Beijing Betrayed

Beijing Betrayed is the fifth global monitoring report published by the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) assessing governments’ progress in implementing the commitments they made to the world’s women at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995.

Beijing Betrayed brings together the diverse voices of women in some 150 countries in subregions across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and North America, Latin America and the Caribbean and West Asia to influence the United Nations 10 year Review of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This report presents women’s realities – their concerns, experiences, perspectives and analyses – in the implementation process and contrasts sharply with the more formal and often abstract reports governments have presented.

The reports presented here are a testimony to women as agents of change and give us cause for celebration. They show that women advocates everywhere have stepped up their activities since Beijing using the Platform for Action and other key global policy instruments to push governments into taking action. In every region of the world, women have taken the lead in crafting legislation and conducting public awareness activities to promote women’s human rights, peace, and sustainable development.

But the reports also provide powerful evidence that key governmental commitments to women – the Beijing Platform and the outcome of the Beijing Five-Year Review, Cairo Programme of Action and 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – have yet to be achieved. The title, Beijing Betrayed, reflects the core of women’s critique – “governments worldwide have adopted a piecemeal and incremental approach to implementation that cannot achieve the economic, social and political transformation underlying the promises and vision of Beijing”. The reports speak loudly: the women of the world don’t need any more words from their governments – they want action, they want resources and they want governments to protect and advance women’s human rights.

Women understand that implementation falters because of powerful negative political, economic and social trends constraining the global environment as well as progress at the national level. WEDO’s 1999 monitoring report, Risks, Rights and Reforms, assessing government actions five years after the International Conference on Population and Development, sounded a global alarm calling for a reversal of “disturbing economic, environmental and political trends that threaten the health and sustainability of our increasingly vulnerable planet.” But instead of a reversal, women have witnessed an expansion and deepening of this crisis.

A combination of global trends – the predominance of the neo-liberal economic framework, growing militarization, and rising fundamentalism – have created an environment that is increasingly hostile to the advancement of women’s human rights. Since Beijing, the neo-liberal economic model and market-driven policies – particularly changes in trade and finance rules, and the deregulation and privatisation of public goods and services – have increased poverty and intensified inequalities between and within nations, with the harshest impact falling on women, the majority and poorest of the poor. Women’s work in the care economy remains unaccounted for in gender-blind macroeconomic policy and poverty reduction strategies that further exacerbate the feminization of poverty.

The conditions are perpetuated and structural inequalities reinforced by the enormous power wielded by large transnational corporations and the World Trade Organization, along with the failed economic prescriptions imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The dominance of these institutions in conjunction with the most unilateralist U.S. administration in decades has deepened the crisis in global governance and contributed to the weakening of the United Nations.

Escalating militarism and new revived fundamentalisms, both secular and religious, have created a stifling climate for progressive change. Increased militarization since the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, framed by the U.S. “global war on terror” and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, comes on top of an increase in regional ethnic and communal violence in many parts of the world. Fundamentalist parties, often led by or supported by the U.S., seek to rollback the gains of Cairo and Beijing, particularly on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to limit the freedom and opportunities of women and girls around the world. The devastating impact of all of these trends intensifies women’s social and cultural vulnerabilities, especially the poorest and those coping with the consequences of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic.

The 12 Critical Issues:

1. The persistent burden of poverty.
2. Unequal access to education.
3. Unequal access to healthcare
4. Violence
5. Armed conflicts
6. Inequality in economic structures
7. Inequality in the sharing of power
8. Insufficient mechanisms
9. Human rights violation
10. Stereotyping in the media
11. Environment
12. The Girl-child

Operating within this difficult climate, which constrains available resources and narrows public perceptions about acceptable roles for women, few governments have mobilized the political will or leadership at the highest levels to comprehensively carry out the commitments made to women at Beijing. This inaction in the face of such intense opposition to women’s rights, underscores the conclusion of this global report – that governments have betrayed the promises they made in Beijing.

Beyond Beijing + 10

As with previous WEDO global monitoring reports, Beijing Betrayed is an advocacy tool to hold governments accountable for the commitments they have made to women. We are confident that women around the world, who put so much collective energy into this report, will find multiple ways to use it locally as a source of new ideas and experimentation, for mobilization and policy reform, and globally to press for further commitments and to “bring back Beijing” into the Millennium Development Goals. It will also serve as a benchmark against which women can assess future progress and for countries to see how they compare with others in the region and around the globe.

Advocates Remain Steadfast Despite Stiff Struggle for Survival

The UN Fourth World Conference on Women unified the women of the Caribbean region through a thorough preparatory process and joint actions at the conference itself. But developments since then threaten to undermine women’s advocacy for implementing the Beijing Platform for Action.

Most significantly, these include the negative impacts of trade liberalization; the U.S. Government’s so-called war on terror; the severe national disasters that have swept the countries of the region in recent years; and the classification of the Caribbean as a middle-income region, which has led to the withdrawal of critical funding by donor agencies. For women, the resulting economic downturn has meant a greater struggle for survival and less time for political organizing and mobilization.

A year after the Beijing conference, the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) – a regional network of feminists, researchers, activists and women’s organizations – convened a conference of major stakeholders to develop a regional non-governmental plan of action. The impact of global developments on the women’s movement and the implementation of the Beijing Platform were the primary concerns. Conference participants agreed on four core strategies for NGO action: partnership building, institutional strengthening, resource mobilization and awareness building.

As for efforts by governments in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to implement the Beijing Platform, these have been piecemeal and ad hoc at best. There is an urgent need for the region’s governments to take a structured approach to implementing national action plans, and to putting women’s interests and concerns at center stage.