Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, legal inequality persists across the world. Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+30 Review Process, the sixth edition in our Words & Deeds series that began in 1999, exposes that governments have failed to repeal or amend sex-discriminatory laws and highlights the urgent reforms needed to achieve full legal equality for women and girls.
Please note that during the designing of this report, Saudi Arabia published the Implementing Regulations of the Personal Status Law, which update and accompany the 2022 Personal Status Law (PSL) codification mentioned in the report below. The new regulations address provisions on marriage, divorce, custody, and male guardianship— areas identified as sex discriminatory – with some reported limited improvements. We will continue to monitor these developments and their impact on women and girls in Saudi Arabia.
Update: We welcome the Kyrgyzstan government’s adoption of the new Labor Code, which removes and amends sex-discriminatory restrictions that previously barred women from over 400 jobs. As highlighted in our report below, the previous labor code prohibited women from working in roles deemed “harmful or dangerous.” Equality Now has long advocated for eliminating all forms of sex-based discrimination in Kyrgyzstan’s labor laws and formally objected to these restrictions in 2023 before the Constitutional Court of the Kyrgyz Republic.
Update: In February 2025, an amendment to Iraq’s Personal Status Law came into effect. As outlined in the report below, the amended Personal Status Law allows Muslim people in Iraq to choose between the Personal Status Law of 1959 (civil law) or a religious family law, which both govern matters related to marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance among others. This multiplicity of applicable family laws undermines the principle of equality and risks eroding women’s rights in Iraq.
However, we welcome the fact that the amendment requires that Article 8 of the Personal Status Law, which sets the minimum age of marriage at 18, with judicial exceptions allowing marriage from the age of 15, and the conditions under which polygamy are allowed under Article 3, not be contravened and weakened. This prevention of further backsliding on women’s and girls’ rights was achieved through advocacy efforts by women’s rights groups in Iraq and internationally. However, the law still does not align with international human rights standards, which set the minimum age at 18 without exceptions and discourage polygamy.
We will continue to monitor the implementation of this law and advocate for the Iraqi government to prohibit all forms of child marriage and uphold the rights of all women and girls across the country.
