Michelle Bachelet, the head of the United Nations agency promoting the rights of women and gender equality, has told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that she is stepping down after two years in the job. Bachelet, a former Chilean president, is likely to run for president of her country again in elections this fall. She made the announcement about [...]
Read more →
Thousands of women worldwide flock to the Commission on the Status of Women’s conference at the United Nations every March, and this year is no exception, for good reason: the theme is eliminating and preventing all violence against women and girls. Violence is a phenomenon that all females can relate to day after day, however [...]
Read more →
Hardeep Singh Puri, 60, the Indian ambassador to the United Nations, has announced his retirement, which will take effect at the end of February. Ashoke Mukherji, The Times of India reported, is likely to be Puri’s replacement at the UN. Puri has been ambassador to the UN since 2009. He led the country through its [...]
Read more →
A series of opinion polls in recent months in Chile show that Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women, is still the most popular Chilean politician three years after her four-year term as the country’s president ended. Reports from Chile say that across the political spectrum, party officials are assuming she will be returning [...]
Read more →
A dozen years have passed since the United Nations Security Council made history by adopting a resolution that addressed women’s rights during conflicts and required their participation in preventing wars and in peace talks. Until Resolution 1325 was approved, post-conflict reconstruction had been mostly the realm of those possessing the Y chromosome in the [...]
Read more →
The clamor for United Nations reform has not stopped since its first days in 1945. Although ideas for changing the UN rise and fall each year, the newest calls for an overhaul involve development, one of the largest sectors of the world body’s system. With a Kafkaesque bureaucracy consisting of at least 30 agencies and [...]
Read more →
As the first United Nations agency for women struggles for more sweeping support from governments, and advocates raise alarms that another international conference on women would be more dangerous than helpful to the cause, women in the United States also find themselves defending their rights as politics erode gains that have been made in the [...]
Read more →
CANBERRA — The United Nations is located at the cross-section of Interdependence Avenue and Multilateral Cooperation Street in Manhattan. But its destiny lies at the intersection of Indifference Avenue and Hostility Street in Washington. That was the case, at least, under the George W. Bush administration through the mode of John Bolton, the United States [...]
Read more →
Rural women are worse off than their urban counterparts and their male neighbors. They are generally poorer, less educated, discriminated against and left with limited health care choices and jobs, yet they are classic behind-the scene doers, often performing most of the unpaid work at home and on farms, while producing a majority of the [...]
Read more →
The world is letting down the newest and most promising agency created by the United Nations to raise the status of women, a key to more effective antipoverty programs and economic development. When UN Women was created by the General Assembly in July 2010, there were high hopes that it would have a billion-dollar [...]
Read more →