Human Rights

UN Women is committed to the advancement of women’s human rights and places their
realization at the centre of its work in all thematic areas.

Across the globe, women confront manifold violations of their human rights — when they
cannot participate in the decisions that affect their lives or claim fair political representation,
when they face discrimination in employment, when they are denied entitlement to land and
property, or when they suffer violence within their own home. Other obstacles to rights arise
when women and girls are prevented from going to school or attaining health care, or are
subject to harmful traditional practices.

At the same time, governments around the world have undertaken legal human rights
obligations to combat gender inequalities. The key international agreement on women’s
human rights is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW), which is also described as the international bill of women’s rights.
Ratified by 185 UN Member States, CEDAW encompasses a global consensus on the
changes that need to take place in order to realize women’s human rights. This year marks the
30th anniversary of the Convention’s adoption through the UN General Assembly in 1979.

Under CEDAW, States are required to eliminate the many different forms of gender-based
discrimination women confront, not only by making sure that there are no existing laws that
directly discriminate women, but also by ensuring that all necessary arrangements are put in
place that will allow women to actually experience equality in their lives.

UN Women’s Approach
One of the primary ways UN Women works to advance women’s human rights is by
providing support to national actors, in government and in civil society, for their efforts to
implement CEDAW. The focus of UN Women support in this area is threefold:

 facilitating the development of national human rights frameworks in line with

CEDAW, such as constitutions, laws and policies;
 supporting the implementation of existing human rights frameworks to help ensure
impact and rights realization; and
 putting special emphasis on particularly vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as
poor or indigenous women, so that national frameworks become more inclusive of
and responsive to the full range of women’s rights concerns.
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UN Women takes actio

Gender equality and women's empowerment are human rights that lie at the heart of
development and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Despite the progress that has been made, six out of ten of world's poorest people are still
women and girls, less than 16 percent of the world's parliamentarians are women, two thirds
of all children shut outside the school gates are girls and, both in times of armed conflict and
behind closed doors at home, women are still systematically subjected to violence.

Photo by Nicolas Rost

That is why UNDP integrates gender equality and women's
empowerment in its four main areas of work: poverty reduction,
democratic governance, crisis prevention and recovery, and
environment and sustainable development.

Visit the Facebook photo

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UNDP Gender Equality Strategy (FR|ESP)
Women's Day

Choose an area below to see you how the UNDP does work on Follow us
women's issues within its practice areas:

 Democratic Governance
 Poverty Reduction
 Crisis Prevention and Recovery
 Environment and Energy
 HIV/AIDS Stories From The Field
News Women's Unpaid Care
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