November 2009: Dear Supporters of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Rights, TransAfrica Forum is a member
of the Network for Advocacy in Solidarity with Grassroots
Afro-Colombian Communities (NASGACC*) an important national network of
human rights activists, scholars and non-governmental organizations
dedicated to promoting international policies and programs toward
Colombia that support and strengthen the territorial and human rights
of Afro-Colombian communities.

For nearly two decades, the majority of the world has voiced its opposition to one of our most problematic foreign policies – the nearly 50 year U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. On October 28, 2009, the United Nations General Assembly condemned it for the eighteenth consecutive year.

I first want to thank the Congressional Black Caucus for this distinguished award, and to also congratulate my fellow award recipients. Paul Robeson once said that each generation makes its own history and that each generation is judge and defined by the history it makes. When I first attended the activities sponsored by the CBC in 1987, the center of focus and controversy was the struggle to impose sanctions on the South African apartheid government. Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned, the South African machinery of tyranny and repression seemed interminable, and there stood the CBC with its determined, defiant will, with its collective democratic voice and power fighting to impose those sanctions. And the rest is history!

Order your 2010 TransAfrica Forum Calendar TODAY!

The year 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the first World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1975. This conference and others that followed in 1980, 1985 and 1995 complemented what the United Nations had initiated in 1946 with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women, dedicated to gender equality and the advancement of women. The culmination of the Commission’s work to promote women’s rights and to monitor the situation of women was the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by the UN General Assembly on December 19, 1979. This convention went into force as an international treaty in 1981.