• DOI:10.1086/495143
• Corpus ID: 144075825

Beijing '95: Moving Women's Human Rights from Margin to Center

@article{Bunch1996BeijingM,
  title={Beijing '95: Moving Women's Human Rights from Margin to Center},
  author={Charlotte Bunch and Susana T. Fried},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={1996},
  volume={22},
  pages={200 - 204}
}

• C. Bunch, S. Fried
• Published 1 October 1996
• Political Science
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

H E F O U RT H W O R L D Conference on Women in Beijing established clearly that women are a global force for the twentyfirst century and that women's human rights are central to women's leadership for the future. Women's rights as human rights permeated debates and delegates' speeches at the official UN intergovernmental conference as well as at the parallel Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum held some thirty miles away in Huairou, where it was a palpable presence in many sessions. The combined effect of these activities was a groundswell of support for making the entire Platform an affirmation of the human rights of women, including women's rights to education, health, and freedom from violence, as well as to the exercise of citizenship in all its manifestations. Previous UN women's conferences were seen as primarily about women and development or even women's rights, but not about the concept of human rights as it applies to women. This report assesses the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which came out of the governmental conference, focusing on its implications for women's human rights advocacy. The conference was mandated to produce a consensus "platform" that would implement the goals set forth in the "Forward-Looking Strategies" from the 1985 Nairobi World Conference on Women and advance the 1995 conference theme of "Action for Equality, Development, and Peace." More than four thousand NGO delegates accredited to the governmental conference worked to influence the document's articulation of the conditions faced by women worldwide as well as the content of the strategies proposed. In the context of such international UN meetings, controversies over language are debates about the direction of governmental policy. If the agreements that result from these meetings are to be meaningful beyond the moment, attention must be paid to the details of the compromises, as well as to the subtextual disputes they represent. These documents address several aspects of international debates over gender roles, includ-