S.Mona Sinha, Equality Now, at the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Credit: Joel Sheakoski
 
International Women's Day March 8 2025: This year it will be celebrated under the theme, 'Accelerate Action': a worldwide call to acknowledge strategies, resources, and activities that positively impact women's advancement, and to support and elevate their implementation.12

By Antonia Kirkland and Tara Carey
NEW YORK, Mar 4 2025 (IPS)

A new global report analyzing sex discrimination in laws reveals that while some commendable gains have been achieved in strengthening legal protections for women and girls over the past five years, progress remains slow, uneven, and increasingly under threat from a growing backlash against women’s rights.

Research by Equality Now identifies how women and girls continue to experience systemic and intersecting discrimination in laws, policies, and cultural practices, exposing them to multiple forms of harm, sometimes with little or no legal protection.

Alarmingly, in some places, women’s legal rights have deteriorated significantly, with hard-won protections weakened or overturned through regressive legislative changes, judicial rulings, and withdrawal of funding.

The Beijing Platform

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (“Beijing Platform”) is a ground-breaking global framework for advancing women’s rights. Adopted in 1995 by 189 countries at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, it outlines commitments to deliver gender equality in all aspects of life. Crucially, countries pledged to “revoke any remaining laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.”

Equality Now’s report, Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable In The Beijing+30 Review Process (6th Edition), finds that three decades on, women and girls continue to face discrimination in the law, with not one country achieving full legal equality.

Laws and practices that constrain women’s and girls’ rights are obstructing progress on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality, putting the world off track to meet these critical targets.

Report co-author Antonia Kirkland explains, “Women and girls deserve full protection of their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights under the Beijing Platform and other international human rights commitments. This requires repealing all sex-discriminatory legislation, enshrining gender equality in constitutions, and introducing and enforcing laws that fully protect the rights of women and girls in all their diversity.”

Rollback on women’s legal rights

Some governments are allowing sex and gender-discriminatory religious and customary laws and practices, while religious, cultural, and nationalist justifications are increasingly being harnessed to undermine and revoke women’s rights.

For example, in Afghanistan, draconian restrictions have comprehensively banned women and girls from participating in public life, education, work, and leisure. The situation is also dire in Iran, where women have experienced sustained crackdowns, and those opposing sex-discriminatory laws have been subjected to arrest, detention, torture, and death.

Lawmakers in Bolivia and Uruguay are considering regressive bills to weaken protections for sexual violence survivors. While in The Gambia, a bill to repeal the law banning female genital mutilation threatened to undo years of progress. Thankfully, strong opposition successfully prevented its passing.

In Russia, ‘promoting’ LGBTQ+ relationships was banned in 2022 among all adults, and in late 2024, under the rubric of “anti-propaganda”, legislation was adopted to prohibit the promotion of a ‘child-free lifestyle.’ Kyrgyzstan and Georgia have adopted similar laws curtailing LGBTQ+ rights.

In Argentina, there have been severe budget cuts to policies to address gender-based violence, and the Ministry of Women has been abolished, significantly hindering the State’s capacity to safeguard women.

Over the last 30 years, more than 60 countries have liberalized their abortion laws. However, sexual and reproductive rights are facing sustained attacks. Examples include Poland, where one of the few grounds permitted for abortion access – fetal ‘defect’ or incurable disease – was removed in 2021.

In the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the U.S. Constitution does not provide the right to abortion. By January 2025, abortion was criminalized in 14 states, and there are efforts to ban travel to other states to access abortion services.

The Dominican Republic is one of five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to impose a complete abortion ban. Their senate is close to passing a bill continuing this prohibition and lowering penalties for marital sexual violence, labeling it ‘non-consensual sexual activity’ rather than rape.

Explicitly sex-discriminatory laws

Countries such as Sudan and Yemen grant male family members wide-ranging authority over female relatives and legally require wives to be obedient. In Saudi Arabia, women must obey their husbands in a ‘reasonable manner,’ and husbands have a ‘marital right to sexual intercourse.’ If a wife refuses to have sex or travel with her husband without a ‘legitimate excuse,’ this “disobedience” can result in her losing her right to spousal financial support.

