Publication summary Women 2000 An Investigation into the Status of Women s Rights in the former Soviet Union and Central and South-Eastern Europe. Although the existing laws in all of the countries surveyed appear to grant equal rights to women, in practice nearly all of the governments of those countries ignore their own laws.
Enforcement is minimal, and women continue to suffer disadvantages and degradation.
The governments of these countries need to live up to the commitments they have made in national legislation and international agreements. The IHF was able to conduct such an investigation because of its network of national Helsinki Committees , independent human rights groups located in Europe, North America, and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Thirty-nine such groups are members of or associated with the IHF, which has its head office in Vienna, Austria. The investigation, carried out over the last year, was directed by Romanian human rights lawyer Renate Weber, and is the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted across this broad region, funded largely by a grant from the Ford Foundation.