As the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), the Women in Migration Network (WIMN) is launching a new report, “Women in Migration Still Seek Inclusion in the Equity & Equality Agenda.” The report examines the state of women in migration and underscores the urgent need to position migration at the center of the global gender equality agenda. While the BPfA has advanced women’s rights, it has historically overlooked the complexities of migration and its profound impact on women and gender-diverse individuals.
The report will be launched in a hybrid event in New York on Thursday, March 13, during the CSW:
Voices from the Ground: Taking Stock of Migrant Women’s Rights in 30 Years of the BPfA. 10:30am – 12:00pm, All Souls Congregation, 1157 Lexington Ave. at E 80th St.
Click here to register to attend via Zoom.
Amid rising conflicts, political violence, climate crises, and growing authoritarianism, the report highlights the increasing vulnerabilities migrant women face. It calls for a bold, rights-based approach that moves beyond outdated protectionist frameworks and instead promotes agency, justice, and systemic transformation.
Read the text summary of the report below.
WIMN’s full report for Beijing+30 is available in four languages.
Click below for a PDF in English, Arabic, French and Spanish.
30 years since Beijing:
Women in migration still seek inclusion in the Gender Equity and Equality Agenda
A summary of the WIMN’s B+30 Brief
(Available in Arabic, English, French and Spanish)
Background
The Beijing Platform for Action [BPfA], adopted in 1995, is a landmark blueprint for gender equality and human rights. However, while migration is a central element in the achievement of rights for women and gender-diverse people, the Platform inconsistently tackles the subject and fails to adequately address its driving factors.
At this 30th anniversary of the BPfA, human rights, the rights of women and gender-diverse people, racial justice–along with the power of the multilateral system and international law–are under attack. The “inalienability” of rights does not serve as a compass for political action and policy making. Expanding wars, military coups, political violence, and shrinkage of civic space dispossess people internally and internationally, escalating forced migration and displacement. At the same time, the surge of climate-related disasters, large scale deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and heat waves reaching record-breaking temperatures are too often met with skepticism–despite their severe impact on the most impoverished countries and peoples. The world is burdened by avarice within its economy, discrimination within policies, disenfranchisement of its societies, detention and deportation of its migrants, destabilization of its democracies, and criminalization of its poor.
Authoritarian governments have come to power by weaponizing xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric, fed by citizens’ response to decades of austerity and deep economic insecurity. These governments restrict and further criminalize migration, increasing the deterioration of rights for women and gender-diverse people in migration and for all migrants. The Beijing+30 review offers an opportunity to create spaces of hope and to strengthen social movements and civil society’s work against the backlash. Civil society must urge governments and the UN System to take bold action towards gender equity, with migration as a central cross-cutting theme.
BPfA and Migration
Beijing Platform for Action (1995)
Women migrant workers were briefly mentioned in the Platform when discussing how migration creates additional vulnerabilities for women and girls. The BPfA sought to protect women from violence, eliminate discriminatory practices, and support their access to education and employment, even as the focus on protection, in some cases, sidelined the centrality of rights and women’s agency. Nonetheless, such framing recognized migration’s connection to poverty, health, and violence against women.
Beijing+5 Outcome Document (2000)
B+5 addressed the effects of neo-liberal globalization on impoverished countries that were implementing structural adjustment programs and trade liberalization, an imposed response to the debt crisis. In addressing migration, B+5 added language upholding human rights for women including freedom of movement; protection from exploitation and violence; and access to justice in local contexts and throughout the migration cycle–emphasizing the importance of international cooperation. It also made a specific reference to undocumented migrant women. The B+5 Outcome Document was an early marker towards intersectional feminist approaches, as it recognized the diversity of women and the systemic nature of the oppression they face.
The next review included attention to trafficking and forced labor, with special emphasis on informality in employment and within migration channels. While a welcome contribution, the framing again focused on the protection of women rather than on their human rights, harkening back to weak language in the BPfA.
The 2020 review explicitly introduced the language of intersectionality. It also made links between climate change, environmental degradation, displacement, and women’s rights. The Generation Equality Forum (GE), convened by UN Women in 2021, stating that “too little has changed” since the BPfA, re-energized the Beijing process, calling on governments, businesses, and civil societies to become commitment-makers and proposing six areas of focus.
The Challenge for the Beijing +30 (2025) Review
While the Beijing+30 regional reviews speak to notable actions, the reality is that women around the world are facing a profound backlash against their rights–even as people also face climate crises, war, and the undermining of democracy, human rights, and international law. This must be named and challenged in the Beijing+30 review. To counteract the backlash and rise of populism, migration must be front and center in our demands, recognizing it as an urgent imperative and a cross-cutting reality of all 12 critical areas concern and abandoning the “victim” and protectionist approach of the past.
We call on Governments to:
- Adopt a human-rights-based approach to migration across all stages–origin, transit, destination, and return–through national policy and regional and international cooperation. Establish rights-based and gender-sensitive regular pathways for migration which ensure and protect family unity, facilitate regularization of status, and offer pathways to permanent status.
- End the criminalization and stigmatization of migrants, combat xenophobia and GBV, and eliminate detention within the migration system.
- Urgently establish mechanisms for families of missing migrants to seek justice and conduct thorough investigations into missing persons cases.
- Ensure decent work and labor rights for all migrants, recognize the value of care work, end exploitative temporary labor contracts, and guarantee freedom of association for migrant workers.
- Facilitate migrant women’s participation in decision-making processes and political life.
- Guarantee access to essential services, social protections, and justice for all migrants, while ensuring that the use of these services does not pose the threat of deportation.
- Implement policies that support migrant parents, their children, and their specific needs.
- Enforce international standards in the context of war, conflict and occupation. Halt the deployment of migrant workers to conflict zones. Protect domestic workers in conflict zones, including protection against violence and trafficking and ensure access to humanitarian assistance.
- Recognize the impact of climate change on migration and implement human-rights and labor rights-based responses to climate-induced displacement. Address the root causes of climate change, hold polluters accountable and protect the rights of displaced communities while centering their voices in policymaking.
We urge the UN Commission on the Status of Women to:
- Center migration as a critical emerging priority for the achievement of gender equity and equality, weaving it into all of the 12 Critical Areas of Concern. Make migration a theme in the next five-year agenda.
- Ensure accessibility of the Commission on the Status of Women to civil society organizations, especially grassroots and smaller organizations, and facilitate their access to the deliberations, to UNHQ and to participation within governments and side events. This involves both greater access and funding.
Conclusion:
Bold action by all stakeholders is urgently needed to counter the tide of authoritarianism and build a more just and equitable world for all. Our action must recognize the gravity of the current situation and challenge policies that will undermine our commitment to gender equity. We call on all stakeholders to ensure that migration and women in migration are at the center of our collective efforts and are addressed within each of the Beijing Platform’s twelve critical areas of concern.
Migrant rights are women’s rights and human rights!