Hansa Mehta’s life story continues to inspire

Dr. Hansa Mehta’s inspiring life story is more important to recall than ever at a time when progress towards gender equality has stalled or even reversed in many parts of the world, the President of the United Nations General Assembly said.

Delivering the Hansa Mehta Memorial Lecture at UN Headquarters in New York on 6 March, Annalena Baerbock pointed out that 30 years after the landmark Beijing Platform for Action established a global commitment to gender equality, “the distance still to travel is unfortunately far.”

The lecture is an annual event organized by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN honoring the life of Dr. Mehta, the activist and reformer who, as Indian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission in the late 1940s, was responsible for changing the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that it states “all human beings are born free and equal,” rather than “all men”.

Ms. Baerbock noted that no country has ever achieved full legal equality between men and women, and that women globally still have only roughly two thirds of the legal rights available to men. 

Political and economic leadership is overwhelmingly male, women have less access to AI and other digital tools, and women comprise 96% of victims of deepfake pornography.

“These realities differ across geography and context, yet they point to a shared truth – the struggle that animated Hansa Mehta’s work continues,” said Ms. Baerbock, a former foreign minister of Germany.

The General Assembly President said Dr. Mehta’s life should serve as a signal of what the individual can achieve, despite the obstacles that so many people face.

“If just a single person can make such an immense difference, imagine how profoundly a society can transform when that opportunity is extended to all humanity.”

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