00:00Maybe your viewers or other people get fired up about this.
00:02Women 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 ahead of the
00:15Beijing 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, is there'll be
00:30a fair amount of back slapping and, hey, you know, 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, and
00:48suddenly they're looking up and they're seeing these faces.
00:50And sometimes it's diplomats from the countries from where these prisoners come, and the facade of the U.S. mission
00:57here.
00:58And there are these portraits of these women who are not well-known names.
01:01We've heard of the Nelson Mandelas and the Vats of 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 for 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.
01:31I mean, it's never been done before, anything like this.
01:33And I think it's in the best tradition of American diplomacy, and it's in the best tradition certainly of the
01:38people 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.
01:51This 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?
02:11You know, we've pushed through the Security Council, through other parts of the UN, to create new norms where every
02:17UN 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, because women know
02:26how people are actually living in the communities.
02:30Women often have really constructive ideas about confidence-building measures, and the kinds of ways to sort of break down
02:36barriers.
02:37The United Nations itself as an organization, you know, has UNICEF for kids out in the world, it has the
02:43UN Development Program, it has UN Women.
02:45And so 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,
02:52your viewers have a lot to do with this, because they're the next generation, they're the people who are, you
02:57know,
02:57going to be inhabiting these institutions and bringing this perspective to bear.
03:02I think it's so powerful for women to have a role model like you to look to, say, I want
03:07that, I see someone who looks like a success I want.
03:09But what 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, which is,
03:20never compare your insides to somebody else's outsides.
