Proclamation 4398

October 2, 1975

Recognizing the need to destroy the discriminatory barriers of legal inequality which confront women throughout the world, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 1975 as International Women's Year.

At home, the President, by Proclamation No. 4262, set aside the year 1975 as International Women's Year in the United States, and, by Executive Order No. 11832, created a National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year. In 1972, the Congress adopted a proposed constitutional amendment which would ensure the equality of men and women before the law. If a few more States ratify that proposed amendment, it will become a fitting constitutional heritage of our Bicentennial era.

Our efforts at home have been linked with those of other nations. This year, citizens of the United States participated in the world Conference on International Women's Year held in Mexico City on June 19 through July 2, 1975, to develop guidelines for a sustained, long-term effort to achieve the objective of International Women's Year.

Also this year, members of our Nation's legal profession will be joined by lawyers, professors, and jurists from more than one hundred nations during the week of October 12, 1975, at a World Law Conference, under the auspices of the World Peace Through Law Center, held in our Nation's capital. The agenda of the World Law Conference will deal with a host of international legal issues, ranging from the role of multinational companies to laws governing oil pollution at sea.

The theme of the World Law Conference is the achievement of legal equality between men and women. A portion of the agenda will be devoted to discussing the elimination of discrimination against women.

The President of the United States, along with the leaders of other nations, for more than a decade has encouraged the significant international efforts represented by these World Law Conferences. With its theme of legal equality between men and women, it is fitting, during this International Women's Year, to do so again.

Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate Sunday, October 12, 1975, as World Law Day in the United States.

I call upon all Americans, men and women, especially members of the legal, educational and religious communities, to give recognition to the importance of law in our Nation's international quest for peace, human dignity and equality before the law for women and men.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of October, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundredth.



GERALD R. FORD