Violence against women and girls is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations. In our world today violence against women and girls remains largely unreported due to impunity, silence, stigma and shame surrounding it but also due to lack of political will by governments to implement relevant policies to help victims.

On the 25th of November every year we commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on the basis of resolution 54/134 of the General Assembly which invites governments, international organisations as well as NGOs to join together and organise activities designed to raise public awareness of the issue every year on that date.

I find raising awareness for one day too little. We must find other ways to commemorate the International Day.

The executive director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka in her speech at the official commemoration of this day in New York City this year called for turning the struggle to end impunity to a global movement for accountability. This is a very good approach to the issue of violence against women.

IAW has for a couple of years now issued Declarations on Accountability by governments on issues that have to do with the gender equality and women’s human rights. The last IAW Declaration of 2018 is even more important because it refers to civil society, in particular women’s organisations and feminist groups, and the shrinking space they encounter which creates enormous difficulties for them to work.

The reason this is taking place is that CSOs are key players in holding governments to account to ensure their role as duty bearers for the fulfillment of human rights.

So, without a strong civil society, we cannot proceed with what the Executive Director of UN Women is calling for.

We should mobilize to work against overregulation of civil society organisations putting in place restrictions in their funding, taxation, membership registration and thus their functioning.

As the UN Executive Secretary is saying we should turn decades of difficult struggle to end impunity into tangible sisterhood that is getting stronger and telling perpetrators that time is up.

More importantly it is about building partnerships and changing the culture in our society that makes these violations possible and tolerated.

The independence of CSOs is a perquisite for the effective accountability of governments and for building a human rights and gender equality culture.

We have to mobilize to ensure that governments stop using symbolic policies and practices with limited impact as a substitute for the real political and economic commitments that are needed to overcome the structural barriers to eliminating violence against women and more generally the realization of women’s and girls’ human rights.

One way of demonstrating to governments their lack of effective policies and accountability is by gathering data that are comparable at the international level. To that effect I have to reiterate the call of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women who urges the worldwide adoption of femicide watches or gender related killings observatories, in order to collect, analyze and review data at the national, regional and global level.

These data concerning gender related killings would contribute to identifying existing failures of protection, boost preventive measures as well as tackle impunity of perpetrators.

The aim is to move in the direction of collection of comparable world data on femicide and towards the development of modalities of data collection and analysis. Such data could then be turned into femicide rates in order to enable states to objectively assess where they stand on the regional and global level to scale and to adopt actions needed to prevent many preventable deaths of women.

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Urgently calls on its membership to

• initiate projects and support initiatives that propagate monthly hygiene and provide the means for this including suitable underwear and reusable, washable sanitary pads, allowing girls to stay in the school system;
• increase its networking on the national and international level by strong advocacy addressing communities, governments, and also the private and public sectors
•  pressurize local authorities to
  • provide for separate toilets for girls including running water and soap in school areas in order to keep girls in the school system.

 Moved by

Gudrun Haupter, Ursula Nakamura,
IAW Commission on Health 

Seconded by
Airelle Wagenknecht

Read all resolutions:
Resolutions adopted at 37th Congress

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• Shrinking civil society space should be seen as when space is closing for civil society to organize and foster civic engagement and when external support for democracy and human rights is shrinking.
• According to many studies, governments are seen to be the main offenders behind this oppression of civil society space, followed by business actors and extremists groups.

What are the reasons for this recent development?

• An international environment that is not conducive to the realization of human rights in particular concerning women’s human rights.
• The post-1990’s consolidation of hybrid regimes, the post 9/11 era and the spillover effect of counterterrorism agendas, as well as a global society with highly developed information and communication technologies, have also been contributing factors.
• We should work for the recognition of the critical and unequivocal role of women’s and feminist organizations and women’s human rights Without those, there would have been neither Beijing Declaration nor a program of action or progress in its implementation.
• We should advocate for a campaign to make governments understand that working with the civil society is the best way to rule a country. 

What is the situation globally regarding progress on gender equality and women’s human rights?

