United States Mission Geneva

We honor women who refused to listen to those who would say that you couldn’t or shouldn’t pursue your dreams. And we honor women who may not have had many opportunities in their own lives, and we all know women like that: Women who poured everything they had into making sure that their daughters and their granddaughters could pursue their dreams; women who, as the poet Alice Walker once wrote, “knew what we must know without knowing it themselves.

Today, the United States is making women a cornerstone of foreign policy because we think it’s the right thing to do, but we also believe it’s the smart thing to do as well. Investing in the potential of the world’s women and girls is one of the surest ways to achieve global economic progress, political stability, and greater prosperity for women — and men — the world over.

While we may have disagreements on substantive issues, such substantive disagreements should not be misinterpreted as attacks on the independence of Special Procedures. We strongly support their work, and we recognize that these Special Mechanisms are often able to achieve results where others, including States, cannot.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons continues to pose one of the greatest threats to global security. Thus, the international nuclear nonproliferation regime must be strengthened to confront the evolving threats from terrorists and other nonstate actors with nuclear ambitions as well as the ongoing challenge of governments that flaunt their nuclear nonproliferation obligations. As President Obama noted in Prague, “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”