Economic and Social Council: Meetings Coverage

Addressing the Commission on the Status of Women’s fifty-fourth session this afternoon, Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said the General Assembly’s proposal to create a United Nations body for gender issues was an historic opportunity to give women a stronger voice in global governance and policymaking.

While implementing the Beijing Platform for Action had been hamstrung by severe resource constraints and a lack of will to combat entrenched stereotypes, more and more women were participating in high-level political decision-making in their countries, with some of the biggest gains made in Africa and Latin America, speakers in the Commission on the Status of Women said today in continued debate.

As the international community grappled with the global financial crisis, officials in countries from Chile to Ireland were stepping up efforts to economically empower and improve the workplace status of their female citizens, delegates and a senior United Nations official said today as the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women continued.

Implementing the Beijing Platform for Action was essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, but the well-known conceptual shift in approaching poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon had not been matched by a similarly comprehensiveapproach to women’s empowerment, the Commission on the Status of Women heard today, as it held two high-level panels that zeroed in on filling both strategy and implementation gaps.

The international community must tackle head on the root socio-economic causes of violence against women, end impunity against perpetrators and recognize such abuse as a violation of women’s human rights, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, said today during an address to the Commission on the Status of Women’s fifty-fourth session.

Reaffirming the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, delegates attending the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women today pledged to undertake further action to ensure the full and accelerated implementation of those important instruments.

Fifteen years after world leaders adopted the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on gender equality and women’s empowerment, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro urged Government ministers to replicate successful policies and programmes to end violence against women and improve women’s education, maternal health and role in decision-making, as the Commission on the Status of Women opened its fifty-fourth session today.

The Commission for Social Development concluded its forty-eighth session today by approving a draft resolution on the social dimensions of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

As it continued its forty-eighth session, the Commission on Social Development this afternoon approved its first ever resolution on promoting social integration in order to eradicate poverty, promote full and productive employment and achieve stable, safe, peaceful harmonious and just societies for all ‑‑ goals set forth in the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and its Programme of Action.

As the Economic and Social Council continued to fine tune the agenda of its 2010 session, the 54-member body’s President today announced the chairpersons for the thematic clusters examined annually by the Council, and urged delegations to conclude negotiations and present their proposals as soon as possible so that all outstanding matters could be addressed ahead of the substantive session -- set to be held from 28 June to 23 July in New York.