Post date: Jul 12, 2013 3:55:29 PM
Malala Yousafzai celebrates her 16th birthday at the United Nations headquartersin New York, meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown and General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, on a day that is now called "Malala Day".
UNITED NATIONS (JULY 12, 2013) (UNTV) - Malala Yousafzai celebrated her 16th birthday on Friday (July 12) at theUnited Nations, appealing for compulsory free schooling for all children.
The young girl was attacked by the Taliban in October 2012 as she left school inPakistan's Swat Valley, northwest of the country's capital Islamabad, after campaigning against the Islamist Taliban efforts to deny women education.On Friday she met with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown at the U.N. headquarters in New York. She also met with U.N. General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic. The group posed for photographs on the sidelines of Malala's speech to the U.N. in which she told a packed room that education was the only way to improve lives.
She presented Ban with a petition signed by nearly 4 million people in support of 57 million children who are not able to go to school and demanding that world leaders fund new teachers, schools and books and end child labor, marriage and trafficking.
"I'd like to thank you for inviting me here. It's an honor for me to be here in theUnited Nations with Mr. Gordon Brown and Mr. Ban Ki-moon and thank you for your precious gift," she said, after being presented with a book by Ban, containing the charter of the United Nations.
"Today, here, we, it's our aim and our ambition that in future we will start our campaign now and we will work for the education of every child, whether girl or boy, and we will achieve our goal if we work together and if we work hard for it. So I tell all the girls all around the world, as well as all children, that they should go to school and they should raise up their voice for their rights," she added.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt on Yousafzai, calling her efforts pro-Western. Two of her classmates were also wounded.
Yousafzai was treated in Britain, where doctors mended parts of her skull with a titanium plate. Unable to safely return to Pakistan, she started at a school inBirmingham, UK in March.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), formed in 2007, is an umbrella group uniting various militant factions operating in Pakistan's volatile northwestern tribal areas along the porous border with Afghanistan.
Under Taliban rule in neighboring Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, women were forced to cover up and were banned from voting, most work and leaving their homes unless accompanied by a husband or male relative.