Opinion: UN General Assembly - failure for the 79th year running?
Karama’s founder and CEO Hibaaq Osman writes on Substack on the absurdity of holding UN General Assembly during a genocide.
Image: UN Women
At the start of the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), world leaders gather in New York to take part in the High Level debate. At this ‘state of the union address’ for the entire world, 133 heads of state or government took to the stage.
Just nine of these speakers were women.
It is hard to tell what is most shocking about this statistic. For decades, women’s rights activists have made increasing women’s political participation and representation a top priority. We have been calling attention to disparities every bit as depressing as this year’s UNGA for as long as I can remember. It has been a call that many politicians have loudly claimed to have heard, and to have themselves taken as a priority - from the current UN Secretary-General, who has long trumpeted his feminist credentials, to UN Women, which has made serious efforts on the issue.
The net result of these years of talk? Women leaders are outnumbered 20-1 on the global stage.
Pathetic.