2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), the world’s most widely endorsed and visionary agenda for achieving gender equality, empowering all women and girls, and ensuring the full enjoyment of their human rights.

Every five years, the review and appraisal of the implementation of the BPfA provides an important rallying point for women’s movements and gender equality advocates worldwide. The 2025 Global Review, undertaken by the Commission on the Status of Women, and informed by the national reports, regional synthesis reports, and extensive civil society engagement, encouragingly points to global advances in the past five years made in certain areas of concern outlined in the BPfA – with 88 per cent of States having passed laws and established services to eliminate violence against women and girls; most having banned discrimination in employment; 44 per cent are improving the quality of education, training and lifelong learning for women and girls; and more countries than ever are considering the impact of environmental degradation on women and girls and reflecting gender equality in plans for climate action.

Nevertheless, the review highlights that progress has been uneven and generally too slow. Many of the critical areas of concern identified in 1995 remain unaddressed or have worsened. States are increasingly unable to weather political crises and instability, resource and financing constraints, and the rise of anti-rights movements. For instance, since 2022, cases of conflict-related sexual violence have risen by 50 per cent; furthermore, in 2021-2022, only 4 per cent of official development assistance went to programmes with gender equality as the principal objective.

2025 also marks the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG5 on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. It also signals the start of the final five-year push for the achievement of the SDGs by the end of the decade.

The latest ‘Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: the Gender Snapshot 2025’, report by UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, stresses the importance of making full use of those five years to accelerate progress. The report concludes that the world is still falling short of its commitments to women and girls and so far, the pace of progress has been too slow. It points to the centrality of robust gender data systems in shaping policies, legal reforms, and fueling transformative advocacy, and calls for ‘bold, ambitious investments, strengthened partnerships, and collective action’ to drive change that will benefit women, girls, and society in general.

As gender equality and women’s and girl’s rights face significant pressures, the need to realize the commitments set out in the BPfA and achieving the SDGs —especially SDG5— is ever more pressing.

This report demonstrates that, to accelerate progress in gender equality and the full enjoyment of women’s and girls’ rights, the UN human rights system represents one of the key ‘engines’ promoting the implementation of the BPfA. It shows how UN Women’s efforts to support States in implementing UN human rights recommendations have produced tangible results, accelerating progress towards achieving BPfA-aligned objectives.

This report begins with an analysis of how recommendations on gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights have been addressed by the three UN human rights mechanisms – the Universal Periodic Review, Special Procedures, and Treaty Bodies – between 2007 and 2024. It then offers a more granular analysis through five country case studies, presenting clear evidence that by leveraging these States’ engagement with UN human rights mechanisms, UN Women has had, and continues to have, a real and measurable impact on the enjoyment of women’s and girls’ rights and on the promotion of gender equality: whether it is the promotion of gender-responsive governance in Albania, efforts to reduce and eliminate gender-based violence in Brazil, advancing the women, peace, and security agenda in Colombia, boosting women’s participation and representation in Nepali public life, or advancing women’s economic empowerment in Nigeria.