• The most recent UN Women Progress of the World’s Women publication reported many advances in the status of women around the world. However, the results are very unevenly spread across countries. The political panorama is one of great turmoil. A variety of forms of backlash is threatening the progress made including increasing fundamentalism, violent extremism, increased number of refugees and displaced persons, increased inequalities within and between countries, climate change, etc…
• We have to work to ensure a real accountability for governments to address the structural causes of gender inequality as well as the emerging challenges that are setting back the fight for gender equality.

Why is shrinking space for civil society an important obstacle for the participation of CSOs and feminist organisations in accountability processes?

• Accountability means duty bearers (governments and others) are answerable to the people whose rights and lives are affected by their decisions.
• The independence of CSOs is a prerequisite for effective accountability of governments in the implementation of SDGs and women’s human rights.
• Truly inclusive and democratic participation is a prerequisite for the operation of any meaningful accountability.

Through which mechanisms can women and feminist organizations participate in holding governments accountable for women’s human rights?

• The most important mechanism is the one of the 2030 Development Agenda, the High-Level Political Forum, which was designated as the global apex of the follow-up and review process of the SDGs.
• The mandate of HLPF to review and hold states accountable is weak and limited especially because of its reliance on voluntary self-reporting. This mechanism needs strengthening.
• We should work to make the HLPF provide a counter-balance, an opportunity for engagement, and a place where government action can be subjected to scrutiny.
• Because of the weaknesses of the SDG’s accountability architecture, it is crucial to seek other complementary pathways and tools of accountability. These offer opportunities for women rights’ organizations to influence and inform policy-making and implementation in the long term and to identify systemic failures as well as good practices.
• UN mechanisms such as the Treaty Monitoring bodies, Special Procedures and the Universal Periodic Review could prove to be effective fora for monitoring progress on how far SDGs’ implementation plans by states align with human rights in particular women’s human rights.
• We should work to have the findings generated by human rights’ mechanisms in particular the findings concerning women’s human rights fed into the SDG specific review process.
• We should ask states to explain how their SDG’s implementation plans are in line with their human rights obligations concerning women.

Conclusions 

• Women’s human rights’ standards must be those on which public decisions are assessed.
• We should work for women to be full participants in any accountability processes.
• In conclusion, one crucial way of strengthening CSOs including women’s organisations is through their participation in accountability processes.

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Trump has objectified women, has glorified sexual assault, and more generally the mistreatment of women, calling them ‘fat pig’ and ‘sheet’. He has been boasting about grabbing women between their legs and kissing them without their consent.

Reasons for Trump’s election

In order to be able to understand what should be done to meet the challenges of the coming era, one has to try to answer why has Trump been elected, what are the reasons behind his triumph, why women have voted for a misogynist?

Neo-liberalism is the ideology behind Trump’s triumphal election. His election was enabled by the policies that overlooked the plight of the most vulnerable citizens in the US. It was a desperate and xenophobic cry for a way out of a devastating neo-liberal order.

White working and middle-class citizens out of anger rejected the economic neglect of neo-liberal policies. Yet these same citizens supported a candidate who appeared to blame their social misery on minorities, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, black people, gay people, and women.

They have lost jobs, pensions, and much of the safety nets that used to make these losses less frightening. They see the future for their children being even worse than their precarious present.

Donald Trump has spoken directly to the hearts of these people. So do all the rising far right parties in Europe. They answer it with anger at remote bureaucracies, Washington, the EU, the World Trade Organization etc. They answer it as well by degrading immigrants, people of colour, Muslims and women.

What are the characteristics of neo-liberalism?

Neo-liberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It maintains that the market delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are considered as attempts to limit liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimized, public services should be privatized. The organization of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is considered the highest value. Efforts to create a more equal society are considered as counter productive. The market ensures that everybody gets what they deserve.

Neo-liberalism means massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing, and competition in public services.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty. When neo-liberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally through trade treaties.

Impact of neo-liberalism in the political field

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neo-liberalism is not the economic crisis it has caused but the political crisis. As the domain of the State is reduced, the citizens’ power of voting also contracts and with it their ability to change the course of their lives.

