The death on June 4 of Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, and a Nigerian, was not only a personal tragedy and a shock to the staff of the fund but also another blow for an agency that had recently lost all its United States financial support. Osotimehin, a physician, … Read more
Louise Fréchette, a Canadian, was the first United Nations deputy secretary-general. Appointed by Kofi Annan, she took office in March 1998, bringing to the job qualifications that exceeded those of most UN secretaries-general. She had spent a quarter-century in the Canadian foreign service, including as ambassador to several Latin American counties and to the UN; … Read more
In the political annals of New York, the 1990s boasted a strong presence of women not only in government but also at the United Nations. One such woman, Ruth Messinger, served as Manhattan borough president from 1990 to 1998, with time out in 1997 to run for mayor of New York City on the Democratic … Read more
On the eve of a speech Ruchira Gupta was to give on International Women’s Day in New York as the recipient of a Woman of Distinction award, she got a strange email. Gupta, who has collected numerous awards for her work against sex slavery in India — including an Emmy for her 1996 documentary, “The … Read more
In the global annals of women’s rights defenders over the last half century, Nafis Sadik’s name will always rank high, though little may be known about her among the broad American public, focused as it usually is on Western feminists with Western issues. As head of the United Nations Population Fund in 1994, Sadik marshaled … Read more
After years in the shadows, and under attack from left and right, a campaign to put action into the demand that every woman should have the right to contraception is finally gaining momentum — or regaining the central role it once played in family planning decades ago. Next week, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of … Read more
