Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (L) and US Secretary of State Hillary ClintonUpdated Nov. 21| (See 30 Years Later, US Again Takes Up CEDAW, International Women’s Treaty). The devil is always in the details, and there’s a juicy one about international women’s rights in this NYTimes story Advancing Women a Top Clinton Goal.

Can you imagine being Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal being told that America’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on the line and she wants to protest an 8-year-old Saudi girl being sold to a man in his 50s to pay off her father’s debt?

Central to every Clinton initiative is women, and that includes getting this poor 8-year-old girl out of the marital bed before it was too late.

We consistently track Secretary Clinton’s efforts on behalf of the world’s women, but the NYTimes has done a great summary of her efforts this year. In my feisty women’s rights mood, there’s another very juicy bone lying at the end of this article.

Note also that Defense Secretary Gates agrees with Clinton that empowering women is our best shot at diffusing the future of terrorism in the world — although it varies by country. The women of Hamas hate American women as much as our military and government.

Hillary Clinton invited Dr. Muhammad Yunus to Arkansas when she was first lady, so that she could learn about Dr. Yunus’s believ in microloans for poor women. Today Grameen is operating in America — Queens, NY and Omaha today.Don’t think the push back is exclusively overseas. It’s in America, too. Just last week I was putting out fires on a microfinance blog suggesting that there was no payoff on microloans (given almost exclusively to women) and it bears another look as a strategy.

To be nice, I’ll not post the link.

In the midst of research on microloans and women, I’ll share this NY Times stat saying that SKS Microfinance Private, India’s alrgest microlender, has five million borrowers — all women. Profits soared to $17.5 million in 2008 from $71,121 in 2004.

The single worst idea I’ve ever heard in life may be discouraging microloans for women. (Updated Nov. 21, 2010. The current problems with microloans in India don’t discredit the concept. I wrote of this concern last year.)

Granted, there are sharks getting in the game. Dr. Muhammad Yunus spoke of this growing concern, when I head him in Sept. 2009. Remember how the banks couldn’t give out enough unsecured credit cards in America? Microloans is becoming the new get-rich scheme for some rich investors around the world.

Forgive me for being aggravated lately, but there are moments when we all must take a deep cleansing breath. Where’s Donna Karan when I need her?

Back to Hillary and items on the Times list of style and strategy:

- always connects with village women and pushes their issues to global media

- appointed Melanne Vereer, her former chief of staff, as the first US ambassador for global women’s issues

- in the Congo Mrs. Clinton was visibly distressed wondering why women were venturing alone into the forest to gather firewood, exposing them to attacks. Writing this story brought me to tears a couple months ago. See: APROSAF Midwives in Congo Fuel Lifesaving Rescues with Briquettes; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sends Message to Women of Congo. What these women go through with attacks and rape is beyond the logic of human behavior.

US Ambassador Melanne VerveerOn a global level, the political profile of women is low globally. Only 18.6 percent of Parliament members globally are women, according to the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union.

That’s an aggregate total. I’ve been quoting US House and Senate figures at 10%. We rank 74 in the world in terms of women in Parliament at about 16%.

Countries that stand out ahead of us are (numbers are quick average): Sweden at 47%; South Africa at 40%; Finland at 41%; Argentina at 40%; Netherlands, Denmark and Norway at 39%; Spain, Angola and Costa Rica at 37%; New Zealand at 34% and Germany at 30%. These are just some of the highlights. There’s 70 countries ahead of us from every continent.

Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work and produce 50 percent of the food, but earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property, according to the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

“Women are key to our being able to resolve all of those difficult conflicts,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech in August. Since then, she has pursued initiatives to help women gain political power, personal safety and enough money to help their communities and countries improve economically and transition to democracy.

“There is nothing that has been more important to me over the course of my lifetime than advancing the rights of women and girls,” she said in a Washington speech Nov. 6. “And it is now a cornerstone of American foreign policy.”

I promised you a juicy bone and here it is. America likes to forget that we are a handful of countries who have refused to ratify the 30-year-old Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian LawIt’s amazing that the issues second wave feminists felt to so strongly about just sank in the mud in America. We’re joined by countries like Somalia, Sudan, The Vatican and Iran in not ratifying this treaty which affirms a woman’s right to reproductive choice along with an extensive list of other rights.

I wrote yesterday that America isn’t so vastly different than Sudan in how it views women, and this is another example. I could ask my readers what right America has to impose our will on the women of the world. It’s one subject when we’re fighting out American issues here in the US.

What right do we have to dictate the terms of women’s lives all over the world? This issue isn’t only about American aid. It’s about the commitments of other nations to empower their women citizens and protect them with a set of internationally-recognized human rights.

Presently all the other countries who have ratified the treaty say they’re not bound by it, because the US won’t even sign the treaty.

I’d like to believe that America— the land of the free — is “bigger” than Iran, Sudan and Somalia on this topic of international women’s rights. If we’re not, then the bodies of infected, married AIDS women and their orphans are on our national conscience.

Secretary of State Clinton says that she’s determined to bring this treaty forward for resolution in Congress.

Returning to Secretary of State Clinton’s phone call to Saudi Arabia, the eight-year-old Saudi girl was allowed to divorce. Nita Lowey, a Democratic representative from New York who chairs a House Appropriations subcommittee, told President Hamid Karzai in May she would stop civilian aid unless he quashed a proposed law legalizing marital rape.

Let us not celebrate, because for all practical purposes, a modified version of the law passed. Anne