At the 2018 meeting of the annual UN megaconference on women, a scene of which is captured above, the United States delegation created controversy over its conservative stances on women’s rights. This year, days before the meeting starts, the US has offered scant information on how it will participate, revealing major disorganization in the government. RYAN BROWN/UN WOMEN
François Delattre, left, the French ambassador to the UN and president of the Security Council for March, with Christoph Heusgen, Germany’s UN ambassador and president of the Council in April. They presented the agenda of the Council’s first twin presidencies to the media on March 1, 2019.
The author, an Australian who has been researching the lives of women and girls worldwide, risked traveling in Afghanistan by herself, yet she said she would return, despite the problems she met. Here, a woman heading into the village of Ishkashim, near the Tajikistan border. JOHANNA HIGGS
Protests against a new overtime law in Hungary, Dec. 12, 2018, Budapest. Women who defend human rights are subjected more than ever before to a range of threats, from online trolling to torture, a new Swedish report finds.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile workplace for women.
Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.
Wendi Winters, a reporter and editor with the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Md., was one of three female journalists murdered this year worldwide, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Gazette was attacked on June 28 by a gunman who also killed four others in the ambush. Winters, who was 65, was a mother of four children who apparently charged the gunman, thus saving others’ lives.
Migrants in the Abu Salim detention center, in southern Tripoli, holding about 1,200 people and run by the Libyan interior ministry. Of such centers, it is considered one of the better managed in the country.
Chan Kanha, a member of the Cambodian People’s Party, is deputy mayor of her hometown, Kampot, on the coast. One way that Cambodian women can make headway in political participation, she said, is to get a university degree. JOHANNA HIGGS
In recent negotiations in the UN General Assembly’s committee on disarmament, the British delegation wanted gender-focused language removed from documents being discussed but then seemed to changed its mind. Recent UN disarmament treaties now note the gendered impact on women in conflicts, as in the civil war in South Sudan, above.
The UN World Conference of the International Women’s Year opened in Mexico City on June 19, 1975, with 110 delegations present at the opening session. Patricia Hutar, the delegate for the United States, appointed by President Ford, making a statement, above. Bold verbal commitments to enhance women’s rights at the conference were not met by “meaningful public investment,” the author writes in the review. B. LANE/UN PHOTO
