Paragraph 42 of the Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter III: Critical Areas of Concern
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/19
42. Most of the goals set out in the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women have not been achieved. Barriers to women’s empowerment remain, despite the efforts of Governments, as well as non-governmental organizations and women and men everywhere. Vast political, economic and ecological crises persist in many parts of the world. Among them are wars of aggression, armed conflicts, colonial or other forms of alien domination or foreign occupation, civil wars and terrorism. These situations, combined with systematic or de facto discrimination, violations of and failure to protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms of all women, and their civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, including the right to development and ingrained prejudicial attitudes towards women and girls are but a few of the impediments encountered since the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, in 1985.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
This part of the Beijing Declaration comes with the background of the second chapter with the emphasis on the overall viewpoint. This paragraph almost opens on a lamentation. Based on the set of strategies set forward from Nairobi at the time, women remained – and to a lesser extent than in 1995 continue to be – less than men on a number of metrics.
Some cannot be fixed but only ameliorated such as those already given infibulation, clitoridectomy, and female genital mutilation. The estimates are in the tens of millions, around 200 million. That’s what is estimated, but that number could be higher. Those non-achievements or un-achievements, or failures to reach projected targets resulted in 1995 as still another year of barriers for women.
Note the descriptor, “most” of the targeted objectives or goals failed to be reached. The barriers continued for women as a result. The barriers are to women insofar as they remain barriers for the empowerment of women – a common phrase in international parlance, of which readers are familiar with, no doubt.
There are a number of ongoing issues politically, economically, and ecologically more than in 1995, especially the increasing severity of the ecological onslaught from climate change due to the impacts of the human industrial activity on the world. The crises are exacerbated by various forms of militancy, which span right into the present with an extended war set in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, by a number of state actors, in the world.
With this chaos and destruction, the ability to exercise rights, let alone implement them. Any instability creates a host of damages to the infrastructure of the society. The stability and internal apparatus of the nation to be able to systematically and comfortable implement the rights of women and, furthermore, the empowerment of women too.
This has cascading consequences for the fundamental freedoms of women too in the exercise of their “civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.” It comes in the furtherance of prejudicial attitudes against women and the inability of the state’s stability to engender these forms of equality for women.
The main issues for women remain the same with the prejudicial attitudes towards girls and women yielding real, verifiable negative impacts on their lives. It is in this context that we can find the destruction of the potential futures of many women, exacerbated by the failure to achieve most set goals or the catastrophes of human destructive activity, and capacities.
–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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