Empowering women: for 80 years, the Inter-American Commission of Women has worked to ensure that women are not only seen but heard on critical issues affecting all citizens.

• Author: Edwards, Ian
• Position: INTER-AMERICAN SYSTEM

To even begin to appreciate how indispensable the Inter-American Commission of Women has been In promoting and protecting the rights of women, it helps to step back in time eight decades and imagine a world without it. Most likely, this would have been a "very, very sad and dismal world, where our women's rights would not be acknowledged as they are today," the head of the women's agency, Dr. Jacqui Quinn-Leandro, says.

"We would not like to see that world return," Quinn-Leandro insists as she looks back to that time. Without the advocacy of the Inter-American Commission of Women for the past 80 years, she says, "perhaps we would still be trampled upon as the weaker sex; perhaps a woman's place would still be in the home and not necessarily in the House of Parliament; and perhaps we would still have gross and violent abuses of women being perpetrated, uninhibited and unchecked."

The reality women face in the Americas is considerably less austere than it might have been if not for the creation, in 1928, of the Inter-American Commission of Women--known as the GIM, for its Spanish-language acronym. Its mission is to promote and protect women's rights, and to support the OAS member states in their efforts to ensure the full exercise of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights that will make possible equal participation by women and men in all aspects of society. The idea is that women and men will share, fully and equally, both the benefits of development and responsibility for the future.

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CIM President Quinn-Leandro, who is also Antigua and Barbuda's Minister of Labor, Public Administration and Empowerment, with responsibility for gender affairs, says the organization she leads will not rest on its past accomplishments. Too much remains to be achieved, she stresses, in order to consolidate the gains of the last 80 years and ensure that all barriers to full and equal access for women are dismantled.

A recently released study by a research project called WorldPublicOpinion.org finds that "in nearly all countries most people perceive that in their lifetime women have gained greater equality. Nonetheless, large majorities would like their government and the United Nations to take an active role in preventing discrimination." Put another way, an overwhelming majority of people around the world see it as important for "women to have full equality of rights compared to men," the study says.

Since its beginnings, the Inter-American Commission of Women has been working to tear down the structural, legislative, and social hindrances to women's equality. A specialized technical organization of the inter-American system governed by the OAS Charter, CIM is working as hard today as when it was established.

Quinn-Leandro says the OAS agency's work plan for the current biennium shines a bright light on the persistent problems of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the impact of gender-based violence, and seeks to craft regional policies and programs that are...