President Alberto Fernández will visit Paris for the second time in two months to attend a United Nations summit on gender equality, it emerged over the weekend.
The Peronist leader will attend the June 30-July 2 event, which is convened by UN Women and organised by Mexico and France, at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, local daily La Nación reported Saturday, citing government sources.
According to UN Women, the Generation Equality Forum is a global gathering with youth and civil society groups that aims to launch “a series of concrete, ambitious and transformative actions to achieve immediate and irreversible progress towards gender equality.”
Its first leg took place back in March in Mexico City. This second summit, lasting three days, will be inaugurated at the Louvre Museum. World leaders from Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Kenya, Tunisia, Cyprus, Estonia are also expected to attend, as well as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US Vice-President Kamala Harris have also been invited to the forum, but neither has confirmed their attendance to date.
According to reports, Macron first invited Fernández to the forum back in February, when he congratulated him after the congressional passage of Argentina’s historic abortion reform law, which decriminalised and legalised the procedure.
This will be the second time the two leaders have met in close to 50 days. Fernández last saw his French counterpart in mid-May, during a stop on his brief European tour that also took in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Vatican. That last sojourn was intended to win diplomatic support for Argentina’s attempts to renegotiate multi-billion-dollar debts with the International Monetary Fund.
According to official sources, cited by the Noticias Argentinas news agency, President Fernández will depart for Paris on June 28 to attend the forum’s opening sessions two days later. That same night he will participate in a dinner at the Élysée Palace with other world leaders.
– TIMES/NA
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