The Fourth UN Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China, in September 1995 to accelerate the drive to achieve equality between women and men.
This campaign formally began in 1975, which was declared International Women's Year by the UN General Assembly. The year was a turning-point, bringing women's issues to the forefront of international attention.
The UN Decade for Women, from 1976-1985, was a world-wide effort to examine the status and rights of women and to bring women into decision-making at all levels.
In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This entered into force in 1981 and set a standard for what was meant by equality between men and women. All the world's industrialized nations, except the United States, have ratified this treaty.
"Equality by the Year 2000," is the UN's slogan for the decade and one of the goals of the Beijing Conference was to compare the actual progress made by women everywhere to the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies adopted in the 1985 women's conference.
Since the Mexico conference, 20 years ago, the campaign for women's rights has witnessed momentous changes-women are entering the work force in unprecedented numbers and playing a greater role in all areas of public life. Healthcare and education is more accessible now that it ever was.
However, in most of the world, women's rights are still not recognized as human rights. Many governments have done nothing to ensure that women enjoy the full range of rights to which they are entitled. So the Beijing conference offered the perfect opportunity to pressure governments to take action to promote and protect women's rights.
The conference drew 40,000 women from all over the world, among them, US First Lady, Hillary Clinton, Pakistan's Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto and, on videotape, Burmese dissident writer, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Among the main goals of the Beijing conference was to adopt a Platform for Action to eradicate the remaining obstacles to women's full and equal participation in all spheres of life. Most of the 189 countries represented agreed with this women's rights document and roundly condemned injustices like inequality in education, bride-burning and female infanticide.
The Fourth World Conference for Women Draft Platform for Action has been described as "the strongest statement of consensus on women's equality, empowerment and justice ever produced by governments."
