Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was targeted by Taliban gunmen for advocating girls' education in her home nation, has become the first signatory of a new worldwide petition calling for urgent action to ensure the right of every child to safely attend school, it was announced on Monday.
The petition was launched on Monday with the backing of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who is now the U.N. Special Envoy for Education.
In an op-ed published in the Huffington Post on Monday, Brown noted that the petition's launch came in the wake of a suicide bomb attack on a bus belonging to the Sardar Bahadur Khan Women's University in the south-western Pakistani city of Quetta last Saturday. At least 14 female students were killed in that attack.
"This, the bloodiest atrocity yet in escalating violence against female students, comes eight months after the attempted assassination of Malala and her two friends, Kainat and Shazia, targeted by terrorists just because they wanted to go to school," Brown wrote in the article.
"That is why today, in advance of Malala Day on July 12, we are launching our worldwide petition to demand that global leaders ensure 57 million out-of-school girls and boys are given the chance of education," he said.
Malala's appearance at the U.N. headquarters on July 12 will mark her first major public speech since she was shot last October. She will be joined at the U.N. by hundreds of young people from around the world.
The petition and the U.N. event are part of an effort to establish universal primary education by December 2015, the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, a set of anti-poverty targets set by U.N. Member-States in a 2000 summit.
In a statement issued for the petition launch, Malala stressed that the terrorists who carried out the Quetta bus-bombing last week were "cowards."
"The innocent girls who died on Saturday have nothing to do with politics and only wanted to empower themselves through education. Obtaining education is every man and woman's birth right and no one is allowed to take away this right from them," she stressed.
Incidentally, Brown and Yousafzai are supporting the initiative of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to accelerate progress towards the U.N. Global Education First Initiative to put every child in school, improve the quality of learning, and foster global citizenship by the end of 2015.
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