As a memeber of the delegation of the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament (FEMM), Dubravka Šuica, head of the Croatian EPP delegation, is attending the 59th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women this week in New York. The session coincides with ceremony of the official publication of the report on the one-year initiative ˝Without Borders: A full program of participation˝, that Croatian President Grabar-Kitarović recently participated in.

 
˝Gender equality is an absolute imperative for every society, while each country must focus its resources in order to achieve not only better social, but also economic status of women. To achieve this we must start from the premise of equality and provide equal opportunities for men and women to achieve success that is not necessarily based on gender, but on skills and knowledge˝, said Dubravka Šuica ahead of her trip to the United States.
 
It is on the agenda for these discussions that began on March 9th to speak about the challenges and barriers that affect the implementation of the Beijing Declaration, twenty years after the signing of the Declaration, all with the aim of achieving awareness of the importance of gender equality and empowerment of women in the Programme for Development after 2015.
 
Together with colleagues from the European Parliament, Šuica will meet with the head of the EU delegation to the UN, Thomas Mayr-Harting, Deputy Executive Director of the UN Women's Directorate, Lakshmi Puri, Deputy Director of UNICEF, Geeta Rao Gupta, and other representatives of institutions around the world that promote gender equality.