Almost 50 years have passed since the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – the major international bill on women’s human rights and the only binding treaty that protects women and girls from sex-based discrimination – was adopted by 130 states at the United Nations General Assembly[1]. 30 years have gone by since 189 states gathered in Beijing for the Fourth UN World Conference on Women and unanimously adopted the Beijing Platform Action (BPfA). Together, these two instruments make the most far-reaching binding and non-binding commitments that the world has ever made to women and girls.
Globally, living conditions of women and girls are deteriorating. Feminised poverty and the income gap between women and men around the world increase, with this gap increasing manifold between those in the global South and the global North. Women and girls are worse affected than men by pandemics, austerity policies, environmental and climate change, war and conflict. Women are harassed, beaten, tortured, raped, exploited, mutilated and murdered because we are women, in war and in peace. The very concept of sex is being annihilated in language and legislation, and women as a legal class of right holders are being erased. We are discriminated against and abused in public and in private spheres, offline and online. Women’s human rights are questioned, eroded and eliminated.
This is why a unified global voice and action of WoPAI is needed.
WoPAI will promote substantive equality between women and men, we will advocate for general, differentiated and temporary special measures, and defend women’s universal and inalienable human rights as they are defined in CEDAW. As a counter-voice to the many regressive, hierarchical and relativist organisations that are active on international level today, we will bring together women’s organisations who work in different countries and regions and who share an understanding of sex-based oppression and violence against women and a vision of the world where our sex-based rights are fulfilled, protected and promoted.
Spread over the world authoritarian, totalitarian, far-right, religious fundamentalist regimes and organisations are rolling back women’s rights and freedoms. Women cannot leave their homes without a male guardian, they can not show their face, female voices are banned in public, girls are not allowed to go to school but allowed to get married off at nine years old. Women’s right to abortion and contraceptives is threatened. Child-free women are ridiculed or subjected to state sanctions. Lesbians are persecuted and murdered for being same-sex attracted. They say all this must be done to stop gender ideologies.
This is well known, it is the “anti-gender movement”.
Spreading all over the world are also states, organisations, interests and ideologies that position themselves as “progressives” but, in fact, are too rolling back women’s rights. Neoliberal, relativist, left-labeled agendas rooted in the exploitation and subjugation of women are being institutionalised. These actors have codified postmodern identity based ideologies and theories which harm women’s rights. They claim that being a woman is a matter of opinion and search to eradicate women in terminology and language. They also advocate for trading female sexual and reproductive capacities in pornography, prostitution and surrogacy systems. They say that a floating gender replaces sex.
This is not well known, it is the “pro-gender movement”.
This movement exists inside international and national institutions, academia, manifested across the globe. They defend harmful practices such as child and forced marriage as cultural and religious traditions; they demand that commodification of women is normalised and regulated; they deliberately conflate biological sex with sex roles and stereotypes of gender. The pro-gender movement also demands that legal records of sex are abolished globally and substituted by non-legal and not agreed by the international community concepts of “gender identity”, thus instigating a direct attack on international and national laws that protect women from sex-based discrimination. They appropriate feminist language and structures and demand that freedom of speech and association of women opposing this anti-women agenda is curtailed. They claim to be anti-colonialists but are in reality orchestrated by highly privileged persons in the global north that want to inflict their theories on others.
This side of the backlash against women’s rights is often portrayed as a response to the “anti-gender” movement and is in part driven by large civil society organisations that claim to be feminist. In reality, these organisations lack grassroot support from women around the world, are often influenced by corporate and special interest lobby groups, and undermine rather than protect our rights.
At the same time, true feminist organisations are often small, working solely on national or local level or on issues affecting specific groups of women, such as impoverished and destituted, prostituted and exploited, battered and raped, displaced, disabled, widowed, incarcerated or lesbian women, among many others. These grassroots organisations operate under severe financial and political constraints and are often forced to survive under pressure from states as well as powerful multinational and/or corporate donors whose support is conditioned on accepting the said donors’ terms and conditions.
From the totalitarian states who co-opt and/or eliminate independent women’s organisations in the name of ‘traditional and religious values’, to the liberal states who co-opt and/or eliminate independent women’s organisations in the name of ‘diversity and inclusion’, women’s rights groups and women’s rights defenders – the heart and soul of women’s global resistance to oppression and discrimination – are under attack.
Women’s Platform for Action International (WoPAI) will stand up against all threats against women’s rights irrespective if they come from the so called anti-gender movement on the far right, or “pro gender”, queer, postmodern or neoliberal agendas of liberal and leftist origin.
Let’s defend women’s universal human rights and unite different groups of women. Let’s be truly progressive. Let us always put women and girls first.
[1] The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1979 by votes of 130 to none, with 10 abstentions.
