My name is Cheryl Hotchkiss. I'm a women's rights campaigner with Amnesty International Canada.

For Amnesty, Beijing means a great deal because it was the beginning of a larger conversation about standard setting on women's human rights that hadn't occurred in the past. Building on the outcomes of the Vienna process, it was an opportunity for us to get together both as activists across the world and as decision makers to set the agenda and set the standards for protecting women's human rights globally. It was a wonderful opportunity to begin a dialogue with each other about how we collectively go about doing that, both within our own countries and across the world.

Since that time we've been able to use the standards set in the Beijing Platform for Action as a means to examine the progress we've made and the weaknesses within the domestic legislation and domestic policies agenda. But what we are increasingly concerned with is the fact that we feel like the standards that have been set and the progress that was made have really not moved forward much. The work that Amnesty has done researching international country situations has illuminated this to us in a serious way. There is still so much work to be done. So much has been set out as important areas of rights to protect, but the standards are not being realized and lived by women in the world. Our agenda is to ensure that Amnesty, along with other organizations, can bring those standards to life in the daily lives of women across the globe.