VATICAN CITY, 9 MAR 2010 (VIS) - Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations in New York, yesterday addressed the fifty-fourth session of the Economic and Social Council's Commission on the Status of Women, which was meeting to discuss "Item 3: Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women and to the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly entitled 'Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century'".
Addressing the commission in English, Archbishop Migliore said: "From the successive interventions in these days, ... it seems that the assessment is not entirely positive: It includes some light, but also many and disturbing shadows.
"The advancements achieved regarding the status of women in the world in the last fifteen years include, among others, improvements in the education of girls, the promotion of women as key to eradicating poverty and fostering development, growth of participation in social life, political reforms aimed at removing forms of discrimination against women and specific laws against domestic violence", he added.
"In particular, among the many parallel events, some have stressed the indispensable role played by civil society in all its components, in highlighting the dignity of women, their rights and responsibilities. This having been said, women continue to suffer in many parts of the world".
The permanent observer highlighted the importance of not overlooking "violence in the form of female feticide, infanticide, and abandonment", as well as "discrimination in health and nutrition". He noted, moreover, how "girls and women 15 years of age and over account for two-thirds of the world's illiterate population".
The archbishop went on: "It is a sad fact that three quarters of those infected by HIV/AIDS are girls and women between the ages of 15 and 24", and that, among the victims of human trafficking, "minors account for up to fifty percent and approximately seventy percent are women and girls".
The reasons for this situation are to be found "in cultural and social dynamics as well as delays and slowness of policy", he explained.
"Achieving equality between women and men in education, employment, legal protection and social and political rights is considered in the context of gender equality. Yet the evidence shows that the handling of this concept ... is proving increasingly ideologically driven, and actually delays the true advancement of women. Moreover, in recent official documents there are interpretations of gender that dissolve every specificity and complementarity between men and women. These theories will not change the nature of things but certainly are already blurring and hindering any serious and timely advancement on the recognition of the inherent dignity and rights of women".
Archbishop Migliore stressed the fact that the final documents of international conferences and committees often "link the achievement of personal, social, economic and political rights to a notion of sexual and reproductive health and rights which is violent to unborn human life and is detrimental to the integral needs of women and men within society".
"A solution respectful of the dignity of women does not allow us to bypass the right to motherhood, but commits us to promoting motherhood by investing in and improving local health systems and providing essential obstetrical services", he said.
"Fifteen years ago the Beijing Platform for Action proclaimed that women's human rights are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. This is key not only to understanding the inherent dignity of women and girls but also to making this a concrete reality around the world", he concluded.
DELSS/CONFERENCE WOMEN/UN:MIGLIORE VIS 20100309 (600)
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