Gordon: taking women’s rights seriously

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Gordon Brown has co-authored an artice on the Huffington Post, in which he talks about the continuing need to fight back against the oppression of women and girls around the world.

The powerful post, co-written with President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, says:

“In supposedly civilised and enlightened times, girls and women around the world suffer unimaginable atrocities: forced marriage, rape, mutilation and death in pregnancy and childbirth. In Sierra Leone, a woman has a one in six chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime — a grotesque transformation of what should be the happiest time in a family’s life into one of the most dangerous. Discrimination also means girls and women are more likely to be in poverty, denied schooling, deprived of health care, excluded from political and economic decision-making and die young.“

The article calls for the urgent establishment of a new agency to empower women around the world, as recommended by the UN in 2006, and pledges that Britain will “at least double the UK’s core funding for the UN’s work on women’s equality through this new body, once established”.

Read the full post here.