Women and girls are not commodities and must be treated as human beings with equal rights to men, politicians from across the world who are gathered at a conference in Stockholm heard on Wednesday.
Babatunde Osotimehin, the executive director of the UN population fund, UNFPA, told delegates at the international parliamentarians' conference that they had a duty to raise the status of women in their countries and to remind their heads of state of the commitments they made to improve the lives of women and girls.
The politicians are meeting in Sweden this week to discuss progress towards agreements made at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). "We say girls, you are old enough to be married and old enough to have sex and old enough to have children, but you are not old enough to have access to contraception, not old enough to have sexuality education, not old enough to have control of your own body. This simply does not make sense," Osotimehin said.
