UNITED NATIONS: Fourth World Conference on Women

▪ 1996

      Women from 185 countries convened in Beijing on Sept. 4, 1995, for the Fourth World Conference on Women. Among the prominent personalities in attendance were Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who delivered a stirring (and controversial) speech on September 5. The assembly agreed on a “platform for action” at the close of the conference on September 15.

      The platform's preamble called for improvements in the economic circumstances of women, protection from increasing levels of violence, and improvements in the status of girls; it also urged states to take steps to achieve these goals. The document aimed at empowering women by ensuring that they enjoyed all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

      The conferees sought to ensure “women's equal access to economic resources including land, credit, science and technology, vocational training, information, communication and markets” as ways of further advancing and empowering women and girls. The document asserted that women have the right to decide freely all matters relating to their sexuality and child-bearing and condemned forced abortions and sterilizations. Abhorring “ethnic cleansing” in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, it characterized the systematic rape of women in wartime as criminal and called for perpetrators to be tried as war criminals. It recognized domestic violence as a worldwide problem and censured domestic battering, sexual harassment at work, genital mutilation of girls, and attacks on women with small dowries.

      The platform claimed that girls are discriminated against throughout the world, often before birth in cultures where more value is placed on boys, and it censured such practices. It called upon governments and international lending institutions to support banking services and credit facilities for low-income women. Governments were urged to guarantee women equal rights with men to inherit, even if they may not inherit the same amount as men.

      The declaration called for strengthening, protecting, and supporting the family as the basic unit of society. Acknowledging various forms of family in different cultural, political, and social systems, it insisted that whatever the form, women must not suffer discrimination just because they are mothers. Efforts to bar discrimination based on “sexual orientation” failed to achieve a consensus because of objections by more than 30 national delegations. The conferees also failed to obtain sizable financial commitments from governments to pay for new programs for women, but they did elicit official pledges to redirect funds already appropriated. The document did not bind countries to action but gave the issues new visibility and served as a model for national policy makers. The conference asked the UN secretary-general to appoint an undersecretary-general for women's issues, but some feared that such a post might be politically vulnerable and face overpowering resistance from UN member nations.

      China had intended to enjoy the prestige of being the conference host, but its heavy-handed and oppressive “security measures” against the delegates and the press and pro-democracy and human rights campaigners called attention to the least attractive aspects of Chinese society. Many delegates were offended by China's exiling nongovernmental organization representatives to an inadequate site about 50 km (30 mi) from the main conference. (RICHARD N. SWIFT)

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