Thirty Years of The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action 

Thirty Years of The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action

“Beijing in Egyptian” – Amplifying Women’s Stories and Presenting Our Vision, Recommendations, and Interventions

As the world marks key international and national days this March dedicated to women’s rights, the Beijing Platform for Action celebrates its 30th anniversary. Over the past three decades, national, regional, and international efforts have continued to monitor and evaluate progress, assess challenges, and review government commitments. In this context, our campaign, “Beijing in Egyptian,” sheds light on the lived realities of women today, both in Egypt and across the region. Structural violence persists at the national level, compounded by the systemic violence of occupation, making it clear that gender equality cannot be achieved in the face of austerity policies, mounting debt, occupation, and gender-based violence reinforced by colonial and patriarchal systems.

Three decades after the Beijing commitments, women across the region continue to suffer under neoliberal economic policies that have entrenched poverty and deepened class disparities. These policies have reinforced the violence and discrimination women face, particularly in the private sphere, where they are most affected by the care economy and informal labor.

At the same time, they have also contributed to women’s marginalization and withdrawal from public life. Data from Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics shows that as of February 2024, the annual inflation rate had surged to 31.9%, further worsening the conditions of women living in poverty, especially as a large number of eligible beneficiaries remain excluded from social protection programs like Takaful and Karama.

While 76% of Takaful and Karama recipients are women, these cash aid does not compensate for their exclusion from the formal labor market. Women continue to struggle to access stable jobs, with the majority relying on informal work that provides no insurance or legal safeguards. Meanwhile, discriminatory labor laws persist, such as the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Egypt’s unified labor law, along with the state’s failure to ratify international agreements that protect women from workplace violence and harassment.

These ongoing gaps make it clear that empowerment rhetoric remains little more than a promotional tool in the absence of real structural reform. At the same time, women in rural and marginalized areas face additional obstacles, particularly due to the absence of legislation protecting them from discrimination in land ownership and agricultural labor. Women’s land ownership in Egypt does not exceed 3%, a direct result of deep-rooted social norms and a legal framework that continues to uphold these exclusionary practices.

Women continue to face compounded injustices within Egypt’s criminal justice system, which entrenches violence, discrimination, and impunity for perpetrators rather than providing effective protection mechanisms that encourage survivors to report and seek justice. Despite the severity of gender-based violence, lawmakers have been slow to pass a uniform law against violence against women. Meanwhile, crimes such as female genital mutilation and child marriage continue to rise without effective intervention to protect girls from these practices.

Meanwhile, as international discourse pushes neoliberal narratives of “women’s empowerment,” Palestinian women are subjected to systematic genocide at the hands of the Israeli occupation. War crimes are carried out with international legitimacy and global silence. Women are targeted by bombings, killings, arrests, and forced displacement, with no real mechanisms for accountability. Palestinian women activists are detained and brutalized for their role in resisting the occupation.

At the same time, women human rights defenders in Egypt and across the Arab region face security crackdowns, with journalists, activists, and digital rights advocates being targeted. Laws such as the Cybercrime Law are used to punish women for expressing themselves, as seen in the cases of content creators who were charged with “violating Egyptian family values.”

Feminist justice cannot overlook the gender-blind international narratives of “gender equality” that exclude the most marginalized groups, nor can it ignore the economic policies that reinforce poverty and marginalization. Instead of recognizing the necessity of the care economy and unpaid labor, these frameworks propose solutions that fail to change women’s realities.

At the same time, no true liberation can be achieved while Israeli occupation persists and its violations against Palestinian women continue. This demands a decisive stance from feminist movements worldwide, linking the struggle against colonialism with the fight against patriarchy and its neoliberal narratives.

Within these interconnected contexts, we launched our campaign, “Beijing in Egyptian” to share stories that reflect the realities of women today and present our vision for recommendations and interventions that must be adopted and advanced. This campaign reaffirms our commitment to engaging with international mechanisms on our own terms, within the framework of our national and regional contexts, recognizing that our feminist struggles are integral to social justice and affirming women’s right to define their priorities, claim their rights, and exercise them—while standing in opposition to colonialism.