When governments lose the authority that arises from the delivery of public services, the only thing they can do is to threaten and coerce people to obey. If the dominant ideology stops governments from responding to the needs of the electorate, then the electorate turns instead to anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols, and sensation.

The backlash against neo-liberalism’s crushing of political choice has elevated Donald Trump.

Why have women voted for Trump?

What has happened with women votes? How could women vote for him?

A quite plausible explanation is the one that says that in a culture in which one’s self worth is measured primarily by one’s desirability to men then women’s energy is consumed into this horizontal competition with other women that can never be totally won. One way to be desirable to men may be to align oneself with their interests in the hope they might protect you.

The majority of black women and a large number of Hispanic women voted for Clinton. The problem has been with white women.

What is positive about the misogyny of Trump is that he has injected new life, new awareness into the demands for equal treatment for women everywhere. His attitude towards women has shed light on the everyday, pervasive sexism. The good news is that young women have realized that there is a long way to go. Trump has reinvigorated feminism by reminding everyone, but especially women, of the serious violations of their human rights that they experience all over the world.

What should be done?

We should work for a development model that prioritizes people over profits. We have to demand at the international level a global economic development system that protects, respects and fulfills human rights, particularly women’s human rights.

We have to demand changes at the national and international level that promote accountability mechanisms for governments, in particular for the corporate and private sector that is focused on profits at the cost of people’s welfare.

We have finally to do away with the pursuit of gendered global economic strategies using the neo-liberal economic model that are deepening poverty and inequality within and between countries, between women and men and marginalizing women even more.

We should build a radical movement that is based on a genuine re-distributive agenda. This agenda should also include policies that fight institutionalized racism, economic inequality, climate change and gender inequality and violations of women’s human rights.

We should work for an answer to the hate and fear represented by extreme right, xenophobic, and anti-feminist forces.

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This development takes place in a context of increasing attacks on human rights in particular the human rights of women and girls.

This is what we experienced during the CSW59 where an important backlash took place with the exclusion of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), as well as women’s and feminist organizations from both the negotiation of the Political Declaration and the Resolution on the working methods of the Commission on the Status of Women. What are the root causes of this situation?

Currently there is an international environment that is not conducive to the realization of human rights, in particular women’s human rights. The current macroeconomic model fails to address structural barriers to gender equality and the fulfilment of women and girls’ human rights perpetuating poverty, inequality and the gendered division of labour.

CSOs, women’s and feminist organizations should demand a new development paradigm that is not based solely on economic growth but which prioritizes people over profits. A new development paradigm that regulates as well the role of the private sector through binding frameworks that aligns their actions with human rights and sustainable development objectives and holds corporations accountable for violations of human rights and gender equality.

We should call on politicians to recognize the critical role women’s organizations, feminist organizations and women’s human rights defenders have played in pushing for gender equality, the human rights and empowerment of women and girls. The attempt of governments to marginalize the role of these groups is an affront to women everywhere.

CSOs, along with women’s and feminist organizations, should demand from governments and politicians that they create robust accountability mechanisms at national, regional and global levels. These should clearly set out the responsibilities of all stakeholders which  hold state and non-state actors, including multilateral institutions to account for their role in perpetuating gender inequality and violations of the human rights of women.

We call on politicians to show renewed political will and move from commitment to accomplishments. We call on them to work to adopt a new paradigm of accountability that can make the entire process of sustainable development more transformative and responsive to the peoples’ needs. As the Secretary General of the UN has said, a new paradigm of accountability is in fact the real test of a peoples’ centred development. This new accountability paradigm should institutionalize the participation of CSOs, in particular women’s and feminist organizations and marginalized groups, in the implementation, reviewing and monitoring of the Post-2015 Development Agenda at all levels. It should provide avenues for CSOs, women’s and feminist organizations to hold decision-makers answerable for their actions and seek redress where necessary.

States should recognize that by participating in accountability mechanisms, hearing from stakeholders and people affected and addressing their concerns, they are helping to ensure implementation at all levels.

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