Melanne Verveer

Women and girls are powerful and we know what happens when that power and potential are unleashed--communities thrive, local and global communities grow, societies prosper and become more inclusive and equitable.

It is just wrong that women anywhere are denied access to the same economic opportunities as men.

I believe that many women woke up with the Arab Spring, and they will not go back to sleep.

During the revolutions, women in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were on the front lines for freedom, dignity, democracy, and economic opportunity.

Our failure to ratify has denied women and girls around the world U.S. leadership on the implementation of CEDAW.

These values are strongly supported by the American public, and U.S. law, as I believe all have said, is consistent with the principles set out in CEDAW.

The committee's power only has the power that we cede to it. It merely is in the position to make suggestions and recommendations.

It will be a demonstration to our own women and girls that the United States officially stands behind their advancement at home.

It is a powerful tool, and I hope that the United States can finally put it in our human rights arsenal as well.

Women's equality has rightly been called the 'moral imperative of the 21st century.'

This is not the time for the United States to be absent from such an important forum.

The era of brutal repression by the Taliban, that you have all noted, has passed, yet on every measure of development and in every sphere, women in Afghanistan continue to suffer solely because they were born female.

They have literally taken their lives in their hands to get it because of the threat to them every single day.

Women need to have a voice in the decisionmaking about the future of their country.

Women's empowerment in Afghanistan and their full and equal participation in their society are fundamental prerequisites for achieving this strategy.

The scale and the scope of the problem make it simultaneously one of the largest and most entrenched humanitarian and development issues before us.

It is time that violence against women became a concern for all of us.

Violence against women cannot be relegated to the margins of foreign policy.

If they are not at the table, it is unlikely that the outcomes, as much as we want the peace, will be as good for them.

It's about protecting those who are in the path of these horrors that are being perpetrated.

The scale and enormity of the violence directed at women can't adequately be described.

These brutal attacks are part of an armed conflict strategy carried out through rape and sexualized torture.

Violence against women as a tool of armed groups is in no way limited to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan or just to Africa.