Twenty-five Years After the Beijing Conference: Equality Now Reports on Governments’ “Words and Deeds”

Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the UN Conference on Women in 1995 and the Beijing Platform for Action, Equality Now has published its fifth edition of Words and Deeds, a survey of discriminatory laws that persist around the world.  Three U.S. laws are featured:  the executive order barring transgender troops; a Mississippi law permitting child marriage; and the discriminatory citizenship law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Nguyen v. INS.

Equality Now has some good news, too.  It reports that over half of the discriminatory laws featured in its prior Words and Deeds reports have been partially or completely repealed.  But some basic protections remain elusive.  In particular, reports Equality Now, “[w]hile 77% of States
guarantee equality on the basis of sex in their constitutions, 23%, including the United States, do not have sex equality as a constitutional guarantee.”

With each national law it identifies, Equality Now provides information about how to take action to address the discriminatory provision.  For the United States, the report notes, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution would go a long way toward eliminating these explicitly discriminatory laws more than two decades after the attendees at the UN’s Beijing conference pledged to “bring Beijing home.”