Recognizing the United Nations as the leading international organization addressing issues confronting humanity in 21st century and acknowledging its role in promoting and protecting women’s rights;
Assuming that the UN Charter, the Treaties, Conventions, Resolutions and Declarations, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, provide formal grounds for all the necessary actions;
Having debated and analysed the measures possible within our communities and countries and concluding, that joint action and extraordinary measures are the only way to assure that the growing backlash against women’s rights stops;
Having established an international group of women forced recently by our own governments to protest for our basic rights in the streets, due to the rise of radical right-wing politics throughout the world and populist politicians undermining the very core of human rights system;
We, the women of the world forced to struggle for our basic rights, call for:
– immediate action against gender-based violence in all its aspects, including economical, and against any form of gender-based discrimination, including enforcing equal pay regulation implementation in all member states,
– acute reaction to UN member states avoiding taking real and practical measures to solve numerous problems relating to the fact that the law and judiciary systems in our countries fail to assure that sexual crimes and domestic violence are severely and inevitably prosecuted,
– ensuring that suppressing women’s rights, including our reproductive rights, on the basis of the religious systems is no longer tolerated and accepted.
To support our demands, we claim joint strike and protest action on March 8th, 2017, in Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Germany, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Poland, Russia, Salvador, Scotland, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, Urugway – and more to come. We are non-partisan, grassroots movement, supported by women’s rights’ organizations and women themselves, operating jointly as International Women’s Strike group. We are well aware of all the strategies being implemented, for years, in the women’s rights field, but with the recent global regression on women’s issues, we refuse to consider them sufficient and fast enough.
We say enough and we say it now.
IWS