Hillary's Speech at World Conference on Women
No one should be forced to remain silent
for fear of religious or political persecution,
arrest, abuse or torture.
Tragically, women are most often the ones
whose human rights are violated.
I believe that now, on the eve of a new millennium,
it is time to break the silence.
It is time for us to say here in Bejing, and the world to hear,
that it is no longer acceptable
to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.
The voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou
must be heard loudly and clearly:
It is a violation of human rights
when babies are denied food, or drowned,
or suffocated, or their spines broken,
simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights
when woman and girls are sold
into the slavery of prostitution for human greed-
and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice
should no longer to be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights
when women are doused with gasoline,
set on fire and burned to death
because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights
when individual women are raped in their own communities
and when thousands of women are subjected to rape
as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights
when a leading cause of death worldwide
among women ages 14 to 44
is the violence they are subjected to
in their own homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights
when young girls are brutalized
by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights
when women are denied the right to plan their own families,
and that includes being forced to have abortions
or being sterilized against their will.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,
let it be that human rights are women's rights-
and women's rights are human rights once and for all.
Let this Conference be our-and the world's-call to action.
The time is now. We must move beyond rhetoric.
We must move beyond recognition of problems
to working together, to have the comment efforts
to build that common ground we hope to see.
Godspeed and thank you very much.