This week could be the week where the UN must hang its head in shame and get its hands dirty once again in the knowledge that they are allowing women to be sacrificed for the sake of political bargaining.
In 2006 a campaign was embarked upon to change the way the UN interacted with gender issues and actually give us a serious opportunity to tackle some of the issues that are destroying the lives of women across the globe: the call was for a separate UN agency for women. What is so surprising about this campaign is that it is actually needed at all. That in 2009 an effective structure to promote gender equality at the UN does not already exist.
The excuse, often rolled out, for not having an independent, well funded and skilled agency to advance gender equality, is that all UN agencies should be dealing with gender issues as part of their programmes. The problem with this is that gender has now become everyone and no one’s issue. In theory the idea that every corner of the UN is tasked with the advancement of women is not a bad one. It just hasn’t worked and the facts speak for themselves:
• Every minute a woman dies in child birth
• 70% of the world’s poor are women
• 67% of the world’s illiterate are women
• Women in Africa still have to walk over five hours a day to collect water
• At least one out of every three women has been raped, beaten or coerced into sex or otherwise abused throughout their life time
• Rape (within marriage) still remains legal in 141 countries
• Women hold only 18.2% of parliamentary seats
• Between 60 – 80% of people affected with HIV/AIDs in Sub-Saharan Africa are women
Faced with these facts it’s hard to understand how anyone can argue that the current structures at the UN to promote gender equality are actually working.
Sadly, even in the face of these facts, the proposed new agency has still met with serious opposition over the past few years. It has been a difficult road but the drivers of this campaign – Aids-Free World, Action for Southern Africa and VSO – have gradually convinced key decision makers of the merits of such an entity at the UN. In 2008 the campaigning paid off; United Nations and all of its member countries voted unanimously in favour of creating a new women’s agency.
A year on and at one of the final hurdles, the adoption of a resolution to create this new and life-changing agency, it looks like it could all be postponed. There are strong indications that this resolution is going to be blocked by a few member states. There are no logical or rational arguments to postpone the adoption of this resolution. The lives of women are being used by a few member states, who are not committed to gender equality, as a bargaining chip and they are being allowed to do so. This only highlights further how urgently an agency within the UN that represents women is actually needed.
The big driving force behind the campaign for the formation of this agency has been Stephen Lewis, a former UN special envoy and co-director of AIDS-Free World. He sums up what this current move to once more demonstrate just how uncommitted the UN is to gender advancement means. He says that it would be ‘a terrible slap in the face to the women of the world, a dreadful rejection of the views of the secretary-general, and a deep blow to the credibility of the United Nations.’
Please visit www.un-gear.eu and join the voices of this campaign to give a voice to the women of the world and to ensure that the UN is held to account and does not allow the lives of so many to be so easily traded.
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