Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research
Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

BLUE SMOKE: A monthly column, from PassBlue and UNA–UK, spotlighting senior appointments at the UN

Women as Changemakers

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Fatima Gailani comes from a prominent Afghan family who has been working to improve life in her country since the 1980s. But under the Taliban rule since August 2021, women’s rights in Afghanistan have been particularly battered if not…

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Taina Bien-Aimé started speaking up for women’s rights when she was still a teenager. A daughter of two Haitians who had met and settled in New York City, she was only about 15, some childhood friends recently reminded her,…

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Beatrice Fihn, a 40-year-old Swede, grew up wanting to make a big difference in humanity, but she did not know how she could do that. First, she thought she would “stitch people up” after they suffered an accident or…

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Documenting the “dozens of thousands” of Russia’s war crimes that have been committed so far in Ukraine isn’t a problem for Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human-rights lawyer and civil society leader based in Kyiv. But having a fully developed international…

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Nations of the world have taken giant steps in recent decades to build international structures and strengthen institutions to deal with mass human-rights abusers. At almost every stage, Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer, was there, advancing the rights…

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When she was only 10 years old, Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame realized that she could no longer read her classroom’s blackboard at her school in eastern Ghana. She eventually learned that she had retinal dystrophy, an irreversible degenerative condition that…

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Kathy Gannon never wanted to be a journalist. That changed when she was urged by a journalist brother to give the profession a try. She became a successful reporter and editor of local newspapers in Ontario and British Columbia….

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Comfort Ero knew that her appointment as the president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group, a New York City-based think tank working to prevent wars, would be arduous. But taking up the role in December, two months…

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Rebeca Grynspan, the first woman and first Latin American to lead the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, has a lot of work to do. The organization, founded in 1964 as a standing committee, now has 195 member…

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It was the death in childbirth of a dear friend that spurred Adepeju Jaiyeoba, then a young lawyer in Lagos, Nigeria, to take action. It was 2011, and 978 out of every 100,000 Nigerian women — 40,000 a year…

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Celia Umenza, an Indigenous leader who has survived three attacks on her life while advocating for the self-determination of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities in the northern Cauca region of Colombia, recently told the United Nations Security Council that…

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Jessica Neuwirth, a pivotal force in promoting and supporting the rights of women and girls worldwide, was appointed to the rank of chevalier in the French Legion of Honor by the French government in a ceremony in New York…

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For Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund since 2017, the last couple of years have been a wild ride. In 2020, women the world over were getting ready to celebrate important anniversaries: 25 years…

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Naoko Yamazaki made space history not only as the second woman astronaut from Japan, but also by participating in the record-setting 2010 NASA space shuttle mission STS-131 to the International Space Station, or ISS. Launched from the Kennedy Space…

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Séverine Autesserre, a former humanitarian-aid worker, award-winning researcher and professor of political science at Columbia University, has become one of the foremost thinkers on international peace-building in the last decade. Following “Peaceland,” a book critically exploring the parallel worlds of United…

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Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

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