World Bulletin
 | | In northwest Pakistan, a woman displaced by fighting takes away a hygiene kit supplied by the UN Population Fund. William A. Ryan/UNFPA |
New UN Women’s Agency Gets the Go-Ahead
By Barbara Crossette
Sept. 23 -- In the closing hours of the last General Assembly session on Sept. 14, and only days after gloomy advocates were predicting failure, member nations agreed by consensus to establish a new high-level UN agency for women’s issues. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon must now begin the job of finding a strong under secretary-general to lead it.
“We are very relieved that this happened -- it’s time for it to happen,” said Charlotte Bunch, founder of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University and a leader of GEAR, a coalition of several hundred nongovernmental organizations from around the world that has lobbied for a powerful central UN office for women. At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, a strong emphasis was placed on strengthening the institutional influence of women.
“To me, this is the legacy of Beijing,” Bunch added. “This is the unfinished institutional structure for the UN to promote what the Beijing platform is all about. What now has to happen is to get the secretary-general to move on proposing an under secretary-general, getting the allocation and making it clear that he wants this to start being created during the 15th anniversary of Beijing.”
The milestone General Assembly resolution, barely mentioned in UN news bulletins for almost 24 hours because of last-minute disputes over wording -- and greeted at best perfunctorily in the Secretariat -- was reached with considerable controversy.
Some governments argued in the debate that there was a danger of creating another expensive bureaucracy in an already sprawling system. Others were concerned that money would be diverted from development programs in which women were already factored. A few nations apparently balked at what to them looked like a Western feminist idea. Some wanted to stall the process with more discussion, a UN specialty.
The new agency will combine four existing offices or programs dealing with women’s issues, and the under secretary-general who will lead it will rank at the highest official level, just below the secretary-general and his deputy. The decision to go ahead with creating the agency follows decades of discussion about how to give women’s programs more clout and money and three years of intense negotiations over what shape a new office would take.
A lot of work still remains to be done, especially on financing, and opponents are expected to raise roadblocks in the months ahead. But the low level of progress (or complete lack of it) on improving women’s lives through the eight Millennium Development Goals has given the campaign to raise the profile of gender equality and women’s rights greater urgency.
By another measure, according to the UN Population Fund, 62 countries of the 158 that it works in need immediate help to meet the goals of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where it was agreed that women’s reproductive health and rights were crucial elements to reducing poverty and other signs of progress. UN member nations and some officials have paid lip service to the agreements of Cairo and repeat at every opportunity the mantra that women are central to development, but commitment and action have been abysmal in many places.
Under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States is now promising to be a strong partner for women at the UN. An Office of Global Women’s Issues has been set up in the State Department, headed by Melanne Verveer as an ambassador at large. Verveer, who has worked in the field for years and knows the UN well, was a founder and chairwoman of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international nonprofit that aids women economically, politically and in support of their human rights worldwide.
Outlining the administration’s goals for work at the UN in a speech at the Brookings Institution on Sept. 18, Clinton said that she would “work to advance international efforts to recognize women as key drivers of economic progress and social stability, as well, to address impediments to women’s empowerment and advancement, particularly sexual and gender-based violence.” She will also chair a Security Council session on the issue of sexual violence as a tactic of war.
Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and former New York Times UN bureau chief.
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