it is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or a prize of war it is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of deaths worldwide among those aged fourteen to forty four is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes it is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalised by the painful and degrading practise of genital mutilation if there is any one message that should echo forth from this house it is that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights ladies you are the mothers of our future world