Husbands can unilaterally divorce wives without condition, but wives must apply to the court for a fault-based divorce and prove fault within strict criteria. According to the World Bank, Saudi Arabia is just one of 45 countries with different divorce rules for women and men.

Marital rape is also allowed in the Bahamas and India, while in Kuwait and Libya, a rapist can escape punishment by marrying his victim.

Various countries have laws curtailing wives’ access to bank accounts, loans, and even the ability to benefit from their own labor in family businesses. For example, a husband in Cameroon controls the administration of all his wife’s personal property and can sell, dispose of, and mortgage their common property without a wife’s cooperation. Wives in Chile face similar discrimination.

The World Bank reports that 139 countries still lack adequate legislation prohibiting child marriage. One case is the U.S., which has no federal law against child marriage, and 37 states still allow it. California permits exceptions for marrying minors with no minimum age, while states like Mississippi mirror countries such as Bangladesh, Mali, Pakistan, and Tanzania in authorizing girls to be married younger than boys.

Poverty exacerbated by the climate crisis and forced migration is putting girls at greater risk of child marriage, with parents viewing it as a coping mechanism to alleviate financial strain and ‘shield daughters from sexual violence’ – despite child marriage facilitating non-consensual sex with a minor. For instance, Ethiopia suffered a severe drought in 2022, and in one year, saw child marriage rates double.

On a positive note, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone, and Zambia have all recently introduced laws banning child marriage under 18, without exception.

Globally, sex-discriminatory laws and policies are constraining women’s full economic and social participation, trapping millions in poverty and dependency, and increasing their vulnerability to mistreatment. In many countries, women are denied equal access to employment, fair wages, property ownership, household income, and inheritance.

This contributes to women’s overrepresentation in insecure, low-wage jobs, and their shouldering the bulk of paid and unpaid care work.

In countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, and Russia, women are prohibited from working in particular jobs. Progress since 2020 includes similar employment restrictions being removed in Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Oman.

Also needing reform are sexist nationality laws, like in Bahrain, Brunei, Malaysia, Monaco, Togo, the U.S. and others. When mothers and fathers are not granted equal rights to pass their nationality to their children, it creates severe legal and social challenges, including statelessness.

The risk of child and forced marriage is heightened, it creates child custody problems, and wives may remain in abusive marriages out of fear of losing their legal status.

Kirkland concludes, “Eliminating sex and gender-based discrimination in the law is a fundamental responsibility of governments. Equality Now calls on every country to urgently review and amend or repeal its sex-discriminatory laws, prevent removal of legal rights, and establish specific constitutional or legal guarantees of equality for all women and girls.”

Antonia Kirkland is Global Lead for Legal Equality and Access to Justice; Tara Carey is Global Head of Media.

Equality Now is an international human rights organization dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of all women and girls worldwide. Its work is organized around four main program areas: Achieving Legal Equality, Ending Sexual Violence, Ending Harmful Practices, and Ending Sexual Exploitation, with a cross-cutting focus on the unique challenges facing adolescent girls.

For more details go to www.equalitynow.org, Bluesky @equalitynow.bsky.social, Facebook @equalitynoworg, LinkedIn Equality Now.

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Credit: Equality Now, Tara Carey

By Antonia Kirkland and Bryna Subherwal
NEW YORK, Mar 7 2024 (IPS)

Women’s economic opportunities, rights, and well-being are being denied worldwide by sex-discriminatory laws and policies that curtail women’s access to employment, equal pay, property ownership, and inheritance.

Governments need to take urgent action to repeal or amend sex-discriminatory legislation that is hampering not only the socio-economic progress of women and their families but also of their countries.

The World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law 2024 report, released this week, finds that none of the 190 countries surveyed has achieved legal equality for women, not even in the wealthiest economies. Women have only 64% of the legal rights that men enjoy, and globally, they earn just 77 cents of each dollar a man earns.

Closing the gap could raise global gross domestic product (GDP) by over 20%, the report says. But at the current pace of reform, the UN estimates it will take until 2310 to remove discriminatory laws against women and close the gender gaps in legal protection.

