Making Equal Rights Real: Taking Effective Action to Overcome Global Challenges

While laws exist in many nations to guarantee equal rights across gender, race, and ethnicity, they are often not implemented. Around the world, discrimination, biases, and avoidable barriers affect children's chances to access education and health care, and adults' chances to attain jobs, earn equal pay, and hold leadership roles in countries. Moreover, in some countries, it is legal to markedly discriminate based on characteristics ranging from religion to sexual orientation to disability. Making Equal Rights Real brings together leaders from around the world who have been working effectively to increase equal economic and social rights, ranging from rights in the workplace to property ownership and education. The contributors tell the detailed stories of effective approaches to implementing equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities in North America, women in Africa, children in the Middle East, and sexual minorities in Asia. They also describe approaches taken around the world to increase equal rights for people living in poverty, for those living with disabilities, and for all people seeking the information they need to hold their government accountable for implementing everyone's rights. The book addresses what can be done by policymakers, civil society, non-governmental organizations, lawyers seeking to implement equal rights legislation, and advocates working in the community, as well as those developing constitutions and negotiating international agreements.

Jody Heymann is the Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University. An internationally renowned researcher on public policy and equity, Heymann has authored more than 180 publications, including eleven books. She has served as an advisor to policymakers around the world. Her work has been featured widely, in Business Week Inc. Magazine, Portfolio.com, Forbes, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Financial Times, MSNBC, Good Morning America and Fox News, among other leading national and international media.

Adèle Cassola conducts comparative research at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University, where she leads an initiative analyzing the protections established in the constitutions of all UN member states across a number of life contexts in which discrimination can occur, including education, work, health, family and political and civic participation.