Linked with Globalization and the Eradication of Poverty, with Human Rights as Education for Peace, with Netherlands Plans Public Muslim Veil Ban, with U.S. Changing Course In Iraq?, with Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, DAWN – Nigeria, and with The harm at home and abroad.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
She says: « A world without war is too important to be the responsibility of any single government, no matter how powerful.
Our challenge is to find one shared humanity in the face of our diversity ».
She says also: « Peace consolidation is an uncertain enterprise. It is one thing to agree to a ceasefire, and quite another to move from there to a point where societies can resolve conflicts through inclusive governance without reverting to armed combat. This year we have seen many examples –from Timor Leste to the Solomon Islands , Afghanistan to Iraq , the process of establishing a secure peace appears even more difficult than it did a year ago. With the setting up of the Peace Building Commission, the UN has strengthened its peacebuilding architecture, increasing coherence in fulfilling its peacebuilding mandate. But today we must ask what else is urgently needed, and how Security Council resolution 1325 could be more effectively implemented to bring about just and sustainable peace ». (Read more on maxim’s news).
Read: WOMEN’S ROLES IN PEACE.
Noeleen Heyzer – USA
She works for the United Nations Development Fund for Women Unifem, the Development Alternative for Women for a New Era DAWN, and the Asia Pacific Women in Law and Development.
Read: High Level Panel Approves UN Agency for Women Proposal.
And she says: “What UNIFEM is seeing on the ground — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia — is that public space for women in these situations is shrinking,” Heyzer said Thursday. “Women are becoming assassination targets when they dare defend women’s rights in public decision-making”. (Read all on cbsnews).
As the executive director of the UN’s leading agency to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality WFWP International (http://www.wfwp.org/), Noeleen Heyzer has made a difference in the lives of women throughout the world. Since Noeleen’s arrival in 1994, Unifem has expanded its resource base, formed strategic partnerships and grown in visibility and impact. Her leadership helped the organization to identify three central themes: building women’s economic capacities and rights, engendering governance and leadership, and promoting the realization of women’s human rights, with the elimination of violence against women. (Read all on 1000peacewomen).
Read: UNIFEM, top HIV/AIDS envoy in Africa hail panel’s call for new gender agency.
Today we celebrate the fact that, in the hands of women, microfinance has become a powerful tool helping women transform their lives and the lives of their families and their communities. Microfinance is about much more than access to credit. It is about women gaining control over their lives. It is about women achieving economic and political empowerment within their homes and within their villages, towns, cities and countries. It is about changing power relationships in favor of those who previously exercised little power over their own lives. If we are to reach our goal of ensuring credit for self-employment for 100 million of the world’s poorest families, and especially the women of those families, we must take full advantage of all the lessons we have learned about microfinance over the last two decades. (Read all on Microcredit Summit).
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A high-level panel called on Thursday for a radical overhaul of a jumble of U.N. development, relief and environmental agencies and programs that waste money in turf battles and duplication. The appeal comes from a group of prime ministers and other officials who recommended greater cohesion between bodies like the U.N. Children’s Fund or the U.N. refugee agency by appointing one official to oversee operations in a specific country.The official would have more authority than at present and report to a new « Sustainable Development Board » that would monitor coordination in New York. The panel, appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, includes the prime ministers of Pakistan, Norway and Mozambique, the former presidents of Chile and Tanzania and the British chancellor of the exchequer. They were asked for recommendations to streamline programs on development, humanitarian aid and the environment. (Read all on scotsman).
(AP) Women are facing increasing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out publicly to defend women’s rights, a senior U.N. official told the U.N. Security Council. Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, called on for fresh efforts to ensure the safety of women in countries emerging from conflicts, to provide them with jobs, and ensure that they receive justice, including compensation for rape. (Read more on cbsnews).
In Islamic countries where the shari’ah is enforced, the plight of rape victims has been highlighted by what has happened recently in Pakistan, where a victim Mukhtaran Mai, who was gang-raped, faces the threat of being legally killed. Even President Pervez Musharraf is unable to enforce an amendment in the law in deference to global public opinion, mainly because the orthodox parties who support him have opposed any such amendment. In Iran, several cases where victims have been prosecuted have come up, as the afflicted women cannot produce male eyewitnesses of the rape, as required under Muslim law. In Saudi Arabia, where shari’ah prevails in totality, women are denied even the basic right of moving about unless they are accompanied by husband or other close relatives and are fully veiled. The ghetto mentality and the fact that women themselves are caught in this anachronism is clear from a recent case in Britain where a Muslim teacher demanded her right to teach with her body draped from head to toe. « Entrapment » is the right word to discuss this tragic situation where women themselves do not want to be liberated from laws that suppress their individuality and freedom of choice. Nobody is claiming that women do not suffer in other communities. They do, and terribly, in many cases. For most women in India and elsewhere, life is difficult. Many of them are murdered at the foetal stage. Nutritious diet and education are denied to them in families obsessed with their male heirs. Dowry deaths are common. Honour killings are plentiful and even panchayats ordering gang rape of hapless women who complain against wrongdoing is not rare in several communities. (Read the whole article on daily pioneer).
links:
High-Level Panel Endorses Proposal To Create U.N. Agency for Women;
Security Council recalling resolution 1325 (2000), seeks measures to strengthen role of women in peacekeeping, post-conflict situations;