While women’s rights activists welcome the White House’s commitment to gender equality, they note that the USA has also lagged on women’s issues and has not ratified the leading global treaty on the rights of women and girls.
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Over the next five years, Xi said China will help establish 100 health-related projects for women and children in developing countries, finance another 100 projects to send poor girls to school and provide training for women from developing countries.
Clinton, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, took to her Twitter account Sunday and criticized Xi and China’s detention of five prominent women’s rights activists earlier this year.
As the co-host of the high-level meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the importance of gender equality.
“Women are torn from their families, they are raped, they are enslaved”, she said.
For Mr Obama, Ms Wickett said, attending the gathering would be politically costly. The photos include China’s Gao, Wang, and Liu Xia who has been under house arrest since the October 2010 announcement that her husband, Liu Xiaobo, received the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, Ms Power’s campaign has gained backing in Congress, with a supportive resolution sponsored by Republican representative Kelly Ayotte.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf speaks during a meeting on gender equality and women’s empowerment at United Nations headquarters, Sunday, September 27, 2015. But she said much more remains to be done including ensuring that a bill to prevent domestic violence is passed by the legislature.
“China is a player at the table”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her government will launch an initiative to improve the professional qualifications of women in developing countries and promote “the entrepreneurial power of women”. “We will have an opportunity to hold China more responsible for human rights and women’s rights”. Mlambo-Ngcuka credited the United States for taking an active interest in child marriage in its foreign-policy agenda.
She said that development could not be achieved where women were deprived of their rights and that women were often worst off in conflict zones.
The 1995 conference declared that “women’s rights are human rights” and called for women’s full incorporation in schools and government.
“As the Chinese people pursue a happy life, every Chinese woman has the opportunities to excel in life and make their dream come true”, Xi said, vowing to do more to enhance gender equality as a basic state policy, give play to women’s important role as “half of the sky” and support them in realizing their own dreams and aspirations in both career and life.
In December 2011, the Obama Administration released Executive Order 13595 and the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security to support women’s voices and perspectives in decision-making in countries threatened and affected by war, violence, and insecurity.
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Information for this article was contributed by Vanessa Piao of The New York Times.
