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One year of inaction on the UN agency for women

By Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan

Friday, 09 November 2007

The following statement was issued from Nigeria, where AIDS-Free World’s Co-Directors joined other grantees of the Ford Foundation in Abuja to address issues of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

With predictable fidelity to the UN’s lamentable record on the rights of women, a recommendation for a new international women’s agency, submitted to the General Assembly by a High-Level Panel on UN reform, has been mired in a swamp of bureaucratic inertia and sovereign indifference since its formal submission on November 9, 2006.

In the course of the intervening year, millions of women and girls have suffered the savage litany that is as well-known as it is commonplace: unimaginable levels of HIV infection, rape and sexual violence; honour killing, widow burning, forced prostitution and sex trafficking; child marriage, female genital mutilation, maternal mortality; grinding poverty, economic oppression, systematic exclusion… the list goes on. The UN responded to the injustices this year as it always has, by faithfully recording the scale of indignity and then applying rhetorical palliatives. Nothing more.

This ugly process of enumerating injustices against women without attempting to end them has been going on for decades. Every year, there is a particular moment of grotesque parody achieved; in 2007, it came on the 25th of last month with the obligatory regular review of Security Council Resolution 1325, passed seven years ago to guarantee women a place in peacemaking and peacekeeping around the world, and to protect against such wounds of war as systemic rape and sexual violence. Speaker after speaker recited the horrors to which women are subjected, called for an end to impunity for perpetrators and invoked the plea for gender equality. Most decried the undeniable lack of progress since 2000 in implementing the Resolution 1325. And yet, when the debate came to an end, not one further step had been taken in the direction of progress.

The futility was particularly excruciating in this instance because some members of the Security Council seemed to be seized with a current femicide in the making, the war on women in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, recently described by the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs as the worst place on the planet for women. And still, all that resulted from the Council members’ horror was a vague reference to a global plan to combat “gender-based violence” that the Secretary-General would be announcing at an unspecified date before the end of the year.

We should add, definitively, based on inside knowledge, that there is no such plan in place, just various people in various UN agencies and at the top ranks of the UN secretariat, scrambling like crazy to concoct something, anything, to create the illusion of movement against this latest war on women.* The exercise is appalling in its cynicism — and more appalling still when one imagines the hope it might have engendered, had UN staff channeled that same energy into persuading Member States of the urgent need to create the proposed international agency for women. The full version as set out by the High-Level Panel, that is — not the watered-down version of a women’s agency that some would wish (reflected in words employed artfully and by design by both the Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General: ‘catalytic’ rather than operational; ‘able to inspire results’ rather than charged with taking action at the country level.)

We should all remember that following their investigation, the High-Level Panel was so dismayed by the incoherent and trifling response of the United Nations on matters of women’s rights that they recommended an entirely new ‘gender architecture’. No one pretends that the emergence of a new agency would be a panacea, but in every issue involving women, especially at country level, there would be a voice and a vehicle to identify the injustices and to advance the struggle for gender equality.

The prospect for a new agency — funded, if governments are serious, at a billion dollars a year; led by an Under Secretary-General; fully staffed, and with real operational capacity on the ground — is bogged down in lackluster, on-again, off-again debate within the G77 and between the G77 and several western countries, all aided and abetted by the self-serving defenders of turf within the United Nations system.

The log-jam could be broken tomorrow if, in conjunction with his Deputy, the Secretary-General himself took an active interest in trading gender rhetoric for action on women’s rights; it would be advanced that much further if he insisted that the heads of agencies rally to the cause. The last days of the UN’s anachronistic record on women’s rights could be declared tomorrow if only a strong, tenacious, united call for a women’s agency were to come from within — where the gaps and neglect are best understood – to answer the anxieties among Member States and bring consensus.

There are the inevitable questions of process, ranging from whether to separate the proposal for a women’s agency from the more complex reform recommendations made by the High-Level Panel, to assuring countries such as South Africa and India that a women’s agency would not just deal with policy, but would have real capacity to change the lives of women on the ground. But none of that need take time — certainly not a full year, every split second of which represents another female life shattered, tormented or snuffed out. If the Secretary-General is serious about women, and serious about exercising the leadership he’s been granted, he can move Member States through these processes with relative ease and speed.

Meanwhile, the women of the world wait. They live waiting and they die waiting. They wait in poverty, in sexual slavery, in agony from AIDS and in hallucinatory episodes of sexual violence.

The UN loses credibility with every passing day.

*As of the 1st of February, 2008, the global plan promised by the end of 2007 had not emerged from the UN. AIDS-Free World is responding with a new push for the creation of a UN women’s agency.

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