NEW YORK, June 5: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said today that while there has been progress on the goal for women's equality since the 4th National Conference on Women held in Beijing five years ago, "much remains to be done."

Addressing the opening of the five-day United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Women 2000, Annan noted that women still earn less, have higher unemployment rates,are more often unemployed, generally poorer than men, and that most countries have yet to pass laws in favor of women's rights to own land and other property.

The UN Secretary General also noted that even while these old challenges have yet to be met, new ones have already emerged. He cited the spread of AIDS particularly in southern Africa "where 40 per cent of pregnant women are HIV-positive and more than one child in 10 has lost its mother to AIDS."

He cited, however, the following progress for women:

• Violence against women is now illegal almost everywhere.
• There is a worldwide mobilization against harmful traditional practices such as "honor killings" or "shame killings."
• New health strategies have helped saved thousands of women's lives, and more couples now use family planning than ever before.
• A record number of women have become leaders and decision makers in both

Annan called for the full implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, which was passed by 189 member states during the Fourth International Conference on Women in 1995.

"I believe that implementing the Beijing Platform will be crucial in achieving all the Millennium goals I have asked the world's leaders to adopt on behalf of all the world's peoples," he said.

The Beijing Platform for Action contains the agenda for women's empowerment, spelling out the strategic objectives and actions to be taken by the year 2000 by governments, the international community, NGOs and the private sector for removing existing obstacles to women's advancement.

The Beijing document identified twelve critical areas of concern, considered to represent the main obstacles in achieving the goal of women's advancement ­ women and poverty, education and training for women, women and health, violence against women, women and armed conflict, women and the economy, women in power and decision making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, human rights of women, women and the media, women and the environment and the girl child.

Theo Ben Gurirab, Foreign Minister of Namibia, who was unanimously elected as president of the General Assembly, stressed the importance of the five-day conference.

"We are charged with the sense of a new beginning," he said. "This Special Session must try to live up to expectations of millions of women all over the world."

Entitled "Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace in the 21st Century" or Beijing +5 Review, the special session of the GA will review the progress made in the implementation of the Beijing platform. "The 23rd Special Session gives us the ideal opportunity to assess how far member-states have come to address problems, face new challenges and reaffirm new commitments," said Gurirab in his opening speech. "The General Assembly can then move forward to achieve women's goal of equality and empowerment in all walks of life."

Gurirab praised the participation of the nongovernment organizations in the deliberations leading to the current session, also known as Beijing Plus 5.

Last Saturday, the NGO sector submitted its own report titled Alternative Global Report for consideration by member-states which Gurirab acknowledged in his speech. The Beijing Conference was considered a "watershed event" as it resulted in a new international commitment to achieve gender equality and development and the general advancement of women into the 21st century.

This conference has perhaps the largest number of delegates, with some 17,000 representatives from governments and another 30,000 attending the parallel NGO forums.

About 20 NGO representatives from Nepal have been here since last week attending the preparatory meetings and other programmes to lobby for their causes and to network with other South Asian NGOs.

At a special event to highlight the problem, Aanuradha Koirala talked about the trafficking in women in Nepal. At Columbia University, Sapana Malla spoke of the status of human rights in Nepal, and Bandana Rana presented an overview of the implementation of CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) in Nepal at a roundtable discussion. (Isis International-Manila - Global Women's Media Team).