Sex Discrimination in Economic Status Laws

The 68th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) provides an important opportunity to hold governments to account for their effectiveness in protecting and advancing women’s rights, including economic rights.

CSW is held annually in March at the UN in New York, and the theme for 2024 focuses on accelerating the achievement of gender equality and empowerment of women and girls through addressing poverty.

To shed further light on discriminatory laws that impinge on women’s economic choices and financial independence, a policy brief by Equality Now, Words & Deeds: Sex Discrimination in Economic Status Laws – 2024 Update, highlights examples of economic status laws that governments promptly need to reform or remove. These laws are found around the world – including in countries considered to be progressive. A few of the many examples are:

In Brazil, women are required by law to retire earlier than men.

• In Cameroon, a husband can legally administer and dispose of his wife’s property.

• In Chile, there is a legal presumption that a husband will have full control of all marital property, as well as any property owned by their wives.

In China, women are legally prohibited from engaging in certain trades, including any which the State specifies female workers “should avoid.”

• In Ireland, fathers can only access 2 weeks of paternity leave, considerably less than mothers. Although an improvement from the law prior to 2016, which stipulated that the mother had to die before a father could obtain benefits, all parents should be treated equally.

• In Madagascar, women are forbidden by law from undertaking any form of night work, except in family establishments.

• In Sri Lanka, a married woman is restricted from disposing of and dealing with property, such as land, without the written consent of her husband.

In Tunisia, laws exist that limit women’s inheritance rights and stipulate sons inherit twice as much as daughters.

Sex-discriminatory laws disadvantage women in many ways

By restricting women’s full economic and social participation, sex-discriminatory laws trap many in poverty and dependence, making them more vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment by relatives, partners, employers, and the wider society.

Discriminatory family laws can limit women’s ability to consent to marriage and divorce, retain custody of their children following divorce, and access their fair share of wealth in matrimony and inheritance. For example, 43 countries do not grant widows the same inheritance rights as widowers, and 41 prevent daughters from inheriting the same proportion of assets as sons.

Equitable ownership promotes wealth creation and provides economic stability, but 77 countries have at least one constraint on women’s property rights.

In some countries, the law stipulates women must “obey” their husbands and/or male guardians. This puts them at greater risk of domestic abuse, including marital rape, and makes it harder to access justice when their human rights are violated.

A lack of constitutional equality also harms women. In the United States, the US Constitution does not explicitly prohibit discrimination against women. Supporters are calling for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to be incorporated, as this would effectively categorize sex as a “protected class” alongside race, religion, and national origin, giving women greater economic rights.

Impacting women’s career and earning potential

Occupational freedom is associated with better job opportunities, earning potential, and professional advancement. Yet 59 countries have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, and 19 countries allow husbands to legally prevent their wives from working.

Stereotyped traditional gender roles can also leave women shouldering the burden of unpaid domestic labor. Childcare falls almost exclusively on mothers, with women performing 2.8x more unpaid care and domestic work than men. And only 55 countries have paid parental leave laws available to either parent.

Care responsibilities can prevent women from engaging in paid work, limit their career progression, and reduce their income. Additionally, it can make it harder for women to enter or re-enter the labor force, start or run a business, or access retirement funds.

All this contributes to women being overrepresented in insecure, low-paid, and unregulated jobs. It also fuels the gender pay gap, with women often earning less than men for equivalent work. Deplorably, 92 countries fail to guarantee equal pay for equal work. This inequity is compounded when women are denied equal access to pensions on the same basis as men.

Meanwhile, legal systems and social norms frequently undervalue non-financial contributions to family welfare. This is particularly common when marital assets are divided upon divorce oror death, as family laws in many countries only take account of monetary contributions by each spouse.

These obstacles are exacerbated when women’s reproductive rights are curtailed through measures such as abortion bans. Countries like France, which just this week enshrined guaranteed access to abortion in its Constitution, will be better able to leverage women’s economic participation by ensuring their right to bodily autonomy.

