Economic and Social Council

Gender inequality and discrimination were key drivers of women’s and girl’s increased vulnerability to HIV infection, and while various global commitments had been made, national interventions had not been implemented on a scale that made a true difference in prevention, the Commission on the Status of Women heard today as it addressed health and related issues on its last day of high-level debate.

Women grass-roots activists should be given more clout in forming policies at both the local and international levels, speakers said today at a Headquarters press conference on the role of women food producers and their coping strategies in times of severe food insecurity.

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.

Following is the text of Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro’s remarks, in the Commission on the Status Women, to the expert panel in preparation for the Economic and Social Council ministerial review on implementing internationally agreed goals and commitments on gender equality and empowerment of women, today in New York:

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.