Promoting gender equality and empowering women
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One United Nations (Ch 2, paras 47 - 49)47. Assuring equal rights and opportunities of women and men is a central objective of the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration addresses gender equality and the empowerment of women as human rights and as essential instruments for fighting poverty, hunger and disease and for stimulating development that is truly sustainable. It also embodies specific commitments to combat violence against women and to promote implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). And, as described above, it sets a clear target, encompassing all levels of education, for eliminating gender disparities in education by 2015. 48. Targeted, women-specific initiatives and an active and visible policy of mainstreaming gender perspectives in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all policies and programmes are long-standing priorities for the UN system. The Millennium Declaration’s commitments have given renewed impetus and focus to the close inter-agency collaboration and coordination in these areas. 49. In that spirit, the outcome of the ten-year review of implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, conducted by the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2005, reaffirmed, in a special declaration, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The declaration emphasized that full and effective implementation is essential to achieving the internationally agreed development goals, including those agreed at the Millennium Summit, and it reiterated the crucial importance that Member States attached to the UN system’s collective contribution and engagement towards that end. One United Nations (Box 2.12)
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