More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Nations of the world have taken giant steps in recent decades to build international structures and strengthen institutions to deal with mass human rights abusers. At almost every stage, Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer, was there, advancing the rights of political detainees and the protection and status of women.
In the middle of the night on April 2, 2020, buried in a 400-page state budget, a provision to make commercial surrogacy legal in New York was adopted despite a campaign against the move by leading advocates of women’s reproductive health and rights.
Addressing a mostly virtual annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the U.N.’s key advocate and protector of women’s rights since 1947, Harris—the first woman to rise to the vice presidency—presented a broad view of rights and freedoms held by the Biden administration.
It was a tough and discouraging year, 2020, for women around the world as they prepare for the 12-day annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
Peg Snyder, the founding director of Unifem, now folded into UN Women, died on Jan. 26, 2021, after a brief illness while staying in Syracuse, N.Y., near her relatives and the city where she was born.
In 2016, the Feminist U.N. Campaign produced a six-point agenda for the incoming secretary-general that it uses as a base for annual report cards measuring Guterres’s performance since he took office on Jan. 1, 2017.
Overall, Guterres’s cumulative grade for 2017 was C+. In 2018 and 2019, he moved to B- . The report card for 2020 gives him a B.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union reports increasing attacks on lawmakers globally, with women suffering more disproportionately than men.
Sometimes all it takes is a woman’s eagerness to become a political activist to put her in mortal danger—especially if she fights for women’s rights.
Biden’s White House staff is falling into place, and Cabinet members are being announced: Antony Blinken will be Biden’s secretary of state; Linda Thomas-Greenfield will become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Michèle Flournoy will be secretary of defense; John Kerry will focus on climate change; Alejandro Mayorkas has been nominated secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Avril Haines has been nominated for director of national intelligence; and Jake Sullivan will be the national security adviser.
In the rubble of what’s left of American commitments to international organizations, one survivor is doing well. The United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, the perennial target of Republican politicians and presidents since the 1980s, is thriving.