Investing in women’s rights benefits everyone

Economic and gender inequalities are intimately linked, and it’s not an exaggeration to say inequality kills. The relationship between gender inequality in the law and peace and economic prosperity is well documented.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused skyrocketing rates of unemployment and damaged the global economy. Although the shock reverberated across industries and communities, women bore the brunt. Preventing future global crises and recessions requires prioritizing changes now to achieve legal equality for women.

Investing in this isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart economically. Full legal equality would maximize economic participation by women, adding up to $28 trillion of wealth into the worldwide economy every year, McKinsey estimates.

Holding countries to account for advancing women’s rights

The CSW is a space for governments, civil society, UN bodies, and other stakeholders to discuss challenges and formulate strategies and policies that set best practice global standards on gender equality.

Part of this entails reviewing the implementation of commitments made by countries in various international agreements, such as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which was agreed by 189 UN member states in 1995. The Platform for Action clearly outlines what governments must do to guarantee equality and non-discrimination under the law and promote women’s economic rights.

As governments come together once again at CSW, it’s time to tell them: unlock women’s potential by investing in legal equality. Governments need to address the whole ecosystem of laws and policies to ensure women are not concentrated in the lowest-paid or unregulated jobs and aren’t effectively forced to leave the workforce to take up (unpaid) care responsibilities. And once progressive laws – such as equal pay for equal work – are adopted, governments must robustly implement them.

Ending legal discrimination will enable women to flourish and communities to thrive, boosting global productivity and stimulating economic prosperity across all nations, and for the benefit of all.

Antonia Kirkland is Global Lead, Legal Equality & Access to Justice at Equality Now; Bryna K. Subherwal is Global Head of Advocacy Communications at Equality Now.

Equality Now is a feminist organization using the law to protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls. Since 1992, it’s international network of lawyers, activists, and supporters have held governments responsible for achieving legal equality and ending sexual exploitation, sexual violence, and harmful practices.

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By Antonia Kirkland
NEW YORK, Mar 2 2021 (IPS)

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, the principle of equality for all – regardless of sex, race, language, or religion – was enshrined in the organization’s Charter.

More than seventy-five years have passed, and during the intervening decades, the UN has played a leading role in advancing gender equality around the world. But there is one significant way in which the UN, through the General Assembly of member states and the Security Council, has failed to live up to its stated ambition, and that is in the selection of its own leader.

To date, there have been nine UN Secretary-Generals. Not one of them has been a woman.

I work at Equality Now, a global women’s rights organization that has been at the forefront of campaigning for a woman Secretary-General since 1996. Twenty-five years ago, there were numerous suitably qualified women who could have fulfilled the role commendably, but none were selected.

And up until the most recent election, hardly any women were even nominated.

In recent years, sentiment that the appointment of a female leader is overdue has swelled and become mainstream. In the 2016 campaign to choose the current head, seven of the final thirteen candidates were women – unprecedented in the UN’s history.

Thanks to successful advocacy by the civil society coalition 1 for 7 Billion and others, a new, more transparent selection process was introduced, including live televised conversations with the candidates.

Alongside this was the “Campaign to Elect a Woman Secretary-General” (WomanSG campaign) as well as a Group of Friends initiative led by Colombia, which also championed the appointment of a woman.

Although it was abundantly clear how eminently qualified the women contenders were, and despite their impressive resumes and breadth of appeal and experience, once again it was a man who was chosen for the top job.

When António Guterres was selected as the incoming Secretary-General, feminists within and outside the UN developed a series of action points for him to advance gender equality within the organization.

This included the need to increase gender parity across UN institutions; provide adequate financing to achieve gender equality within the UN; and strengthen UN Women. The importance of working with women’s rights organizations and holding member states accountable to commitments to achieve gender equality was also highlighted. Encompassing all this was the call to lead by example.

Advances and shortcomings under Guterres’ leadership

During Guterres’ time in office, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) has been grading his performance in feminist leadership. Their fourth and latest report gives him a “B” and applauds the great strides made in reaching gender parity within the UN’s senior management under his tenure.

However, a neglected concern highlighted in the ICRW report as requiring urgent addressing is sexual harassment and abuse within the UN work environment.

