The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), rendering it “strange bedfellows” with Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Tonga, and Palau.
“From the tuk tuk drivers in Cambodia… to the school children in South Africa, women and men and girls and boys are taking a stand to prevent violence against women,” says Executive Director of UN Women and Under Secretary General Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
Recent developments around the world give support to the idea of the #MeToo movement’s transformative potential. A postmodernist claim was that the feminist movement was essentialist and that no one expression of feminism can be applicable to women of different ethnicity, cultural, or class identity. The #Me Too movement has found expression in different cultural traditions and helped to challenge this theory.
Something historic was initiated at the European Development Days (EDD) in early June: the EDD placed women and girls at the forefront of Sustainable Development. Since its inception in 2006, EDD has become a barometer for ideas in global development.
At the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Robert Jackson, the Chief Prosecutor, charged the world that submitting the enemy to the judgment of the law is “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
March 8th, 2018, International Women’s Day, saw an extraordinary global mobilization for gender equality. In the last year, global movements for gender equality-- from marches to powerful grassroots organizing and viral social media campaigns, such as #MeToo and #TimesUp in the United States and other countries-- have galvanized the world’s attention like never before.
I first met Asma Jahangir, the champion of human rights in Pakistan, who died Sunday, as a teenager in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. In a friendship that spanned political upheavals and turbulent transitions in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka, to the War on Terror in the US, Asma remained my mentor and muse.
As the 62nd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations in New York draws near, women from every corner of the world will convene to deliberate on the theme of CSW 2018: Challenges and Opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls. This year, the theme of empowerment has added significance. The #MeToo movement has shocked our collective conscience and made it impossible to ignore that empowerment goes far beyond economic agency.
At this historic moment – this new report (“
Business and SDG 16”) is a tryst with destiny, one that fulfills a promise that was made both by the United Nations and the private sector at the launch of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015.