Three decades after the landmark Beijing declaration to advance women’s rights, right-wing, religious, and conservative actors are reversing and obstructing hard-won progress. This International Women’s Day, our Oxfam campaign calls on governments across the globe to reassert their commitment to gender justice, bodily autonomy, and sexual and reproductive health and rights, say Lata Narayanaswamy and Amina Hersi.
The Beijing Declaration 30 years ago, was a landmark moment for women’s rights. At the fourth World Conference for Women, 189 nations unanimously backed the declaration which stated that “women’s rights are human rights”, called for global funding to achieve gender equality and unequivocally supported “the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility”.
Yet three decades later, the ideals of the Beijing declaration and the hard-won progress that followed it are under threat. A range of right-wing, religious, and conservative actors around the world are capitalising on persistent crises, to reorient state power to re-assert racist and sexist profit-driven systems. These systems favour the wealthy, privilege men, and harm and disadvantage women and LGBTQIA+ people in the name of ‘traditional’ family values.
The promotion of heteronormative family systems, often now done under the guise of “protecting” women, risks entrenching patriarchal gender roles. It also exacerbates the unequal distribution of care work disproportionately undertaken by women, care work that remains unpaid, underpaid, and undervalued.
As world leaders prepare to review their Beijing commitments, they must reject the mainstreaming of anti-rights movements and their co-opting of human rights language. Now is the time to confront the threat to the hard-won gains of feminist, LGBTQIA+ activists and movements.
Our new briefing, Personal to Powerful: Holding the line for gender justice in the face of growing anti-rights movements, and campaign sets out the scale of the new threat to gender rights – and also outlines how this is contributing to a bigger picture of broken promises and unfulfilled ambition since Beijing. Not a single indicator under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on gender equality, has been fully achieved, and too many of the Beijing commitments remain unfulfilled ambitions.
How austerity, inequality and debt are huge obstacles to progress
The briefing highlights the disastrous consequences of inequality, austerity, and debt on global gender justice. Aid spending is in decline and economic inequality widening dramatically, with billionaire wealth rising three times faster in 2024 than 2023. This, as Oxfam’s recent paper for the Davos summit highlighted, is part of a wider systemic extraction of wealth from the Global South to the super-rich 1 percent in the Global North.
An economic system that favours the Global North is driving a surge in national debts in the Global South. Worse, the near-universal response to this burden of debt has been further economic austerity measures, with dire consequences for sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice (SRHRJ) and bodily autonomy.
More than half of countries that have either cut their social protection budget or have very little social protection budget (below 15% of total government expenditure), have little or no social assistance to mothers with new-borns. Diminishing aid and growing inequality are also undermining our collective capacity to hold states to account for upholding SRHRJ and bodily autonomy. Meanwhile the resources pushing a reactionary anti-rights agenda are soaring. According to the Global Philanthropy Project, just three anti-LGBTQIA+ organizations received more funding in 2021-2022 than all 8,000+ LGBTQIA+ organisations globally combined.
The urgent action needed: from gender-based violence to abortion rights to support for carers
Actions that governments have and continue to take in areas including maternal mortality, gender-based violence, comprehensive sexuality education, abortion and contraception information and care, and LGBTQIA+ rights demonstrate that acting in favour of SRHRJ and bodily autonomy is possible. Gains are not, however, happening fast enough.
We still live in a world where one in three women (1.3 billion) lives in countries that do not prohibit the dismissal of pregnant workers. Care work is distributed unevenly amongst women in ways that reflect prevailing race and class inequalities. The gendered labour of wealthier women is frequently displaced on to poorer, racialised women in a range of contexts, with these forms of unpaid work representing a massive wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest.
However, this is no time to despair. Instead, we can take inspiration from the collective action that brought feminists together in Beijing. Our new campaign and briefing calls for states to work towards a new social contract: one that centres accountability to women, trans, and non-binary people; one that uphold everyone’s fundamental rights to make decisions about their own bodies; and one that centres care and the redistribution of resources and power through transformative gender-just policies.
We make four key demands of states in our new campaign:
1. Uphold and promote bodily autonomy and SRHRJ as fundamental human rights.
Women, girls, and people of diverse genders and sexualities must have full autonomy over their lives and bodies for improved health and education outcomes, as well as the freedom to participate in all aspects of economic life.
States must ensure, all people, including in emergency settings, have universal access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, including safe abortion and post abortion care. States must also repeal laws that criminalise or discriminate against consensual sex between adults, challenge discriminatory and harmful social and gender norms, and uphold universal human rights that promote and protect people of diverse SOGIESC.
2. Strengthen the feminist social contract and end austerity
Austerity is a political choice that is neither necessary nor inevitable. States must reject and end austerity as it weakens economic, political and social settlements by dismantling the social contract on which we depend. This can only be achieved by taxing the rich, cancelling unsustainable debt of low and middle-income countries to free up financial resources, and invest in social protection and universal public services, alongside other gender-transformative policies.
3. Recognise care as a right and as a public good
The global economy has long relied on the undervalued and unpaid labour of women, particularly those from the Global South, reinforcing racialised and gendered inequalities. States must recognize care as a public good, a human right, and a cornerstone of SRHRJ. This is only possible if states shift to a caring economy that ensures dignified work for all, and an increased investment in universal and gender transformative public infrastructure and services, social protection and publicly funded healthcare systems for all.
4. Strengthen and resource feminist and queer organisations and movements
Feminist and queer organisations and movements have demonstrated time and again that they are best placed to challenge states that break the social contract by not respecting, protecting, and promoting bodily autonomy and SRHRJ. Funding, including through official development assistance (ODA), should be prioritised to ensure that feminist and queer organisations and movements can continue to hold governments accountable. States must promote the equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women, trans and non-binary people in decision-making spaces and protect and expand public and civic space for all, including ensuring individuals and groups dedicated to the protection and promotion of SRHRJ can carry out their work in an enabling environment.
This International Women’s Day, we believe governments and communities must confront an anti-rights agenda that seeks to limit SRHRJ, bodily autonomy and gender justice. It’s time to unite in solidarity with feminist and queer movements, hold the line – and resist.
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This blog is adapted from the executive summary to our new briefing for International Women’s Day, Personal to Powerful: Holding the line for gender justice in the face of growing anti-rights movements. It is the first in a series of blogs we will be running this month for International Women’s Day.
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