PH EMBASSY PARTICIPATES IN PL’S 5 CONGRESS OF WOMEN; PAYS COURTESY CALL ON PL’S 1ST FEMALE SEJM MARSHAL EWA KOPACZ “Out of 135 countries, the Philippines ranked No. 8 in the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, showing that it ranks very high in terms of narrowing the gap between women and men,” said Ambassador Patricia Ann V. Paez during the Roundtable Session chaired by Poland’s Foreign Undersecretary Beata Stelmach. She was accompanied by Attache Teofila Perez, the Embassy’s principal assistant on women’s issues and gender development. The Roundtable Session was one of the activities during Poland’s 5th Congress of Women which was held at Warsaw’s Palace of Culture. Special guests were Princess Ameera al-Taweel of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and former Prime Minister of Finalnd, Hon. Tarja Kaarina Halonen. In her remarks, Amb. Paez also said that gender development issues have been mainstreamed into the national development agenda and that all government agencies are required to allocate a certain percentage of their budgets for gender development. She acknowledged the challenge of human trafficking which the Aquino administration has been addressing with much resolve that has resulted to headways and remarkable progesss in the Philippines’ anti-human trafficking campaign. After the Roundtable Session, Amb. Paez together with the lady ambassadors of Australia and New Zealand as well as the delegation from Afghanistan, paid a courtesy call on Sejm Marshal Ewa Kopacz. The latter “broke the glass ceiling” in the Sejm by being its first-ever female Sejm Marshal. Marshal Kopacz informed them that out of 460 members of the Sejm, 160 are women, 70 of whom come from the ruling party, the Civic Platform Party. She added that to increase women’s participation in government, the “zipper policy” where every other candidate for a position must be a woman has been adopted. The Congress of Women is held every year and is a “non-political and open movement which numbers approximately 200 prominent and active women, including politicians, entrepreneurs, civil activists, ministers, culture activists, feminists, and women from the left to the right of the political spectrum.” Its aim is “to emphasize the vast contribution of women to the social, civic, and economic transformaiton in Poland.”
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 07:02:27 +0000