10,000 activists from around the globe are meeting at the United Nations this week to review the world’s progress toward women’s equality since the Beijing conference in the 1995. Five years since Beijing, U.N. officials believe that half of the world’s female population endures some type of domestic abuse, and the U.N. estimates that more than 1 million women are victims of sex trafficking worldwide. In politics, only 8 governments out of 189 have met their Beijing commitment to increase women’s participation in parliamentary positions to 30 percent. However, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and U.S. secretary of state Madeline Albright addressed the delegates, saying that the world’s governments have made some positive strides. “It is no longer possible, after Beijing, to deny that women’s rights are human rights,” Albright declared today. “When a woman is raped, beaten or mutilated, it is not cultural, it is criminal.”
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