STATEMENT BY THE ACTING HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS TO THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL

ECOSOC
17 July 2003

Following is the statement delivered by Bertrand G. Ramcharan, the Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, to the Economic and Social Council's panel on gender mainstreaming, on Thursday, 17 July, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva:
"It is a great pleasure and an honour to participate in this discussion of gender mainstreaming, particularly within the ECOSOC context. The Agreed Conclusions ECOSOC adopted in 1997 have guided our own efforts to improve the integration of gender perspectives and women’s rights into the activities of the UN human rights system.
As I am sure you know, our Office has given strong priority to gender and women’s rights issues.
We have been asked to share our experience and examples of good practice in the integration of gender perspectives. The elimination of gender discrimination has been an integral part of UN human rights efforts from the beginning. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms without any distinction based on sex. The two most basic human rights treaties – the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the General Assembly, in 1966 - not only repeated that injunction, but added a common provision (article 3 in both cases) specifically committing ratifying States to ensure the equal enjoyment by men and women of all rights included in the Covenants. Shortly after the two Covenants entered into force a decade later, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted by the Commission on the Status of Women and the General Assembly. Thus, gender discrimination was reasserted – with racial discrimination – as a core human rights issue.
The 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference for Women reinforced the message that the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights had already emphasized: that women’s rights are human rights. The 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism was particularly successful in drawing attention to the intersection of both forms of discrimination. In agreeing to tackle the double discrimination that women often suffer, because of their ethnicity as well as their gender, UN Member States renewed in Durban their commitment to combating gender discrimination on a priority basis.
Thus, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is doubly mandated to mainstream gender. On the one hand, as all other UN entities, OHCHR is expected to implement the gender mainstreaming policy of the United Nations, using the 1997 ECOSOC Agreed Conclusions as a basic reference. On the other hand, human rights norms and standards require OHCHR to contribute to the realization of all human rights for all people without distinction. In addition to the key world conferences and summits, the resolutions adopted on the human rights of women by the Commission on Human Rights, the Commission on the Status of Women, this Council and the General Assembly have all reiterated this mandate.
In responding to this dual mandate, the activities of the Office have two different dimensions. First, the Office must, in its own activities, ensure the full adoption of a gender perspective, giving specific attention to the need to integrate the elimination of gender discrimination and the promotion and protection of the equal human rights of women into all the activities of the High Commissioner and his staff. In addition, the Office can - and does - seek to provide support to the efforts made by UN human rights organs and mechanisms to integrate gender dimensions in the implementation of their mandates. Significant progress has been made in that respect, often with the valuable support of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General, Ms. King, of the Division on the Advancement of Women (and other UN partners such as UNFPA), and of the many NGOs that have played such an important role in promoting the women’s agenda in all human rights discussions.
The Commission on Human Rights and the Commission on the Status of Women provide a valuable example of cooperation among the functional commissions of ECOSOC. For years, the Chairperson of CSW has participated in the CHR sessions, and earlier this year – for the first time – the Chairperson of the CHR was also able to participate in the CSW session. An annual joint work plan and report of the Division on the Advancement of Women and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is submitted to both the CSW and CHR sessions.
The Commission on Human Rights tries to integrate women’s and gender issues throughout its agenda, as well as having a specific agenda item dedicated to women’s rights, which focuses particularly on violence against women and on trafficking. As evidenced by the reports of the Secretary-General, the resolutions of the Commission on Human Rights frequently refer specifically to gender issues. In particular, the Commission has called on all its special procedures to address within their mandates the problems of trafficking in women and girls and of violence against women. In addition to its resolution on integration of the human rights of women and a gender perspective, which calls on all special procedures and other human rights mechanisms to take a gender perspective into account in the implementation of their mandates, many – though not yet all – of the Commission’s resolutions specifically request mandate holders to integrate gender and/or women’s rights into their work. In particular, the Commission has emphasized the issue of women’s equal access to land, housing and property, asking the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing [as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living] for additional reports on women and housing.
Similarly, the Sub-Commission on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights has, for many years, worked on mandates of particular importance to women’s rights, such as that of the Special Rapporteur on traditional practices or that of the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. In addition, the Sub-Commission decided last year to integrate a gender perspective into all its agenda items.
As for the human rights treaty bodies, in addition to the work of the CEDAW Committee, the other five treaty bodies (now about to be six, with the entry into force on the 1st of July of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families) have also addressed gender discrimination and women’s rights issues, increasingly so in recent years. The Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have always been particularly attentive to gender discrimination. The Human Rights Committee has also dealt with relevant issues –a surprising proportion of the few relevant individual communications it has handled under the Optional Protocol, were in fact brought by men. Its adoption of General Comment no. 28 in 2000 has reinforced the Committee’s sensitivity to gender and women’s rights issues. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also adopted a General Recommendation in 2000, committing itself to giving greater attention to gender dimensions of racism. Finally, the Committee Against Torture is also increasingly dealing with torture issues specific to women particularly with regard to trafficking.
As for the special procedure mandate holders, there has also been progress in their integration of gender perspectives and approaches into their mandates. Several special procedures work closely with the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and several have also been in contact with the CEDAW Committee and dedicated part of their work and efforts to specific issues that affect women disproportionately or differently.
