Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter II: Global Framework – Paragraph 25
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/11
25. The Fourth World Conference on Women should accelerate the process that formally began in 1975, which was proclaimed International Women’s Year by the United Nations General Assembly. The Year was a turning-point in that it put women’s issues on the agenda. The United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985) was a world-wide effort to examine the status and rights of women and to bring women into decision-making at all levels. In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which entered into force in 1981 and set an international standard for what was meant by equality between women and men. In 1985, the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace adopted the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, to be implemented by the year 2000. There has been important progress in achieving equality between women and men. Many Governments have enacted legislation to promote equality between women and men and have established national machineries to ensure the mainstreaming of gender perspectives in all spheres of society. International agencies have focused greater attention on women’s status and roles.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
There has been a continued effort of the world’s systems to include more voices and incorporate more women into the power matrices of nations and regions, not a small task and, indeed, quite important for the move towards the furtherance of the implementation of human rights. If we take into account the ways in which the world’s belief and political systems, typically, endow a supernatural mythology around limited, prescribed, and subordinate roles of women, we can note the threat to these prevailing mythological superstructures through the inclusion of a reason-based, science-based, evidence-based, and human rights-oriented perspective on women.One in which women are given the equal play, equal consideration, and equal access and opportunity with men. As this began to happen several decades ago, and as we have seen the historic ascendance of women, we can observe the overt pushback against this advancement and empowerment of women through a variety of means, whether ethnic hate groups, authoritarian elements of societies and concomitant xenophobia rising, attempts at diversionary tactics to prevent proper attention on real activist efforts – and, of course, the direct attacks on the right to bodily autonomy of women in reproductive health rightsThe points of reference in the paragraph are important for the considerations even to this day. Women’s issues are more and more on the agenda to not only the benefit of the women but of the men of the world willing to look at the evidence too, in observing the quality of life and wealth of most nations implementing these various equality measures. Some documents, such as the CEDAW or the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, have been sincerely considered within this framework and remain one of the bases for the prevention of discrimination against women.Much of the legislation is of a positive nature through the legitimate pathways or “machineries” of the state or governments within some of the international community for the promotion of the equality of women with men. Indeed, the expansion of the possible gender perspectives comes to a head with the traditionalist mythologies from times of slavery, war, superstition, oppression of women, divine right of kings, and not knowing what an atom or a germ was for examples, but these come into conflicts – the narratives from the mythologies – with the modernized work to expand the set of human potentialities not simply for the few but for the many and even the most.This is a long struggle going back to the pre-scientific eras in attempts to move the leadership systems to include more people and to move from the superstitious into the more secular, scientific, and reason-based. Now, more than two decades past the statements of the Beijing Declaration, we can note the development of more progress than, probably, ever before; however, we can see the doubling-down efforts to try and restrict the life and livelihoods of women, indeed intellectually through a re-packaging of the oppressive myths, in the modern period starting in some of the 2010s. But the focus by the international agencies may be an important marker of the continued progress through hard work of individual citizens of the globe aimed at the common good rather than the uncommon – often rich and privileged – good alone.–
- 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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