Asia Pacific governments are meeting in Bangkok to take stock of the progress of implementing the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA), a landmark agreement made in 1995 to promote and advance the status of women. The BPFA will be 20 years in 2015, and women around the world are alarmed that what progress has been made is being eroded. Moreover, what accountability that governments have towards people have shifted towards corporations and profit-making rather than ensuring and protecting rights and advancing equality.
More than 400 women in the region will gather for an Asia Pacific Civil Society Forum on Beijing Plus 20 from 14 to 16 November, which will precede the High-Level Intergovernmental Meeting to Review Regional Implementation of the BPFA.
Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development (APWLD) is supporting the participation of more than 150 women from diverse feminist and people’s movements in the region. These participants took part in several APWLD-organised activities preceding the forum: a roundtable and training in gender and politics, the annual meeting of the Southeast Asia Women’s Caucus, the meeting of the Regional Civil Society Engagement Mechanism, and a Feminist Legal Theory and Practice Graduates Meeting. At all these activities, feminists and CSOs strategised on how to best make governments accountable for promises made around the BPFA, and how to counter the backsliding and regressive policies emerging in the region.
We also launched our book Our Rights! Our Voices! Our Resources! the research report of the feminist participatory action research with rural and indigenous women under our Breaking Out of Marginalisation Programme.
APWLD will also be organising four workshops during the CSO forum itself. There will be workshops on: trade agreements’ impact on women; migrant workers and decent work; monitoring and accountability; and advancing development justice.
At the intergovernmental meeting, APWLD will be organizing a side event on Parliamentary Mechanisms to Implement the BPFA, highlighted by women parliamentarians and representatives from two national women’s agencies.
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