Women's Rights in Armed Conflicts from the UN Perspective – A Case Study of Syria

The bachelor thesis deals with the women’s rights in war conflicts from the point of view of the UN and analyzes the violation of women's rights in war conflicts demonstrated on the example of the Syrian civil war. The aim of this thesis is to determine what international legal instruments the UN uses to protect women's rights and to clarify how these instruments were used in the Syrian civil war. This thesis also focuses on the two main UN documents in the field of women’s rights in war conflicts, namely UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security and the responsibility to protect doctrine. When studying both of these documents the main focus was initially drawn to how these documents were created and to what extent these documents (as new norms) were accepted in the international society. Subsequently, this bachelor's thesis discusses the extent to which the UN has managed to enforce compliance with these documents in the Syrian war conflict. It is concluded in this bachelor's thesis that that incomplete respect of these new norms in the international society causes their unsystematic implementation, and therefore makes it impossible to enforce respect for women's rights in war conflicts. In order to map the violations of women's rights that women have encountered (and still to this day encounter) in Syria the reports of the UN specialized agencies have been used as the main source of the information.