Resolve to Unlock and Unleash Women’s Voices
Today, as I lead the U.S. delegation marking the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, there is much cause for hope.
The progress made on women’s rights over the past two decades is striking:
from the achievement of near gender parity in primary education, to the halving of extreme poverty and the doubling of the percentage of female national parliamentarians.
Today, assembled world leaders recommit to women’s empowerment and their full and equal participation in all spheres of society. President Obama just announced the concrete steps the Administration has been taking to further advance the fundamental rights of women and girls on this milestone anniversary of the Beijing Conference.
But today, even as we celebrate progress, we must acknowledge that many governments continue to suppress women’s basic rights
— including by locking them up for speaking out about injustice and fundamental freedoms.
This September, the United States has featured twenty cases of women being unjustly detained for their beliefs or for their defense of the rights of others;
Women of courage like 71-year-old Chinese journalist Gao Yu, whose 2014 arrest came as authorities detained dozens ahead of the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, or Bahareh Hedayat, who has been arrested multiple times by the Iranian government for her advocacy to change discriminatory laws against women in Iran.
We have been saying to the governments holding these prisoners, and others like them: if you want to empower women, don’t imprison them on the basis of their views or beliefs. And to the women and their families, we have been saying:
We have not forgotten you. We will continue to fight for your release and that of others like you.
Over the last few weeks, two of the women we have featured have been released.
Seventeen other women we have featured still remain imprisoned or silenced because governments fear what they have to say. More than 80,000 political prisoners — many of them women and children — still remain detained in North Korean gulags facing starvation, forced labor, executions and torture. Most critically, countless other women around the world not identified by name, but championed in spirit, still remain imprisoned for their beliefs.
So today, as world leaders gather to discuss the very real advances we’ve witnessed for women’s rights, we remember also the women of #FreeThe20
and resolve to unlock and unleash remarkable women whose voices could add a great deal to the communities they were arrested for trying to improve.
