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

All those benefits of women's full economic participation I mentioned earlier--stronger, more stable societies--are also in our national interest.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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