The Office has worked to facilitate and encourage this process in several ways. Together with other UN partners (including particularly DAW and UNFPA), it has organized several workshops for independent experts – both members of treaty bodies and special procedure mandate holders - to raise awareness about gender issues and about human rights issues in which gender dimensions are particularly important (such as HIV/AIDS or sexual and reproductive health). It has also encouraged States, UN agencies and NGOs to provide relevant information to the human rights mechanisms.
As in the UN Secretariat, gender balance among the independent human rights experts can facilitate gender mainstreaming. There are, of course, many examples of men who have given great attention to women’s rights but it has often been the few women experts who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden in raising relevant gender discrimination issues. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the only treaty body to have had a reasonable gender balance – its membership has usually included 70% of women – has also been the most sensitive to gender discrimination issues affecting girls as well as, though more rarely, boys. The other five treaty bodies have had more than 90% men (or women in the case of CEDAW) among its members. For the CHR special procedures and the Commission itself, the gender balance has been somewhat better, though still clearly favouring men. It is the responsibility of States to address this problem, by improving the gender balance in their nomination and election or appointment of independent experts to the human rights mechanisms.
Gender balance is also an issue that needs further attention in the Office’s own activities. We have been one of the UN entities with a reasonable gender balance among our staff, coming close to the objective of 50% women among our professional staff in recent years. However, it is true that this reflects mainly greater numbers of women among our junior professionals. We have done less well at middle-management levels, and we have so few senior posts that a few changes at that level can have a dramatic impact on the gender balance among senior staff.
We have now realized that we do not consistently monitor the participation of women and men in our human rights activities. We are addressing the issue: the team servicing the sessions of the Commission on Human Rights has been compiling statistics on participation in the sessions, and such figures are disaggregated on the basis of gender, revealing a slow but steady improvement in the participation of women (with the proportion being somewhat higher among NGOs than among State delegations or – in particular – among dignitaries addressing the Commission). Our colleagues are now revising the lists of participants in the activities the Office organizes: seminars, training workshops, fellowship programmes, etc. We realize that we have examples of very good gender balance, but that they are not consistent enough. We need to monitor the situation systematically to ensure that women benefit equally from our activities.
Our efforts have improved recently. Since the mid-1990s, in particular, groups of committed colleagues – often including a disproportionate number of younger women – have worked tirelessly to increase our attention to gender issues. Thanks to their efforts, and to the help and support of inter-agency gender mechanisms (including the generosity of UNFPA which seconded a staff member to our Office for several years), the Office was able to carry out a number of initiatives, including gender training in which more than 60 staff members participated in 2000.
Realising that we needed to dedicate more attention and resources to these efforts, we requested the assistance of donors in 2001, and established a full-time post of Gender Coordinator for the Office. In July 2002, we adopted a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy, which requires us to carry out a number of actions:
(1) designating Gender Focal Points for each working unit, to be integrated into an office-wide network;
(2) including discussions of gender mainstreaming regularly in the agenda of management bodies;
(3) carrying out a gender review of all proposed projects;
(4) including gender mainstreaming objectives in the workplans of all units and individual staff members;
(5) monitoring progress; and
(6) identifying specific needs for capacity-building for staff and experts, and seeking resources for the necessary training and awareness-raising.
Gradual implementation of the Strategy has been proceeding over the last 12 months. Our greatest success has probably been the establishment of a working and effective Network of Gender Focal Points. I am proud to report that – as required by our Strategy - a significant proportion of its members are mid-level rather than junior professionals. We have succeeded beyond the requirement we set (a minimum of one-third) in having 40% of men among the 27 gender focal points. We have also made significant progress in having gender mainstreaming discussions in meetings of the Policy Review Board and Heads of Field Presences, and in including gender review in the pre-screening of projects. Inclusion of gender mainstreaming objectives in workplans is proceeding only gradually, which makes monitoring of progress still difficult. But our early efforts have already succeeded in identifying the need for more attention to gender-balance among the participants in our activities.
The most important lesson we can draw from our efforts of the last few years is that gender mainstreaming requires us to pursue a dual strategy: on the one hand, we need to ensure that responsibility for gender mainstreaming is assigned to every individual staff member, with a particular emphasis on senior managers. On the other, we need to be able to maintain a dedicated and specialized gender capacity to assist us in our efforts – not to carry out all the relevant tasks but to support us in learning how to we can all integrate gender perspectives in carrying out our own tasks.
We have established an additional post of Senior Gender Adviser - currently under recruitment – with extra-budgetary support. Yet we still need additional resources for capacity-building in this area.
In addition to improving the gender balance among our staff, experts and participants in activities, and to continue implementing our gender mainstreaming strategy with particular emphasis on resources for capacity-building, I want to highlight what may be our greatest challenge for the future: achieving a better integration of UN efforts to mainstream both gender and rights-based approaches.
Efforts to address the gender dimensions of UN work started earlier, and have taught us lessons on the mechanisms and techniques needed to mainstream attention to gender. The efforts to address human rights as a cross-cutting theme that must lie at the centre of all our activities have much to learn from the experience of gender mainstreaming.
The UN promotes the advancement of women not only because it works – that is, because it improves the sustainability of development or the success of conflict prevention and resolution. It also does so because it is right – because women are entitled to equal rights. ECOSOC specified in 1997 that gender mainstreaming has as its objective the promotion of gender equality, and it is that element of equality and non-discrimination that lies at the centre of the human rights agenda. By ensuring that our activities address the legitimate needs and aspirations of both women and men, we will address both our gender and human rights objectives.
Gender is a natural part of the human rights agenda, as much as women’s rights are a crucial part of the gender mainstreaming agenda. We need to ensure that all our efforts in each area consistently integrate the perspective of the other. We still have much progress to make in ensuring that all human rights activities combat gender discrimination; we look forward to the continuing support of the Office of the Special Advisor, and of the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality, as we continue our efforts to improve the integration of gender perspectives in UN human rights activities".



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