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Hillary Clinton at UN: ’Women’s progress is human progress’

14 March 2010 00:44 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered those words at the UN Friday as she marked the 15th anniversary of her speech at the World Conference on Women in Beijing, APA reports quoting csmonitor.com web-page.
In a speech Friday at the UN in New York, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified equality for the worldâ€™s women and girls as the central challenge that will determine the peace and progress of the 21st century.
She underscored the links between economic development, ending poverty, improving health, safeguarding the environment, and the continued enhancement of the status of women. â€œWomenâ€™s progress is human progress, and human progress is womenâ€™s progress,â€ she said.
Those words were clearly meant to echo Secretary Clintonâ€™s own words 15 years ago when, as the US first lady, she told the World Conference on Women in Beijing: â€œWomenâ€™s rights are human rights, and human rights are womenâ€™s rights.â€
Clintonâ€™s speech not only marked the anniversary of her 1995 Beijing speech, but also wrapped up events for International Womenâ€™s Day, which took place March 8. Those events included meetings of the United Nationsâ€™ Commission on the Status of Women.
The past 15 years, Clinton said in her speech, have included some remarkable advances for women globally â€“ including heightened attention to womenâ€™s health and economic issues, particularly in developing countries. Womenâ€™s participation in their countryâ€™s political life and their election to national parliaments have also increased, she said.
Clinton noted that Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf â€“ the first woman elected to lead an African country â€“ has been instrumental in promoting not only her countryâ€™s postconflict reconciliation, but also education and advancement for Liberian girls and women.
But women also encounter harrowing new challenges in some regions, including a spike in politically motivated sexual violence, Clinton said. Meanwhile, other crimes against women â€“ including what she called â€œgendercideâ€ and forced childhood marriages â€“ remain dark blots on the world.
She cited the case of a 10-year-old girl in Yemen who recently went to court to demand â€“ and eventually receive â€“ a divorce from a forced marriage. But she also cited a recent Economist cover story that explains how years of gendercide, primarily across a swath of Asia from China to India, means that the world has 100 million fewer girls than it should.
State Department officials offered a preview of Clintonâ€™s theme earlier in the week as they recognized a group of â€œinternational women of courage,â€ named as part of International Womenâ€™s Day celebrations. Those women include Ann Njogu, a Kenyan who has faced threats and violence to fight against corruption and for constitutional reforms in her country; and Jestina Mukoko, who took her case of abuse all the way to the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe â€“ and won.
â€œIn many ways, we are seeing a pandemic of violence against women,â€ said Melanne Verveer, the US ambassador at large for global womenâ€™s issues, at a briefing Thursday. Citing cases of mass rape used as a tool of war and the continued infanticide targeting baby girls, she added, â€œThis is illustrative of the lack of worth, the low status of women, the view of women still, in too many places, that clearly needs to be addressed.â€
In her 1995 speech, Clinton declared, â€œIt is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss womenâ€™s rights as separate from human rights.â€ She went on to offer a litany of abuses of women that she said were a â€œviolation of human rights,â€ including bride burning, slavery, and killing of babies â€œsimply because they are born girls.â€
Now, Clinton said that both she and President Obama are working from the perspective that the â€œsubjugationâ€ of women anywhere is a â€œthreat to the national security of the United States, and ... a threat to the world.â€