Women’s Rights Then and Now: “Know our collective history and move forward” - Rabéa Naciri

When Moroccan human rights expert Rabéa Naciri attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, she knew it was a turning point for women’s rights. “I was inspired by the international momentum that had been set in motion since the Nairobi conference,” she said. 

A series of global conferences, meetings and feminist activism grew the momentum leading up to the Beijing conference and the international agreement endorsed there by 189 governments and thousands of civil society representatives – the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Naciri recalls how feminist activists from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia came together as a collective to advocate for family law reforms in the country and globally. For them, the conference in Beijing was a milestone in their pursuit of equality, rights, and justice. 

“It brought valuable lessons, broadened alliances and strengthened solidarities,” she shares.

“The adoption [of the Platform for Action] represented a turning point, as it was accompanied by an actionable framework and direct accountability for States, requiring them to develop and implement national action plans.” 

National Action Plans hold the promise of change through resource allocation, programmes and policies. For Morocco, the advocacy and commitments made at the 1995 conference in Beijing culminated into the historic reform of its family law. 

In 2004, the new Family Code of Morocco was officially announced by the government and put into effect. It included a number of progressive measures for gender equality, such as raising the age of marriage to 18 years for both men and women, criminalizing domestic violence, equal custody rights for men and women, and ending the guardianship of women by male members of the family.

Naciri recalls that the one of the biggest challenges faced by feminists at the time of the Beijing conference was, “the instrumentalization of religion to reject equality in family legislation and the resurgence of conservatism in the name of religion.” 

There has been a lot of progress on gender equality and women’s rights in Morocco and the world since 1995. Naciri points to the fact that gender equality is now at the heart of social and political debates in Morocco. “Public policies are increasingly analyzed through a gender lens,” she says, adding, “however, populism, sexist stereotypes, and the rise of conservatism lie at the core of current regressions.”

The Beijing Platform for Action remains deeply relevant to feminists and human rights activists like Naciri. “But it is the commitment to its implementation that needs to be renewed,” she shares.

When asked about lessons from the Beijing conference in 1995 that are relevant to feminist movements today, Naciri says: “The key lesson is the importance of intergenerational dialogue and exchanges of learning, understanding, and feminist solidarity, which enables us to collectively challenge patriarchy.”

“Know our collective history and move forward,” she urges young feminists today.