The issues of lack of independence and the accountability gap – acknowledged by even the UN internal justice system itself – cannot remain side-lined if the Secretary-General’s “zero-tolerance policy” on sexual harassment is to be achieved. Member states should support this work as part of their commitment to ending violence against women.

Such commitments must extend to cyberspace. Online sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment have grown exponentially since the onset of the pandemic and there is no reason to think the UN virtual workplace is immune.

Rule of law must be applied in the digital sphere, with protective and preventive measures enacted and enforced to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including online sexual exploitation and abuse.

UN agencies, governments, big tech, and civil society should work together to develop and adopt international standards that will provide a guiding framework for international cooperation. Incorporated within this is the enactment of laws at a national level that address the gendered and multi-jurisdictional nature of gender-based cybercrime.

Positive law reform at the national level must be encouraged and invested in by and through the UN. Member States that fail to live up to their obligations should be held to account.

Governments must protect women’s and girls’ rights in all spaces and relationships, public or private, to tackle their unequal status. This includes amending or repealing gender discriminatory family laws that underpin economic disadvantage, exploitation and violence, preventing women and girls from participating wholly in society and reaching their full potential.

The Global Campaign for Equality in Family Law, launched by Equality Now and partners in March 2020, aims specifically at the reform of sex discriminatory family laws, one of the biggest obstacles to achieving gender equality.

The UN must actively encourage Member States to repeal or amend all discriminatory laws, implement progressive legal and policy frameworks, and adopt and enforce constitutional provisions that guarantee equality without exception.

A positive demonstration of this can be found in Sweden’s feminist foreign policy action plan for 2021.

Advancing women’s leadership

Over the past decade, impressive gains have been achieved in progressing women’s leadership. A growing number of women are being elected to political office, with various women heads of state receiving praise for their effective handling of the pandemic.

Recently, high profile glass ceilings were shattered with the election of Vice-President Kamala Harris in the USA, and the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as Director General of the World Trade Organisation.

It is time for the UN to follow suit by appointing a woman to its highest position. Focusing now on the selection of the next UN Secretary-General is timely considering the priority theme of the 2021 UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW65) is: “Women’s full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.”

In addition, the Generation Equality Forum will be launching an Action Coalition on Feminist Movements and Leadership.

Member states should do all they can to live up to commitments made over a quarter of a century ago in the Beijing Platform for Action – to nominate women for senior leadership posts who will promote gender equality, including within the UN itself.

Representation matters at the global level too. Now more than ever, the world would benefit from having a feminist woman as UN Secretary-General, governing at the helm of the most important international body we have.

In numerous countries, COVID-19 has weakened social protection systems and pushed many women and girls into extreme poverty, further widening the pre-existing gender poverty gap. Concerning reports of increases in child marriage, girls dropping out of school, and domestic violence are just a few examples of how women and girls are being adversely impacted by the pandemic.

The UN must continue to champion gender equality as integral to COVID-19 recovery plans and challenge regressive forces attacking women’s rights. This requires member states further strengthening international efforts to empower women economically and socially, directing financial support to boost women’s rights movements, and ensuring feminists from the grassroots through to the highest levels of governance are equal participants in policy-making and implementation.

It seems that the President of the General Assembly is starting the process of selecting the next General-Secretary in the right direction. It is now up to individual UN Member States to nominate strong women candidates, as they were encouraged to do the last time and which was enshrined in a 2015 resolution.

With continued transparency and input from civil society helping to curtail opportunities for old-boy network backroom deals, a woman Secretary-General is much more likely to be selected.

While Guterres has said he is available to continue for a second and final five year term, he must participate fully in the upcoming selection process as if his re-appointment was not a foregone conclusion (as has been the case in past re-elections).

Furthermore, as a self-proclaimed “proud feminist” he should do all he can to pave the way for women to be nominated and selected by member states when he does hand over the reins. To a feminist woman.

The author is Global Lead on Legal Equality and Access to Justice at Equality Now*.

