Veritas Dinner
Our first Veritas Dinner for 2020 focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 on Gender Equality. It was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and its Platform of Action. Our guest speaker was one of 50,000 women who gathered in Beijing for that amazing event a quarter century ago! Sr Anne Lane PBVM described something of the experience of Beijing, its vision and its challenges.
In his address on 9 March UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said to the sixty-forth session of the Commission on the Status of Women: “A key legacy of the Beijing process was movement building. These past 25 years have seen growing, strengthened, vibrant, transnational and diverse women’s movements that are increasingly challenging slow and piecemeal progress by calling for urgent systemic change.”
Our table conversation was around the signs of movement since 1995 and the challenges confronting Australians as we plan actions to achieve “50/50 by 2030”.
Antonio Guterres urges all of us to ‘focus on what unites us and to strongly reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and its full, effective and accelerated implementation. Let us send a clear message to the word that women’s rights are human rights, and that gender equality is central to all the Sustainable Goals.”