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RIGHTS: U.N. Urged to Create Separate Agency for Women

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2006 (IPS) - A proposed blueprint for a radical restructuring of the United Nations as envisaged by outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan has fallen short of its target in one specific area: gender empowerment.

As the 191 member states get ready to discuss the political nuances and economic implications of Annan’s recently-released landmark report on U.N. reform, there is an increasingly vociferous demand to rectify the gender shortcoming by creating a separate U.N. agency to deal with women’s issues.

Currently, these issues are dispersed among several U.N. bodies, including the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI) and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).

But none of them, with the exception of UNFPA, are in the major league – or equivalent to stand-alone, resource-rich agencies such as the U.N. Development Programme, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF or the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

A high-level panel of experts on “U.N. System-Wide Coherence in the fields of Development, Humanitarian Assistance, and the Environment”, currently in session, has been asked how gender equality “can be better and more fully addressed in the work of the United Nations”.

In a letter to the Panel Friday, a coalition of U.S.-based women’s groups said: “To date, what is clear from the various reviews since the 1995 Fourth World Conference in Beijing is that the United Nations and national governments are failing in this task” -specifically “on the commitments repeatedly made for gender equality and women’s empowerment”.

The coalition – consisting of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – says that “experience indicates that women’s equality and human rights cannot be achieved without a powerful and well-resourced entity within the United Nations, specifically mandated to achieve these goals.”

“And yet, despite repeated statements on the importance of gender equality, women’s machineries within the United Nations remain under-resourced and marginalised from the main activities and policies of development, humanitarian affairs and environment, as well as from human rights and peacekeeping, at the operational and policy levels,” the letter said.

Although the coalition is not endorsing any specific proposal, it refers to several that are currently on the table: incorporating UNIFEM into the U.N. Development Programme; or combining UNIFEM, DAW, OSAGI and INSTRAW, and creating a new women’s agency with a broad mandate on gender equality (building on UNFPA and UNIFEM), with substantial resources at the global and country levels.

“The same commitments to innovation and effectiveness by member states on other issues should be brought to the discussion of gender equality and women’s human rights,” the letter argues.

“Women’s empowerment and gender issues need to be represented more powerfully at the table at the U.N. headquarters, and in the U.N. country teams and complex peacekeeping operations,” it added.

Jessica Neuwirth, president of the New York-based Equality Now, says that UNIFEM “should certainly be upgraded into a full-fledged agency”.

“The real question is why it hasn’t been sooner, especially as there has been so much public recognition of the central role of women in development,” she told IPS.

Neuwirth also said that the secretary-general himself noted the central role of women in development yet again in his presentation on International Women’s Day last month.

“The problem is that we have repeated acknowledgement of the overarching importance of women and yet in reality women are treated as second-class citizens,” she noted.

Or in this case, UNIFEM has been given a lesser status for no apparent reason, which greatly limits its capacity when one would expect from all the rhetoric that there would be a natural interest in enhancing its capacity, Neuwirth added.

Stephen Lewis, U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and a strong advocate of gender empowerment, said last month that what is needed is an international women’s agency, within the United Nations, to advocate for women the way UNICEF does for children..

“It’s as simple and straightforward as that,” said Lewis, a former UNICEF deputy executive director.

He said that to talk of U.N. reform and human rights for women, in the same breath, under present circumstances is laughable.

“The question then becomes, how do we move in the right direction? Let me speak openly: at the moment, in multilateral terms, the United Nations is hopelessly fragmented in its dealings with women’s issues and women’s human rights.”

The vehicle that would seem, on the surface, to best embody the hopes and needs of women is UNIFEM, he said.

“But it’s not even an agency; it’s a mere department of the UNDP, and it has a budget so modest and a staff so small as to belie any possibility of an agency on a grand scale. I don’t belittle UNIFEM: it does its best, but its best is shackled by a lethal combination of parsimony and misogyny within the international system,” Lewis added.

“If we are to have a separate women’s agency, with financing of at least a billion dollars a year (in order even to approximate the wealth and clout of other U.N. agencies), and several thousand staff (UNICEF has more than 8,000), then we have to start afresh,” he said.

In a letter to Annan on International Women’s Day, a coalition of international women’s groups said: “We are disappointed and frankly outraged that gender equality and strengthening the women’s machineries within the U.N. system are barely noted, and are not addressed as a central part of the (U.N.) reform agenda.”

Neuwirth of Equality Now is equally outraged. She told IPS that her organisation is continually disappointed by the failure of the United Nations in the face of so many opportunities to improve the dismal statistics of women’s representation at the highest levels of decision-making.

“There is no indication that any women were considered to fill the role of deputy secretary-general, and in his recently released short list for the recruitment of the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, the secretary-general did not include a single woman,” she noted.

Last week, Mark Malloch Brown of Britain succeeded Louise Frechette of Canada as the new deputy secretary-general, second in command to Annan.

“This is why the statistics are what they are and why we are not any closer to the 50/50 goal of gender balance by 2000. It is because when openings arise at the highest level, too often men are appointed without any search for, or even due consideration of, qualified women for the vacancy,” Neuwirth said.

Equality Now is calling on the Security Council to seek out a qualified woman to serve as the next secretary-general. Annan completes his second five-year-term at the end of December.

“This is a key opportunity for the United Nations to demonstrate some commitment to implementing the long overdue goals that have been established,” she added.