A UN Review and Appraisal: Ten Years After Beijing, Where Are We Now?

NEW YORK, February 24 2005 -- Without fanfare or any major call to action, about 6,000 women arrive in New York from all over the world this weekend to insist that the international community reaffirm that women’s rights are human rights.

From February 28 to March 11, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will hold a Ten-Year Review and Appraisal of developments for women worldwide since the Fourth World Conference on Women met in Beijing in 1995. Its historic Platform for Action asserted that women’s rights are human rights and laid out steps and investments needed in 12 areas of concern. But global action on those commitments has been uneven over the past decade.

A special celebration March 4 will mark International Women’s Day and 30 years since the first UN World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City in 1975.

The United States was a leading architect of the Platform for Action in 1995, but the current U.S. government has refused in several regional meetings to fully reaffirm it. The most recent U.S. statement of position, for example, asserts “parental rights” to make reproductive health decisions for adolescents, stresses U.S. support for abstinence-only sex education, and reserves the U.S. position on sexual rights.

The Platform for Action laid out steps and investments needed to advance women’s equality and empowerment over a broad agenda of civil and political rights. Its recommendations included universal education for girls, access to reproductive health care and services, global action against poverty, and an end to violence and discrimination against women in every aspect of life.

A decade later, governments, agencies and women’s groups have met in every region of the globe during this past year to consider each area’s progress and the remaining challenges. In a significant development, every region reaffirmed its governments’ commitment to the Platform goals and laid out specific recommendations for further action. Delegates in New York will adopt a political statement that recommits nations to actions to improve the human rights and well-being of women and girls.

One indicator of women’s progress is controversy. Where women were once routinely oppressed and abused at home and in the workplace or raped in time of war, with little international attention to their suffering, these conditions today make news as violations of women’s human rights. A backlash of resistance to women’s further advancement is also evidence that the debate is serious and involves real power.

Arguments at the March gathering are expected to involve women’s role in national and global economies; institutional mechanisms to promote gender equality; ending trafficking (in the context of migratory movements); and continuing worldwide poverty and violence against women. Major obstacles to women’s advancement, also subject to debate, include the rise of political-religious fundamentalism and the growth of militarism and conflict.