rights are broad, inclusive, interdependent and indivisible and are tied to citizens ’ participation in the lives of their communities and the articulation of their agency, underpinned by the norms of dignity, equality and non-discrimination. 12. Autonomy and agency aspects of citizenship rights provide a framework for understanding women’s citizenship, through recognizing both the structural factors that constrain women’s ability to live as full citizens, as well as women’s role as active citizens able to participate in creating the laws, policies and conditions affecting them. Historically, States and communities have often used “the women” as a critical symbol in defining the nation. 4 Despite linking their visions of the political community to women as symbols, in practice many States often constrain women’s autonomy, thereby limiting their ability to participate fully in the community as equal citizens. 13. Individuals cannot influence the decision-making processes affecting their lives, livelihoods and the life of their community without their human rights being respected, protected and fulfilled. Having a voice and stake in community action, requires active political participation and civic enga gement in various areas of social, political, civil, and economic aspects of community life. Thus citizenship rights that embrace multiple sites of political participation and civic engagement, establish a relationship between individuals and the State and also among individual citizens. This implies not only rights and responsibilities, but also interaction and influence within the community. 3 States, in turn, have an affirmative obligation to promote and protect all human rights, in order to enable the effective exercise of citizenship rights. B. Nexus between violence against women and citizenship 14. Violence against women impairs and nullifies women’s realization of all human rights, it prevents women from participating in their communities as full and equal citizens, it reinforces male dominance and control, it supports discriminatory gender norms and it maintains systemic inequalities between women and men. These factors, in turn, preserve and perpetuate conditions that enable gender -based violence to continue. 15. The international community explicitly acknowledged violence against women as a human rights issue when it adopted the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action at the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. Standard -setting developments, such as general recommendation No. 19 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, further acknowledge violence against women as a form of discrimination that impedes or nullifies women’s right to enjoy all other human rights on a basis of equality with men, and also address the obligations that States have to prevent and respond to violence against women. These developments are underpinned by an understanding that gender-based violence on women’s rights to equality, bodily integrity and freedom from discrimination also affects numerous human rights. __________________ 4 14-60186 See Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities, Routledge (1992). 5/21