Legal equality for women may take 300 years: UN Chief
UNITED NATIONS: Legal equality for women could take centuries as the fight for gender equality is becoming an uphill struggle against widespread discrimination and gross human human rights abuses, the United Nations chief said on International Women’s Day.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a packed UN commemoration on Friday that “a global backlash against women’s rights is threatening, and in some cases reversing, progress in developing and developed countries alike”.
The most egregious example is in Afghanistan, he said, where the ruling Taliban have barred girls from education beyond sixth grade, from employment outside the home, and from most public spaces, including parks and hair salons.
At the current rate of change, legal equality for women could take 300 years to achieve and so could ending child marriage, he said.
Guterres pointed to “a persistent epidemic of gender-based violence”, a gender pay gap of at least 20 per cent, and the under-representation of women in politics. He cited September’s annual gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly, where just 12 per cent of the speakers were women.
“And the global crises we face are hitting women and girls hardest — from poverty and hunger to climate disasters, war and terror,” the secretary-general said.
In the past year, Guterres said, there have been testimonies of rape and trafficking in Sudan, and in Gaza women women and children account for a majority of the more than 30,000 Palestinians reported killed in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
He cited a report Monday by the UN envoy focusing on sexual violence in conflict that concluded there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape, “sexualised torture” and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women during its surprise attack in southern Israel.
Guterres said a global backlash against women’s rights is threatening, and in some cases reversing