For media enquiries and interview requests please contact Sr. Media Manager Tara Carey at tcarey@equalitynow.org; +44 (0)7971 556 340 (WhatsApp)

*Equality Now is an international human rights organization that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world by combining grassroots activism with international, regional and national legal advocacy. Its international network of lawyers, activists, and supporters achieve legal and systemic change by holding governments responsible for enacting and enforcing laws and policies that end legal inequality, sex trafficking and exploitation, sexual violence, and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage.

For details of its current campaigns, please visit www.equalitynow.org and on Facebook @equalitynoworg and Twitter @equalitynow.

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By Antonia Kirkland
NEW YORK, Sep 30 2020 (IPS)

In September 2017, Secretary-General António Guterres launched the “System-wide strategy on gender parity”, which set the goal of reaching gender parity within the United Nations by 2028 and outlined a strategy on how to achieve this, including the introduction of special measures, senior appointments, targets and accountability, amongst other things.

Three years have passed and it is heartening to hear that the UN has made significant progress towards this goal by achieving gender parity within its senior management. We look forward to the organization hopefully achieving this at all levels by 2028, or preferably sooner.

The principle of equal rights for women and men is one of the pillars upon which the UN was founded. It is rooted in the recognition that gender equality is a fundamental human right and that empowering all women is essential for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world.

The blueprint to achieving this was outlined by the UN in 2015 with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which enshrines the ambition in Sustainable Development Goal 5 to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.

As an agenda-setting organisation that plays an influential role on the world stage, the UN has a responsibility to lead by example in advocating for gender equality from the inside out. This entails ensuring that women from a variety of backgrounds are equally represented at all levels of the UN system, and is necessary for both its credibility and effectiveness in applying a gender lens to its policies and programs.

An inclusive, gender-balanced and culturally diverse workforce, operating within a system that support’s women’s equal access to decision-making, will enable the UN to carry out its mandate more successfully.

Although gender parity is an important component of achieving gender equality within the UN, what is also needed is a frank examination and enhancement of the organizational culture and ways of working. The UN has spoken of the need to “create a working environment that embraces equality, eradicates bias, and is inclusive of all staff.”

Whilst it is encouraging to see the progress being made at the UN, there are still areas where commitments must be translated into effective action, and this pertains particularly to the handling of sexual abuse and harassment within the work environment, even as the workplace itself is evolving in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2018, UN Women appointed an Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Sexual Harassment and Discrimination. This office was tasked with “supporting States, government administrations and the private sector to ensure actions are taken to respond to women’s experiences of sexual harassment.”

It contributed to the adoption of the UN System Model Policy on Sexual Harassment by the Chief Executives Board, as well as promoting much-needed awareness raising and open discussion of the issue at the highest levels of the UN itself.

Unfortunately, this office has just been closed permanently, undermining the Secretary-General’s “zero-tolerance” policy on sexual harassment and putting into question the UN’s commitment to priortizing this as in important issue in need of addressing.

Greater attention and improvement are required regarding the handling of sexual harassment and abuse cases involving UN staff, including those in senior management. A staff survey investigating sexual harassment within the organization was carried out in 2018.

Only 17.1 percent of staff responded but of those who did, a third reported they had experienced harassment, with junior and temporary staff being particularly targeted. 12 percent of the perpetrators were in senior leadership positions and incidents were cited in which offenders were not punished or condemned, despite numerous charges being levied against them.

This type of failure was clearly illustrated when the UN’s own internal Dispute Tribunal called the “accountability gap deplorable” in a recent case involving compensation for sexual harassment committed by a previous chair of the International Civil Service Commission against a UN staff member who worked under him.

Although the chair was a UN official elected by the UN General Assembly, he was deemed to be outside the jurisdiction of the UN Secretary-General and as such, no action was taken by the Tribunal. This demonstrates a systemic failure in dealing with cases of this kind.

Sexual harassment and abuse thrive where there is a culture that fosters a lack of accountability that enables perpetrators to act with impunity. Tackling it requires clear and effective leadership to ensure the implementation of adequate safeguarding measures.

Senior management must enact changes to embed transparency across the board, tackle the continuing problem of under-reporting, and provide better support to victims and whistle-blowers who disclose allegations. Only then, will the UN truly be on course to achieve gender equality within its own ranks and stand as a role model for others.

