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I am delighted to welcome here in Vilnius our honoured guests, participants of this international Conference, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania and the Nordic Council of Ministers Office in Lithuania on the occasion of Lithuanian coordination of Nordic Baltic Eight (NB8) cooperation in 2012.

To start with, I am really proud to be a citizen of the state where the first historical records related to women’s rights acknowledgement in official documents go back to the 16th century (1529 - women’s rights to an inheritance and to attend meetings confirmed in the First Lithuanian Statute. The Statute also contained separate chapter protecting women against violence), and where 2 of 3 highest official positions of today - the President of the Republic of Lithuania and the Chair of the Parliament are held by women. There are so many other positive facts and numbers to quote and boast of; nevertheless, a big number of problems and drawbacks still exist. This event is meant to address some of such problems, namely the role of the state in mainstreaming gender equality, academia’s input to the subject matter or, for instance, the importance of informal education on gender equality.

I am also delighted to note that this Conference is not accidental and not the first one on our agenda. Only half a year ago within programme of the Lithuanian Chairmanship in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2011 we organized a round table discussion “Making Women‘s Voices Heard” with the aim to support constructive work and initiatives in areas of particular concern for OSCE participating States, including issues on women’s rights and gender equality. Participants from EU Eastern Partnership, Mediterranean region countries, and Lithuania discussed such questions as gender equality achievements on political level, socio-economic problems and the role of public discourse in mainstreaming gender equality and women’s rights related issues.

This event may be also regarded as a continuation of the commitments Lithuania pursued during its recent chairmanship in another international organization - Community of Democracies (2009-2011). The CoDem chairmanship programme included a high level international conference “Women Enhancing Democracy: Best Practices” (June, 2011) under the patronage of the President of the Republic of Lithuania Ms Dalia Grybauskaitė. The event enjoyed the participation of more than 130 men and women-world leaders, best experts in gender issues from 44 countries.

Those events mainly focused on such problematic areas, as women's leadership capacity and equal participation with men in the spheres of politics and economic development; domestic violence against women; women’s role in peace and security related operations, and other critical topics.

Thus, this Conference is meant to be a logical continuation of the mentioned activities as well as the best occasion to announce our further commitments foreseen in the program of Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union next year – gender equality and women’s rights will be one of our priority areas.

I cannot mentioning one more important observation made by our previous events’ participants, who claimed that even in the world of high technological possibilities, there still exists a vital necessity to cooperate in sharing our experience, lessons learned and achievements. Thus, we proposed a simple way to meet this problem, i.e. to create an independent column „Women_in_Democracy.com“ on the Community of Democracies website, and make it working as a global online conference and a point for networking, as well as a storage of best practices. I am more than happy to announce that we managed to launch this column only a month ago, and all the materials of this Conference will be published on it for your convenience.

Before giving the floor to my colleague Co-Chair of this meeting Mr Bo Harald Tillberg I would like to wish all of us much enthusiasm and commitment in order to make our work in this field unnecessary in the future. I hope this event will be just a small step forward, but of great value and importance. Wish you good time together in this beautiful hall of the Presidential Palace.