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.

Recognizing the tremendous global burden of fatalities resulting from road crashes, as well as the 20 million to 50 million people sustaining non-fatal traffic-related injuries each year, the General Assembly today proclaimed the period 2011-2020 as the Decade of Action for Road Safety, with the goal of stabilizing and eventually reducing the number deaths and injuries.

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.

Calling women’s empowerment and gender equality fundamental to the United Nations identity, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon pressed for renewed determination in creating a future of equal rights, opportunity and progress for all as he opened a day of activities at Headquarters to commemorate International Women’s Day, which will be observed worldwide on 8 March.

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.

The Security Council committee monitoring the implementation of sanctions on Iran was continuing to explore options for an effective response to a pattern of repeated violations, its Chairman told the Council this morning.

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.

Guinea-Bissau was experiencing a relatively stable political environment and growing international attention, which offered the country an unprecedented window of opportunity that should not be missed, the senior United Nations official in the country told the Security Council today.

Responding to the Secretary-General’s report on a proposed “accountability system”, speakers in the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today urged that more attention be given to what the United Nations leadership could do to foster a sense of personal responsibility among staff, in order to better address what some saw as weak links between resource allocation and desired results.

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.