Category: MIL-OSI

Source: United Nations (video statements)

Suzuka Nakamura, a Japanese peace activist and third‑generation hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) from Nagasaki, has been advocating for a world free of nuclear weapons since high school. Selected as one of the UN Youth Office’s 17 Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2025-2027, she is now determined to create a mobile atomic bomb museum as a new way to bring the urgent call for nuclear disarmament to communities across the world.
Learn more about Suzuka: https://www.un.org/youthaffairs/en/suzuka-nakamura
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c27kknNcK1M

Source: United Nations (video statements)

A UN Women spokesperson said, “No country in the world has achieved full legal equality between women and men."

Sarah Hendriks, Director of UN Women’s Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division addressing the press at the launch of the Secretary-General’s report “Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls.”

Hendriks said, “More than half of the world’s countries do not actually define rape by law on the basis of consent. Nearly three quarters, specifically, 74 percent of the world’s countries actually still allow child marriage by law, allows girls to be married as children. And in 44 percent of the world’s countries, the law does not mandate equal pay for work of equal value.”

She said, “Across the world today, violations of the rights of women and girls are indeed accelerating in a growing culture of impunity. This spans courts. It spans also online spaces and, of course, conflict, and also increasingly enabled by backlash against gender equality.”

She added, “Just in the past two years, the total percentage of women and girls who become victims to conflict related sexual violence has risen to 87 percent. And globally, when we look at the online spaces, digital technologies are being weaponized, through harassment, through abuse, through deep fakes that silence women, that force women to deplatform, and far too often, perpetrators face absolutely no consequences.”

She continued, “And a justice system certainly that fails half the world’s population cannot claim to uphold justice at all. And yet – and there’s always a ‘and yet,’ there’s always a ‘but’ – justice systems actually can evolve. They can transform, and certainly when they do, the impact is indeed transformative. Access to justice is one of those powerful forces for advancing equality in the lives of women and girls: when laws change, we see those changes very practically, very concretely.”

She highlighted, “In fact, since the year 1970, family law reforms have led to more than 600 million women accessing new economic opportunities, all because the law was reformed on the family.”

She stressed, “We know what works; the evidence is there. The question, I think, before the Commission on the Status of Women is whether we will confront impunity and invest in justice systems that deliver equality in both law and life.”

The report shows how laws are being reshaped to restrict women’s freedoms, silence their voices, and allow abuse without consequence.

It warns that women and girls are being failed by the very systems meant to protect them, leaving them exposed to abuse, injustice and impunity as backlash against gender equality intensifies and violations of their fundamental rights are on the rise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltgGhDMKa_Q