For media enquiries and interview requests please contact Tara Carey at tcarey@equalitynow.org; +44 (0)20 7304 6902; +44 (0)7971 556 340.

*Equality Now is an international human rights organisation that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world by combining grassroots activism with international, regional and national legal advocacy. It’s international network of lawyers, activists, and supporters achieve legal and systemic change by holding governments responsible for enacting and enforcing laws and policies that end legal inequality, sex trafficking, sexual violence, and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage.

For details of current campaigns, go to www.equalitynow.org, Facebook @equalitynoworg, and Twitter @equalitynow.

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By Antonia Kirkland
NEW YORK, Jan 25 2016 (IPS)

Everyone has the right to be born with a nationality – safe, fearless and free – and secure in their human right to equally transfer, acquire, change or retain it. There is no reason why over 50 countries should still have sexist nationality and citizenship laws, which largely discriminate against women, potentially putting them and their families in danger and denying them the rights, benefits and services that everyone should enjoy.

A new global report by Equality Now demands that these laws, which discriminate on the basis of sex, should be urgently revised in line with international legal obligations. Although commitments have been repeatedly made by governments around the world to work towards repealing such discriminatory laws, many have yet to translate their promises into action.

Despite the reluctance to do this by many countries, momentum is gathering at the global level to fix sexist nationality laws. This includes a target in the post-2015 sustainable agenda for eliminating discriminatory laws, adopted by the UN, and the setting up of the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, a coalition with a steering committee made up of UNHCR, the Women’s Refugee Commission, the Equal Rights Trust, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and Equality Now.

At the national level, a number of countries have either removed, or taken steps to address, discriminatory provisions within their nationality laws since 2013. Senegal, Austria, Jordan, Vanuatu, Suriname, Niger and Denmark have all made amendments – or at least taken steps towards legal reform in some way.

We hope that this will create a ripple effect for neighboring countries. Others such as the Bahamas and Togo have indicated that change may happen soon, and we hope they, and all countries with remaining discriminatory laws, will pick up the pace of reform in 2016.

Sexist nationality laws reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. Once married, a woman loses her independent identity if she loses her nationality of origin; a child “belongs” to a father rather than a mother if only the father can give the child citizenship. Other negative outcomes for women and their families include lack of access to education, social and medical services and even increased risk of child marriage.

Nour was born in Lebanon and married off at 15 to a relative in Egypt, to avoid the difficulties of being an adult in Lebanon without Lebanese nationality, while in Jordan, Maysar, a Jordanian woman, was refused by the officer in charge, who suggested that she should not have married a non-national.

Maysar would now prefer that her daughters marry Jordanians, to ensure that they do not endure what she did. Her husband works illegally in the construction sector, as he cannot afford the fees necessary for his work permit.

In a case study provided by our partner, Nina, a Malaysian woman, married Brian from the US. They had a daughter, Julia, but moved back to her home country. Due to Brian’s short-term immigration status, he found it impossible to find a job. After three years of frustration and considerable expense, Nina finally obtained Malaysian citizenship for her daughter. Had Nina been a man, the process would have been automatic.

Losing her nationality of origin can leave a woman especially vulnerable, if her marriage ends due to divorce, or the death of her husband – particularly if her children have their father’s nationality. Even if a woman is able to subsequently claim back her nationality, delays and other hurdles in regaining citizenship can cause her considerable trauma, anxiety and other hardship.

Having committed to do so on many occasions, all governments should immediately turn words into deeds and finally prioritize the amendment of all sexist nationality laws. This will help them comply with both their international legal obligations, as well as their own national obligations to ensure equal access to civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

National legislation should be revised so that women and men can equally extend citizenship to each other and to their children, whether their children are born in or out of marriage, at home or abroad. It should also be revised so women and men can acquire, keep or change their own nationality in the same way.

This will send a clear signal that everyone is valued equally, in a fairer society, where everyone can reach their full potential. Getting these laws working for women and girls will mean a safer and more prosperous society. Nationality laws can be unnecessarily complex, but removing discrimination between men and women is not a complicated concept – and working together, this is something that can be achieved in a very short time, if governments truly care about girls and women

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