00:00Maybe your viewers or other people get fired up about this.
00:03Women who should be part of political debates are being silenced too much around the world.
00:07Now, 20 years after Beijing, your office and the U.S. government are highlighting female political prisoners
00:13ahead of the Beijing Plus 20 conference.
00:17Why political prisoners? Why is this the issue that feels the most critical to take on right now?
00:22What is very much the case this year, which is the 70th anniversary of the United Nations,
00:29is there will be a fair amount of back-slapping and, hey, haven't we come a long way?
00:33And our goal in this campaign is to put a face to what remains a major problem around the world,
00:41which is that women are being silenced.
00:43All the delegations to all the missions walk up First Avenue in order to get into the United Nations
00:48and suddenly they're looking up and they're seeing these faces.
00:50And sometimes it's diplomats from the countries from where these prisoners come
00:54and the facade of the U.S. mission here and there are these portraits of these women
00:59who are not well-known names.
01:01We've heard of the Nelson Mandelas and the Václav Havels, these iconic dissidents from the past,
01:07and it turns out there are a lot of women on that list and a lot of women that we
01:11should valorize
01:13for the sacrifices they make for the sake of basically trying to build a better world.
01:17The whole delegation is going to see all of this, which makes it a pretty confrontational campaign.
01:23Is there any fear about sort of doing something this bold and this big?
01:29We thought a lot about that. I mean, it's never been done before, anything like this.
01:33And I think it's in the best tradition of American diplomacy,
01:36and it's in the best tradition certainly of the people who've occupied this job
01:40and people who've really used this perch to speak up on behalf of individuals.
01:44Part of what's so great about being at the United Nations is that you have a chance to speak frankly,
01:50in this case to speak visually. This is just the beginning of humanizing a phenomenon.
01:55Beijing 20 years ago, then First Lady Hillary Clinton so famously said,
02:01human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights.
02:04But what do you think we need to do to really live that, to really make women's issues human issues?
02:11We've pushed through the Security Council, through other parts of the UN to create new norms
02:16where every UN envoy is trying to spearhead a peace process,
02:22where it's in the back of their mind that they have to bring women into that process
02:25because women know how people are actually living in the communities.
02:30Women often have really constructive ideas about confidence-building measures
02:34and the kinds of ways to sort of break down barriers.
02:37The United Nations itself as an organization, you know, has UNICEF for kids out in the world,
02:42it has the UN Development Program, it has UN Women.
02:45So if this idea that it's not just the kind of moral thing or the righteous thing to do,
02:50but it's the smart thing to do, your viewers have a lot to do with this
02:54because they're the next generation, they're the people who are, you know,
02:57going to be inhabiting these institutions and bringing this perspective to bear.
03:01I think it's so powerful for women to have a role model like you to look to,
03:06to say, I want that, I see someone who looks like a success I want.
03:10What advice would you have to offer to those women and girls?
03:14There's a great expression that has become a little bit of a mantra for me over the years,
03:19which is never compare your insides to somebody else's outsides.
03:23If you might be interested in a choice, let's say, you should make a difference.
03:24To be continued...
03:24To be continued...
03:24Of course, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say
03:24let's say it's a terrible decision.
