Student groups this weekend are marking 1996 International Woman's Day with a series of events aimed at raising awareness about women's issues.

The highlight of the weekend will be a conference sponsored by the Harvard-MIT Women and International Development Organization titled "Bringing Beijing Home: Keeping Commitments Alive."

The conference comes six months after the landmark United Nations conference on women's rights held in Beijing last September.

Organizers of today's conference, which will be held at the Institute of Politics (IOP) from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., seek to "bring ideas and promises expressed in China into action" by gathering people of varied back-grounds to discuss ways to fulfill on a local level commitments made in Beijing, according to a press release.

Susan Roosevelt Weld, a resident fellow in East Asian Legal Studies at the Harvard Law School and the wife of Gov. William F. Weld '66, will participate in a late morning session.

Last night, on International Women's Day, Cheryl Carolus, deputy secretary general of the African National Congress, gave a lecture sponsored by Radcliffe College titled "Women, Power and Democracy," at the IOP (Please see story, page 1).

Yesterday afternoon, in a show of support for women's rights, members of Harvard's Amnesty International chapter tabled in Loker Commons and Annenberg Hall.

Amnesty International members distributed information on the organization's "women campaign" and collected signatures for petitions protesting human rights violations against women in Mexico, Rwanda, China and Kuwait.

The group also helped publicize today's conference at the IOP.

Laura T. Meyer '98, a member of Amnesty International who was tabling in Loker Commons yesterday, said this weekend's conference represents a promising avenue for change.

"This conference is a way to have the ideas [proposed in September's Beijing Conference] extend beyond those two weeks and initiate meaningful changes," Meyer said