CNN
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Progress towards gender equality is “vanishing earlier than our eyes,” United Nations Secretary Common António Guterres advised the Fee on the Standing of Ladies on Monday.
Talking to the important thing UN ladies’s rights group forward of Worldwide Ladies’s Day on March 8, Guterres stated gender equality is “300 years away” in keeping with the newest estimates from UN Ladies, the UN group devoted to gender equality and the empowerment of girls.
Guterres cited excessive charges of maternal mortality, ladies being compelled into early marriage, and ladies being kidnapped and assaulted for attending college as proof that hope of reaching gender equality “is rising extra distant.”
In his speech, Guterres didn’t point out Iran, which was expelled from the 45-member fee in December over protests following the loss of life of Mahsa Amini within the custody of the nation’s so-called “morality police.”
“Ladies’s rights are being abused, threatened, and violated around the globe,” Guterres stated, naming a couple of nations specifically, together with Afghanistan, the place he stated “ladies and ladies have been erased from public life.”
On Monday, younger Afghan ladies gathered outdoors Kabul College to protest the ruling Taliban’s ban on feminine schooling, a restriction which a brand new UN report says could quantity to “against the law towards humanity.”
The report offered to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday additionally famous the rise in compelled and baby marriages, the ban excluding ladies from different public areas like parks and gymnasiums, and different restrictions limiting ladies’s capacity to work and journey independently in Afghanistan.
Guterres stated the deputy secretary-general and the chief director of UN Ladies not too long ago visited Afghanistan and conveyed to the Taliban authorities that “we are going to by no means quit combating for” ladies and ladies.
“Disaster and battle have an effect on ladies and ladies first and worst,” Guterres stated, together with the warfare in Ukraine for example. Final yr, the UN referred to as for an investigation into experiences of rape and sexual violence towards Ukrainian ladies and youngsters following Russia’s invasion.
Guterres additionally stated that “in lots of locations, ladies’s sexual and reproductive rights are being rolled again,” although he didn’t specify the place.
Final June, the US Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving the precise to abortion as much as particular person states. The yr earlier than, a ban on abortions as a result of fetal defects took impact in Poland – basically ending nearly all abortions within the nation.
To realize gender equality, Guterres referred to as for “collective” and “pressing” motion, from rising schooling, earnings and employment for girls and ladies, particularly in creating nations within the World South, to selling the participation of girls and ladies in science and know-how.
“Centuries of patriarchy, discrimination and dangerous stereotypes have created an enormous gender hole in science and know-how,” Guterres stated. “Let’s be clear: international frameworks should not working for the world’s ladies and ladies. They should change.”