Women’s human rights and the sustainable development agenda

17 June 2014

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

I am pleased to be with you today to open this prestigious panel on women’s human rights and the sustainable development agenda. The topic of this panel comes at a critical moment. After several years of discussion, reaching out to a wide cross section of stakeholders, proposed goals and targets were circulated earlier this month. These proposals included many issues central to building a world which fully respects women’s human rights. Ensuring that the discussions around the sustainable development agenda build on these positive signals and further strengthen the protection of all human rights is absolutely imperative.
Earlier this year in New York, the High Commissioner said to the Open Ended Working Group: “We live in a world that is wealthier than ever before. Yet millions of people still struggle to feed their families. Our problem today is not poverty. It is inequality.”

Today, with these expert panellists, we are going to take a closer look at that inequality, and we will see that it has a female face.

The MDGs have been important in galvanizing international attention and resources to areas which are critical for sustainable development. And there has been progress – especially in increasing access to education and reduction of poverty. However, the focus on aggregates and averages hid the reality of rising inequality. For women, although there is a goal on gender inequality, the narrowly defined targets and indicators undermined a more holistic understanding of how gender inequality and sexism manifests and perpetuates itself in our societies, as well as how this intersects with other forms of discrimination and exclusion. A more holistic approach is required. The sustainable development framework currently being defined is a critical opportunity to embrace a more comprehensive rights agenda.

To do this is really a matter of delivering on the commitments that States have already undertaken to ensure women’s human rights and achieve gender equality. This will require, at a minimum, addressing the following key aspects:

First, freedom from want: The future development framework must reflect commitments to ensure women’s human rights to health, education, housing, property, food, water, sanitation and work. This is important to ensure women’s ability to reach their full potential and participate fully in society and development. But it is also important as a matter of rights, and as such, these issues should be explicitly articulated as rights. Why does this matter?
Take land. We often hear calls for ensuring women’s access to land and other productive resources. However, the fact is that many women all over the world have access, but no rights. This means that their access is dependent on a man, or otherwise mediated – which makes their access insecure.

Take another example – reproductive health. MDG 5 on maternal mortality was crucial in drawing attention to the unacceptably high numbers of women dying in childbirth. But with the focus on women’s reproductive function, rather than on women’s sexual and reproductive health rights, we perpetuated the gender stereotype of women primarily as mothers. The future framework should recognize the centrality of ensuring all individual’s sexual and reproductive health rights, including such intimate issues as whether, when, how and with whom they choose to have sex; whether, when and who they choose to marry; whether, when, how and with whom they choose to have children; and how they choose to express their gender and sexuality.

Second, freedom from fear: One of the most glaring omissions of the MDGs was the failure to address violence against women and girls, a reality impacting one-third of women globally. Sustainable development is unachievable in a world where so many live in fear, and have no access to justice. The good news is that the proposed goals and indicators have included violence against women and harmful practices. But we also need to be explicit about women’s access to justice, which is particularly threatened as a result of many circumstances, including non-recognition of the violations they suffer, inability to access accountability mechanisms for economic, social and cultural reasons, and discriminatory actions by police, prosecutors, judges, health service providers and others. And we must identify indicators which will help us assess whether the world is really becoming a safer place for women, where impunity is no longer the norm.

Third, equality and non-discrimination: The new development agenda should be underpinned by the human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination, in order to challenge continued widespread discrimination against women. The proposed goals and targets foresee eliminating all discriminatory laws by 2030 – for women, these laws are still embedded in the legislation of the majority of countries. It also means including attention to the elimination of discrimination in practice within the family and community, that threatens women’s autonomy, limits opportunities to obtain an education or access information, excludes women from decision-making processes, and unfairly burdens women and girls with domestic tasks.

Fourth, global partnership: The new agenda must include a strong global partnership which ensures that international policies are coherent with human rights, including the right to development. This will require not only that the global institutional structures do not harm human rights as guaranteed by international human rights treaties but to create conditions that will contribute to realisation of human rights.

And finally, if we are serious about achieving sustainable development, we must be willing to hold ourselves accountable for what we commit to. The post 2015 agenda must establish a strong accountability mechanism to hold Governments accountable to reaching the goals, identifying clear responsibilities to ensure that all actors, including private actors, are held to account, that institutions that are answerable and that commitments are enforceable.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

We have an enormous opportunity before us as the sustainable development agenda is being crafted. We have an opportunity to ensure that the voices of women – in all their diversity – are heard, respected and factored into the new framework. We know our aspirations of a world without poverty, a world of peace, will not be realized without working with and for women and girls.

I am very much looking forward to the discussions today, and I am confident that these deliberations will prove useful to the formulation of the future development agenda.

Thank you.