Time flies, but we have not been sitting still! A short resume of what happened this year so far.
INLW members met up with other Liberal politicians and guests from 5 regions of the world in the House of Lords in the UK Parliament on January 29th to honour the 2014 Liberal International Prize for Freedom laureate Ms Waris Dirie, who has brought global attention to the suffering inflicted by female genital mutilation (FGM).
We have been to the 59th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York in our capacity of NGO with a Special Consultative Status at the UN ECOSOC. We submitted a written Statement on the globalization of the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and girls and domestic violence. We did submit/prepare a joint oral Statement with Liberal International, but due to the amount of NGO requests we were not able to actually deliver it orally. We also were sub host to a fringe meeting organized by UN Human Watch and LI, where our board members Ms Kaba Fofana (VP Sub Sahara Africa)and Maysing Yang(VP Asia) spoke and I was asked to stand in as Chair.
The new Liberal International President Juli Minoves has taken it upon himself to work towards a renewed Liberal Manifesto in 2015. He invited a variety of Liberal personages/scholars to gather on March 21st in Oxford, where the first Manifesto of LI was born in 1947. I was honoured to be invited to keep an eye on the gender issues in this renewed view on Liberalism!
The last Executive Committee of Liberal International was held in Zurich in June (12/14) where INLW was represented by Maysing Yang from Taiwan, VP Asia; Soesila Verhagen, Deputy Assistent and myself. On Monday the 16th of June INLW hosted a succesful afternoon fringe session at the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in Geneva on the globalization of the Instanbul Convention.
As you may remember we submitted a resolution at the last LI Congress in Rotterdam in April 2014 on this subject which was unanimously adopted. Liberal International and INLW as you see have now joined forces in a joint campaign to achieve this eventual globalization of the Istanbul Convention.
Our main plans for autumn 2015 are:
Taking part at the 60th Liberal International Congress in Mexico City from Thursday 29th October till 1st of November with an INLW delegation. We plan to pick up the second phase of the joint campaign together with LI on the ratification and globalization of the Istanbul Convention.
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