International Women’s Day 2014

International Network of Liberal Women (INLW) on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2014 wants to voice their concern that even if everyone agrees this should not be happening there is still every hour wide spread violence comitted against women and girls in all the corners of the world.

It has different faces, but domestic violence, in the form of sexual harassment, rape, forced marriage, crime committed in the name of so-called “honour” and genital mutilation all constitute violations of humen rights of women and girls.
What’s more, some of these atrocious acts of violence are even used as weapons in armed conflicts.
INLW President Margaret de Vos van Steenwijk calls upon the individual politicians to work on their governments to ratify the Council of Europe “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence”. Start with ratifying and signing that those countries who are a member of the Council of European. And then set up an evaluation plan in your country to measure the implementation.

Parlementarians outside Europe, she calls upon to work on globalizing this Convention so that hopefully sometime in the not too distant future, governments will be held accountable for violence against women, which is committed within their nations!

To empower all women and girls so they will fall victim so easily to violence; the basic human right for women and girls to go to school to get equal education must be strictly enforced everywhere!

So on this 2014 International Women’s Day there is still little reason to be optimistic on the human rights of Women and Girls! There is still much work to be done bij women and men together!

Margaret de Vos van Steenwijk-Groeneveld
President of INLW