Mr. Chairman:
Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the statement: "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" and not "all men are born free and equal in dignity and rights," as it appeared in some early drafts. The change, as noted in Mary Ann Glendon’s recent book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Right, was not a casual one. As the framers of the Universal Declaration knew, the time had come for the rights of man to give way to the rights of man and woman.
Words hold great value in the world of human rights, for they have the power to promote human freedom or to prevent it. And so the language in the Universal Declaration marked an important milestone for women’s rights.
Women have traveled a great distance in the 53 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration. It has been a long and difficult journey, one that is far from finished. Few issues strike such deep and emotional strains in any society as a woman’s place within it. Against this complicated backdrop, the progress that women have made is both remarkable and remarkably insufficient.
If there is a single key to women’s progress, it is education, for education is the key to individual empowerment, and individual empowerment the key to a nation’s growth and development. The benefits that accrue to states where women are encouraged to attend school and compete on an equal footing with men in every field cannot be stressed enough. The proof is everywhere around us. Where women have had the opportunity, they have proven themselves, improving their families, their communities and their countries in the process.
Where women have been denied that opportunity, their families and their countries are all the poorer for it. Government policies and customs that keep women in poverty, subjecting them to ignorance and ill-health, holds nations hostage, and their progress is certain to be slow. Again, the proof is all around us, measured in shortened life spans, endemic poverty, and high rates of maternal and infant mortality.
In retrospect, the United States did not pay enough attention to women’s issues early in our history. But ours is a democratic nation, and our laws and customs change when our people want them to. And change they did over the past generation. Today, women in my country are not just making progress, they are breaking new ground and assuming more and more leadership positions in business, government, academia, the sciences, the law, the media and the arts and every field imaginable.
In my 30 years as a teacher and public servant in the United States, I have watched this process with some astonishment. Once my classes were largely filled with males, but now it is just as likely to be filled with women. This tracks with trends throughout our country. Since 1965, the United States Department of Education has prepared extensive reports on female education levels. Its latest report states that "in school and college, females are now doing as well or better than males on many of the indicators of educational attainment, and that the large gaps in education attainment that once existed between men and women have in most cases been eliminated."
I have seen the same phenomenon with national security issues. When I began my professional career, only a handful of women were involved in strategic studies. The situation was similar within the government. Today, however, there is nothing unusual about seeing women at the senior-most levels of our government, working on issues that until recently were almost entirely in the hands of men. The national security team that President George W. Bush has assembled clearly reflects this trend.
The perspective women have brought to our society has been felt in virtually every area, including foreign policy. This has had an important effect on our development assistance. As a result, our assistance now funds numerous health, education, micro-credit and civic empowerment programs for women throughout the world. For example, the United States Agency for International Development maintains a strong girls education program in countries such as Mali, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, India, Morocco, Yemen, Guatemala, Haiti, and Peru.
But despite the obvious progress, there remains much to do at home. For that reason, we have worked hard to incorporate women’s concerns directly into our laws. Today the legal protections against discrimination, sexual harassment, violence, and domestic abuse are far more inclusive than just a decade or two ago.
Mr. Chairman, another issue on which we are now focusing considerable attention is trafficking, one of the fastest-growing and most nefarious types of international criminal activity. While trafficking affects both men and women, women and girls constitute the majority of the victims, and they face a particular set of horrendous problems. Lured from their homelands by false offers of well-paying jobs, these unfortunate individuals face violence, intimidation and sexual abuse at every step, as they pass from hand to hand. Often smuggled across national borders, many wind up in sweatshops, domestic servitude, brothels or other degrading situations, alone, abused, stripped of their documentation and their human dignity, and held as virtual slaves.
To help address this evil, the United States Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 last October. This statute is designed to prevent trafficking, prosecute the traffickers, and protect the victims. It increases the penalties for the crime, mandates special training for law enforcement authorities and creates a new non-immigrant classification for victims of the most severe forms of trafficking. Individuals who fit this classification gain access to many federal benefits and services.
While we have taken these steps on behalf of the victims, we know that trafficking has deeper roots that must be addressed. Here, too, education is a must. Women need to be alerted to the dangers that may await them. This we are doing through our discussions here. We have published a brochure called Be Smart, Be Safe warning potential victims of the risks of trafficking and how they may protect themselves. The brochure has been translated into 24 languages and is distributed through several of our consulates and to local non-governmental organizations. We are also stepping up our efforts to coordinate information with like-minded governments about the criminals and syndicates that prey on human victims, so that we can identify and prosecute them.
Furthermore, we are working with a variety of public and private groups, domestically and internationally, to combat all forms of trafficking.. We are working closely with human rights groups to ensure protection for all victims while coordinating with a variety of private service agencies to provide protection and assistance to these victims. Research is critical if we are to educate people of this growing scourge. One of the most interesting of these is the Protection Project, run by a colleague of mine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The Protection Project just recently published its first Human Rights Report on Trafficking of Women and Children, a Country by Country Report on a Contemporary Form of Slavery. The report covers every country and describes their trafficking problems and commercial sexual exploitation laws.
Sadly, trafficking is but one of the human rights problems that afflict women and girls. In many places a girl simply is not valued as highly as a boy. This limits opportunities for millions of women to reach their full potential. Prejudice and societal discrimination also put many women at a greater risk with respect to HIV/AIDS, as their lack of control over sexual relationships increases the risk of contracting the virus, and the greater social stigma they face once infected makes it more difficult to seek adequate care and treatment.
Domestic violence plagues women and girls throughout the world. Once hidden in the shadows, the problem is now out in the open where we can fight it. Indeed, our federal, state and local governments and many private organizations now fund programs to help battered women and sensitize law enforcement authorities to the nature of the problem.
Too often women and girls bear the brunt of harmful traditional or customary practices that cause physical and emotional scars. Now that we have entered a new millennium, these practices must end.
Mr. Chairman, my country applauds the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for its recent decision, finding that the enslavement for the purposes of repeated rape of Muslim women and girls by three Bosnian Serbs constituted a "crime against humanity."
We applaud, too, those who put women’s rights in the Universal Declaration and labored through the intervening years to deliver on its promise. And we applaud the progress women have made in every country and which made the Beijing Women’s Conference and its Platform of Action possible. Women make up half the world’s population. We have gone a long way down the road to promote and protect all women’s human rights and fundamental freedoms, but we have a long way yet to go. Our path is straight, our duty clear. We will not stop, we cannot stop, until those words are facts in every country of the world.
Thank you.
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