18/03/2025 Equality and Non-Discrimination
“It is more than ever essential for world leaders to unite and harness their potential to defend women’s rights and build collective resistance to the backsliding and obscurantism that threaten these rights. Parliaments also should place the rights of women in all their diversity at the forefront of legislative and policy priorities, in particular disadvantaged women and victims of violence”, today said the Chairperson of the PACE Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, Catia Polidori (Italy, EPP/CD).
“Diversity, as a vector of social, democratic and cultural progress”, she added, “is to be celebrated rather than restrained, and lifelong education helps eliminate stereotypes that perpetuate inequalities between women and men. Leaders at all levels of authority should champion equal rights”.
Mrs Polidori was speaking in the framework of the 69th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), which was attended by a PACE Sub-committee composed of 29 PACE members.
The Committee Chair congratulated UN Women for bringing together world leaders to take stock of progress and challenges since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995. “I pay tribute to UN agencies such as the UNFPA. It is essential to continue financing sexual and reproductive health and rights and to maintain development cooperation despite increased financing needs for defence”, she stressed.
She also expressed the Sub-Committee’s continued solidarity with the women of Ukraine, of whom “at least 109 000 are affected by the cuts in US foreign assistance to women's organisations”, while expressing solidarity with oppressed women everywhere, in particular in Afghanistan.
At the end of the meeting, the PACE Sub-Committee proposed an annual debate on women’s rights in the Parliamentary Assembly, and an annual debate in member, Observer and Partner for Democracy parliaments on the related work of the Council of Europe.