Nafis Sadik, Pakistani women's rights champion, dies at 92

Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani doctor who championed women’s health and rights, and spearheaded the breakthrough action plan adopted by 179 countries at the 1994 United Nations population conference, died four days before her 93rd birthday, her son said, late on Monday.

Omar Sadik said his mother died of natural causes at her home in New York, on Sunday night.

Nafis Sadik joined the UN Population Fund in 1971, became its Assistant Executive Director in 1977, and was appointed executive director in 1987 by the then-Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, after the sudden death of its chief, Rafael Salas. She was the first woman to head a major United Nations program that is voluntarily funded.

In June 1990, Perez de Cuellar appointed Sadik to be secretary-general of the fifth UN International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, and she became the architect of its groundbreaking program of action which recognized — for the first time — that women have the right to control their reproductive and sexual health, and to choose whether to become pregnant.

The Cairo conference also reached a consensus on a series of goals, including universal primary education in all countries by 2015 — a goal that still hasn’t been met — and wider access for women to secondary and higher education. It also set goals to reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality and to provide access to reproductive and sexual health services, including family planning.

While the conference broke a taboo on discussing sexuality, it stopped short of recognizing that women have the right to control sexual and marital decisions.

Natalia Kanem, the current Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, called Sadik a “proud champion of choice and tireless advocate for women’s health, rights and empowerment".

“Her bold vision and leadership in Cairo set the world on an ambitious path,” a journey that she said continued at the 1995 UN women’s conference in Beijing, and with the adoption of UN development goals since 2000 that include achieving gender equality and many issues in the Cairo program of action.

Since Cairo, Kanem said, “millions of girls and young women have grown up knowing that their bodies belong to them, and that their futures are there to shape".

At the Beijing women’s conference a year after Cairo, Sadik told delegates:

“The first mark of respect for women is support for their reproductive rights.”

“Reproductive rights involve more than the right to reproduce,” she said. “They involve support for women in activities other than reproduction, in fact liberating women from a system of values which insists that reproduction is their only function.”

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After her retirement from the Population Fund in 2000, Sadik served as a Special Advisor to the secretary-general, and as a special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

“She fit more into one day, than most of us do probably in one year — she was incomparable and she was unmatched,” he concluded.