Legal Tools & Conventions
Legal Tools & Conventions
A starting point of advocacy is to understand what has already been agreed upon between states and what governments have publicly committed to do. The relevant legal tools that concern the advancement of education and human rights for women in the international arena are listed below.
Civil society can have influence by monitoring whether governments have met their legal obligations in their own countries, reporting what abuses there are, pressuring their politicians for more action and urging governments to be accountable.
The Beijing Platform for Action
The Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) is the outcome document of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), where governments and NGOs took the historic step of setting a global agenda for achieving gender equality and women’s human rights…
Education For All (EFA) is a global commitment, led by UNESCO, to provide quality basic education for all children, youth and adults by 2015. At the World Education Forum (Dakar, 2000), 164 governments pledged to achieve…
The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna, was one of the most significant events in the development of the human rights movement since the Second World War. The Vienna Declaration and Programme…
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is the most comprehensive international agreement on the human rights of women. It calls for States to eliminate all forms of discrimination on the basis of gender…
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a review of the human rights records of all 193 United Nation Member States once every four years. The goal is to improve the human rights situation in all countries and address human rights violations wherever they occur…
Convention on the Rights of the Child
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the first legally binding international instrument to include civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children…
Acronyms
Advocacy Acronyms:
- UN Partners
- NGO Partners