The 1995 Beijing Declaration and United Nations Security Council decision 1325 established the bases for collective dedication to make sure ladies’s rights, enhance ladies’s empowerment and their participation in public life, and get rid of violence towards ladies. However, progress is just not being made quick sufficient. According to UN Women, it might take nearly 300 years to realize true equality, if present developments proceed.
Today nonetheless, gender inequalities stay structural, systemic and profoundly rooted all over the world. They have catastrophic penalties on the lives, freedoms and dignity of tens of millions of ladies, males, ladies and boys. The growing variety of crises and the undermining of authorized and political achievements, in addition to of worldwide legislation, contribute to the persistence and even deepening of those inequalities.
But the rights of ladies and ladies are common, indivisible and inalienable. Their defence is a vital situation for simply, inclusive, peaceable and sustainable societies, the place elementary freedoms are assured for every one. The worldwide surroundings, experiencing an increase in anti-rights actions, requires larger worldwide mobilization.
This is why France was among the many first nations to formally undertake a feminist overseas coverage in 2019, making ladies’s rights and gender equality a precedence. Today, some 15 nations share this dedication, resembling Spain, Mexico, Liberia, and Mongolia.
Having a feminist overseas coverage entails selling gender equality as a precedence, in all fields of overseas coverage (peace and safety, growth, democratic governance, humanitarian motion, commerce, tradition, well being, schooling and extra). All types of diplomatic, bilateral and multilateral motion, in addition to consular actions, are involved.
Set out in France’s International Strategy for a Feminist Foreign Policy, launched on 7 March 2025, French feminist overseas coverage reiterates France’s historic priorities resembling selling equality in and thru schooling and preventing all types of inequality and violence. It strengthens the safety of sexual and reproductive well being and rights, a cornerstone of its motion, and builds new priorities, inserting gender equality on the core of its response to modern challenges (digital expertise, local weather, and so on.) and to crises and conflicts.
In this framework, the Fourth Ministerial Conference on feminist overseas coverage goals to strengthen and increase worldwide coalitions, that are important to protect ladies’s rights and spur new progress for gender equality. It is the one multilateral mobilization occasion on ladies’s rights outdoors of the United Nations, initiated by Germany in 2022, then hosted by the Netherlands in 2023 and Mexico in 2024.
The Conference will convey collectively dedicated States, which have adopted a feminist overseas coverage or are significantly energetic in selling gender equality, and representatives of worldwide organizations, growth banks, civil society and significantly feminist organizations, the analysis world, and philanthropic organizations.
The Conference will alternate between plenary periods and multi-stakeholder spherical tables, with the goal of manufacturing tangible commitments that foster constant, coordinated motion inside the worldwide ecosystem.
- The 4 ministerial sequences in plenary format will discover new priorities of feminist overseas coverage, in a altering world. They goal to pave the best way for brand new types of multi-stakeholder mobilization, to take motion towards the blockages and regressions at the moment occurring, and enshrine feminist overseas coverage as a geopolitical instrument;
- Round tables will present alternatives for small-format discussions on the problems the place States, worldwide organizations, civil society and philanthropic organizations work collectively, with the goal of advancing feminist overseas coverage in all these areas. High-level institutional representatives, civil society and specialists from all fields may have a possibility to contribute with a view to figuring out new technique of tangible motion in assist of gender equality.
