Washington DC (March 6, 2020) – A total of 13 Embassies met today at the Embassy of Italy in Washington DC to celebrate International Women’s Day with a unique online initiative. Italy, together with the Embassies of Argentina, Canada, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Israel, Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and in collaboration with the Digital Diplomacy Coalition (DDC) group, has launched a new social media campaign on women’s rights and equality.
As for the campaign held on the occasion of the 2019 International Women’s Day and amplified by Twitter, this year efforts have focused on Twitter with a “thread” – that is, a series of tweets linked to each other – intended to amplify the coordinated message of the 13 Embassies and the DDC. A deliberately simple and direct message – “This #InternationalWomensDay, #DiplomacyUnited stands together once again in advancing a gender-equal and inclusive world where each of us, young and old, commits to making a difference. Let’s all be #EachForEqual #GenerationEquality. Happy #InternationalWomensDay. Act today, every day, everywhere ”- linked to a video in the various languages of the countries represented.
This is the fourth informal online campaign coordinated with other Embassies in the US capital, under the #DiplomacyUnited umbrella, an evolution of the “Stockholm Initiative for Digital Diplomacy” (SIDD), launched in 2014 by the Swedish government. In 2019, the group, which has grown from 7 to 13 Embassies, supported similar initiatives for press freedom and human rights, reaching an audience of over 10 million users per initiative.
The defense of human rights, women and gender equality are among the top priorities of Italy’s action at national level and in all the relevant international forum, including the Human Rights Council in Geneva where Italy sits for the three-year period 2019-2021.