ISO: ISL
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The electronic version of this document has been prepared at the Fourth
World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
Secretariat.
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AS WRITTEN


Address by Madam Vigdis FINNBOGADOTTIR,
President of Iceland

FOURTH UNITED NATIONS WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN
Beijing 1 1995 Delivered September 4th 1995


Madam Chairman,
Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I am honoured and indeed deeply grateful to have the opportunity to 
address this singularly important conference. History, I suspect, will 
judge this conference as important ill many ways, and not least for 
simply taking place. Irrespective of how concrete or immediate its 
effect proves to be, it is some encouragement to us to know that the 
work being done here would have been dismissed as "unthinkable" only a 
few years ago. but will eventually see m in retrospect a natural step 
towards the progress of civilization. 

The Fourth World Conference on Women is taking place in a jubilee year, 
as we commemorate the founding of the United Nations fifty years ago. In 
our venue here it is perhaps appropriate to recall that the ancient 
Chinese used the phrase "May you live in interesting times" not to wish 
people well, but as a curse. At the same time as we celebrate this 
anniversary, our sense of triumph at what the global community has 
achieved in unison is strangely muted. We cannot ignore the tragic human 
conflicts that still rage on in various parts of the world. 

Obviously, the march of history does not yield itself to the whims of 
the almanac. Nevertheless, the timing of our conference inevitably 
merges its theme with the wider question of the kind of vision we want 
to set out for the United Nations in the next half century.

It is certainly a mark of how far we have come in the past twenty years 
that the pairing together of women s advancement and issues of human 
survival is no longer questioned. Instead, it is accepted as legitimate 
and timely and even necessary. 

Needless to say it was not always so. In the earliest work of Western 
political thought, Plato s Republic, Socrates attempts to sketch the 
best political order according to nature. But he is interrupted by his 
friends who blame him for omitting the role of women. It turns out that 
Socrates has been reluctant at first to admit women as equal partners in 
his scheme of things. for fear of earning himself the ridicule of his 
fellow men. He then reminds himself that the chores that will be 
expected of women under the new scheme were at one time shocking and 
ridiculous for men as well. But then, in his words, "the appearance of 
absurdity ebbed away under the influence of reason s judgement about the 
best". 

This is of course the viewpoint of a male in a male-dominated society, 
praiseworthy as its acknowledgement of notional female equality may be. 
But for women today, the opposite is closer to the truth: the idea of 
not being able to enjoy equality strikes us as absurd, as well as 
irrational. I happen to know that very many men agree with us too. 

Unlike Socrates, perhaps, today s architects of a better future will 
hardly need to be reminded to take due account of women if only because 
many of them are women anyway, and their number is steadily increasing. 
Today, most states in the world are legally committed to protecting and 
promoting women s human rights. And beyond the possibilities offered by 
legal frameworks, the need to secure women's full and equal 
participation in all spheres of private and public life is increasingly 
recognized.

Women's rights have ceased to be a peripheral, "progressive" cause and 
have instead acquired a universality, not least through efforts made at 
a global level by organizations such as the United Nations.

At a time when the United Nations is frequently faulted for not being 
equipped to deal with pressing challenges, we do well to recall the 
pivotal role of our world organization and its agencies in spearheading 
efforts to secure equal access for women in all aspects of political, 
economic and social development. With due regard also to the 
contribution made by numerous non-governmental organizations, I would 
therefore like to take this opportunity to pay special tribute to the 
United Nations for their leadership in this field.

But we must not bathe ourselves in the glory of self congratulation. We 
need the courage to qualify all that we have accomplished with a frank 
admission of our most glaring deficiencies. Paradoxically, the number of 
women living in poverty has increased disproportionately to men; now, 
women constitute the majority of the world's poor. This is reflected at 
all levels: health, education and physical security, as well as 
political and economic power and influence. Girls and women frequently 
do not enjoy the same access to nourishment and medical attention as 
men. Two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women and so are 
most of the world's refugees and victims of violence. Moreover, there 
are many countries where women, if included at all, are deliberately 
kept on the margins of public life.

It will be the task of this conference to tackle those shortcomings: not 
just admit to them, but try to explain where they originate and how they 
can be eliminated. In the coming days the conference will review the 
critical areas of concern to women and, hopefully, adopt a Platform for 
Action containing concrete proposals. But we must not rest satisfied 
with words alone. Needless to say that much depends on the political 
will of governments to ensure their proper implementation. New resources 
may be required in order to do so, but they are not a prerequisite, and 
their lack must not be used as an excuse for failing to act at all. It 
is well within the means of many national governments to prevent some of 
the adversities which particularly affect women. Indeed, it is their 
responsibility to do so. 

Together, we now have a unique opportunity, because, in a sense, we are 
revisiting the United Nations Charter. 

Mistakenly or not, the birth of the United Nations was seen by many 
people as the fulfilment of an ageless quest for lasting peace. The 
foremost goal of the United Nations Charter was to eliminate war. But 
underlying the charter was a no less ambitious ideal: the commitment to 
address the sources of human conflict through the promotion of human 
rights, justice and social progress. It was certainly not the fault of 
the United Nations that international political manoeuvring overshadowed 
this second ideal. The onset of the Cold War and the outbreak of East-
West rivalry induced the leading powers of the world to try to impose 
durable peace by the paradoxical means of establishing military 
superiority over each other. In a word, the United Nations were never 
given the chance to work as intended. The experiment was never 
completed. 

In recent years we have witnessed the United Nations adapt themselves 
quickly to the new demands of the post-Cold War environment. The series 
of conferences, starting with the World Summit for Children in New York 
and continuing with the "Earth Summit" in Rio, the World Conference on 
Human Rights in Vienna, the International Conference on Population and 
Development in Cairo and the Social Summit in Copenhagen, have set a new 
agenda whereby the organization has broken free from the narrow 
conception of security as something largely measured in military terms. 
Instead, we are charting a new path to peace, based on the recognition 
that the security of individuals is in the long run not to be separated 
from the security of states. 

It is in this sense that we are revisiting the United Nations Charter. 
In so doing we are rediscovering the neglected relationship, embedded in 
the Charter, between the maintenance of peace and the equal rights of 
men and women. The drafters of the Charter did not add "equal rights of 
men and women" as an afterthought. They enshrined it up front in the 
second paragraph of the Preamble to the Charter. And as we carry the 
torch for women to Beijing now and the "City Summit" in Istanbul next 
year, we are also demonstrating to the world that urgent global 
concerns, including the environment, population growth and social 
development, involve women just as much as men. 

All rights are matched by obligations, and in demanding equal rights to 
control their lives, women are also declaring their willingness to 
undertake the obligation of tackling these global concerns, in league 
with men, for the benefit of everyone on the planet. If we can state the 
cause of equality in such terms, we have truly universalized it and 
begun to look far into the future towards a very different quality of 
society. But curiously enough, such a vision strikes me as far less 
"unthinkable" than the notion of women s equality would have seemed a 
hundred years ago. In this sense we can justifiably say that we have 
come a very long way indeed.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We have come to Beijing to advance the cause of women. But even more 
importantly, we have come here as responsible citizens of the human race 
committed to creating a better world for succeeding generations. In the 
Chinese language, there is a sign for peace showing a man and a woman 
under one roof. As I conclude this address by thanking the Chinese 
government for their generosity in providing the venue for such a large 
conference of men and women from all over the world, I should like to 
express the sincere wish that, before we depart from under this roof, we 
may come to make a relevant, substantial and lasting contribution to 
world peace.