B.C. activist Sharon McIvor said in a release Friday that Canada continues to discriminate against Aboriginal women and their descendants when determining eligibility for registration as a status Indian.

McIvor fought a 25-year battle against the federal government to have her children registered as status Indians.

Earlier this year, the Department of Indian Affairs moved to amend the act after a British Columbia court last year ruled it was unconstitutional to treat women and men differently when it comes to registering as status Indians.

"Versions of the Indian act, going back to the 19th century, have given preference to male Indians as transmitters of status, and to descendants of male Indians. Despite amendments made to the Indian Act when the Charter (of Rights and Freedoms) came into effect in 1985, Aboriginal women are still not treated equally as transmitters of status, and many thousands of descendants of Aboriginal women are denied status as a result," McIvor said in a release Friday.

"I contested this discrimination under the charter. It took 20 years in Canadian courts, and I achieved only partial success. Now I will seek full justice for Aboriginal women under international human rights law. Canada needs to be held to account for its intransigence in refusing to completely eliminate sex discrimination from the Indian Act and for decades of delay."

Proposed changes to the Indian Act announced in March said grandchildren of First Nations women who married non-First Nations men will be recognized as status Indians under the act. Before that, the act ruled only grandchildren of First Nations men who marry non-First Nations women would retain status.

McIvor says changes will provide only a partial and inadequate solution to the sex discrimination.

"Bill C-3 will make some female line descendants newly eligible for status, but they will still have a lesser ability to transmit status than their male line counterparts. In addition, Bill C-3 will still exclude many descendants of Indian women who were unmarried. As long as these Aboriginal women and their descendants continue to be ineligible for registration as Indians, sex discrimination will remain an entrenched characteristic of the Indian Act," McIvor said.

She said that because of this she will take her case to the United Nations.

"Many people in Canada, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, recognize that this long-standing discrimination against Aboriginal women and their descendants is wrong and should end," said McIvor.

In a letter to Parliament in May, McIvor said: "My own struggle has taken 20 years. Before me, Mary Two-Axe Early, Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, Yvonne Bedard, and Sandra Lovelace all fought to end sex discrimination against Aboriginal women in the status registration provisions in the Indian Act. It has been about 50 years now. Surely this is long enough."

McIvor began her action to challenge sex discrimination in the registration provisions of the act because she said as a woman, she was not treated the same as a man as a transmitter of status, and, as a result, her children and grandchildren were ineligible for registered status.