Thousands of women set to meet at UN HQ Monday to make their voice heard

The annual UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meets Monday to address the widespread inequalities, violence and discrimination women continue to face around the world.

Thousands of women leaders and activists from all corners of the world have descended on New York for the Commission’s two-week meeting at UN Headquarters that will run through March 21 .

Pakistan is being represented by a six-member delegation which includes Dr. Nafisa Shah, Zartaj Gul and the National Assembly Deputy Speaker, Syed Ghulam Mustafa.

Days after the UN General Assembly’s inaugural meetings in 1946 heard former US First Lady and human rights champion Eleanor Roosevelt , the work of the Commission began.

Ms. Roosevelt had called “on the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more active part in national and international affairs and on women who are conscious of their opportunities to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance”.

The UN’s Economic and Social Affairs Commission (ECOSOC) promptly established a sub-commission. Its six members – China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, France, India, Lebanon and Poland – were tasked with assessing “problems relating to the status of women” to advise the UN Commission on Human Rights, a precursor to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council.

From the beginning there were calls for action, including prioritizing political rights, “since little progress could be made without them”, alongside recommendations for improvements in civil educational, social and economic fields, according to the sub-commission’s first report, which also called for a UN women’s conference “to further the programme”.

By June 1946, it formally became the Commission on the Status of Women, one of ECOSOC’s subsidiary bodies. From 1947 to 1962, CSW focused on setting standards and formulating international conventions to change discriminatory legislation and foster global awareness of women’s issues.

Dating back to the commission’s early days, its growing membership contributed to some of the most widely agreed upon international conventions in UN history, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 1967: and Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 1995.

With a growing UN membership and mounting evidence in the 1960s that women were disproportionately affected by poverty, CSW focused on needs in community and rural development, agricultural work, family planning and scientific and technological advances. It also encouraged the UN system to expand technical assistance to further the advancement of women, especially in developing countries.

The UN declared 1975 the International Year of Women and convened the First World Conference on Women, held in Mexico. In 1977, the UN formally recognized International Women’s Day, observed annually on 8 March.