Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter I: Mission Statement – Paragraph 3
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/01
3. The Platform for Action emphasizes that women share common concerns that can be addressed only by working together and in partnership with men towards the common goal of gender* equality around the world. It respects and values the full diversity of women’s situations and conditions and recognizes that some women face particular barriers to their empowerment.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The Beijing Declaration deals with a broad range of statements of values and of action items. The ways in which to effectuate certain kinds of change or the transition towards a more gender equal world. The asserted premise at the outset is the shared concerns of women. With some reflection, the concerns or issues for women are not completely the same, but there are for sure statistically sufficient universals in which women face challenges or issues in life either not experienced at all by men or to the same degree by men.
These values for a higher plane of equality or a greater instantiation of the Golden Rule produce a marked difference to the centuries and millennia of consideration of women as lesser-than, incapable of rational thought or even if having the capacity then the ability as having non-primacy in mental life, and, therefore, worth fewer social privileges and legal rights within society. This is the long march of the realization of human nature in its more positive, magnanimous manifestations, where women are provided with more equality and the societies begin to flourish as science and greater accuracy in knowledge about the natural world emerge and begin to inform our view of the world rather than having the religious texts informing the view of the world.
The purpose through the Declaration and its Platform for Action is to more instantiate the common concerns of women with the recognition and crystallization of their rights and responsibilities as persons, but also to make these the ‘jumping off’ point for the great implementation of equality of the women in the world’s societies. Iceland is far ahead of others. Canada is doing decent. Saudi Arabia is doing terribly. Bt in an international cooperative effort, pressure could be put on the governments of the world to further the interests of the women of the world.
This can mean the difference between a more equitable and just world and a world in which women are not seen as capable of entering into the workplace based on the purported necessity of traditionalism. A world with the inability of men to work with women who wear makeup, the ways in which an enforced heterosexual monogamy is needed to keep society going where women’s free choices in relationships and so on should be curtailed in order to prevent men from becoming violent, and the movement of women outside of the home can be seen as simply a historical accident and non-necessity since the 1960s, at least in North America.
The respect and values given to men and women is, objectively, a better world because the most important metrics to most modern people on the health of a society improve, which creates the empirical argument – cross-cultural and over decades – for the necessity of the implementation of gender equality. Otherwise, we could move to the era in which religious fundamentalism, the Divine Right of Kings, and so on. The individual rights overriding the collectivism found in much of traditional culture and Abrahamic – and other – religions stands opposed to the rights of the individual and the family enshrined in international rights documents.
The same documents providing a bargain between the religious and the non-religious, where there is, for an example, the freedom of and from religion. This makes a democratic and equal society possible with the ability of the individual citizens to be able to live their lives as they deem fit for worship or non-worship in a place of worship or not. It is the nobility of these ideals that make a treaty between the historically opposed groups.
In a similar manner, the equality of women with men comes not from the totality of historical precedents but from the work of people who instantiated the notion of women’s personhood in international documents, where their equality becomes non-trivial, non-negotiable and something to strive towards – for the good of all. While working towards the implementation of the rights, it becomes a proper reflection to identify the ways in which women are prevented from being seen as full human beings or as equals with men, whether through statistics, open policies, workplace culture, or laws, or statements of leaders.
These can provide windows into the ways in women are prevent from attaining full equality with men.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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