Stephen Lewis Speech - UN Reform & Human Rights

“We need, need now, need desperately, a mass movement in support of women’s rights, whose culminating achievement will be the creation of an international, multilateral women’s agency. If the (High-Level UN) Panel, however male-laden, however cerebrally-resistant, were to take on board the issue of women as a fourth frame of reference, and emerge, for the first time in the 61-year history of the United Nations, with a recommendation that gave to women an organizational vehicle to change and challenge the world, then we would have the breakthrough that gives voice, breath and sinew to the meaning of equality.

Agencies of the UN system are capable of changing the world. A true international, multilateral agency for women can do the same. There are infinite numbers of studies to show that to achieve the human rights of women leads, irresistibly, to the amelioration of the human condition without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. God knows, that’s what the world needs.”
(Excerpt from Stephen Lewis’s speech to a conference on UN Reform and Human Rights, Harvard Law School, February 26, 2006)