UN Women and Saudi Arabia - a demystification of the roles of the Executive Board

Controversial bids by countries with poor women's rights records to join the Executive Board of UN Women has caused an uproar. It has also exposed a confusion about the role of the newly-created body. Here we offer a short demystification of the issues involved. 

UN Women’s recent announcement that Saudi Arabia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will be on its Executive Board has stirred much controversy and some confusion as to the responsibilities of countries on the Executive Board. The two countries have miserable reputations for the protection of women’s rights. Rape as a weapon of war is widespread in the DRC, and Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam severely restricts women’s economic and social rights. Iran, a country that preserves practices such as death by stoning as punishment for adultery, also bid to join the Executive Board, but was unsuccessful.

Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi called Iran and Saudi Arabia’s bids “a joke”, claiming that the board “will not get anywhere” with these two countries as members. Blogger Saudiwoman rejected this claim, saying that by including Saudi Arabia, UN Women may have more influence over the country’s human rights policies, and “engage Saudis and educate women here on their rights”.

There seems to be some confusion in this debate as to what UN Women will actually do and what responsibilities fall to its executive board. UN Women has been created to streamline the several previously-existing women’s rights agencies into one body – these agencies were UNIFEM, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Division for the Advancement of Women and the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women. It will become operational in January 2011.

UN Women is mainly a monitoring and technical support body. It aims to “support Member States to advance gender equality, in line with national priorities and international norms and policies.”  This means that not just those states that are on the Executive Board will be held accountable for the standard of their women’s rights protection. All UN Member States are to keep in line with gender equality resolutions made by the General Assembly, which are politically binding, and Security Council, which are legally binding. UN Women is there to monitor their progress in implementing UN commitments. Saudi Arabia will be no more thoroughly monitored due to its position on the Board than any other country would be. What’s more, the Member States get to decide when and what kind of help UN Women provide within their states. So UN Women will only be helping out in Saudi Arabia and DRC if they are invited to do so. Such is the nature of sovereignty.

So what is the purpose of the Executive Board? There are 41 members on this Board, drawing from 5 major regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Six of the states are taken from major contributing countries, a category which includes the USA, UK and Saudi Arabia. One function of the Board is to establish which countries have the greatest need for support. UNIFEM works in 80 countries of the world, according to requests for help and the organization’s judgment of which countries need their technical support most urgently. This pattern will be continued by UN Women in its decisions on how to allocate its financial and technical resources.

As far as innovation goes, the board will be able to influence policy making by recommending new initiatives to the Council and Assembly and approve country programs and projects within its own field.

All this means that the countries on the board must agree to what policies the agency will advocate for. The diversity of State practices in women’s rights represented on the board could make progress slow and halt forward-thinking policies. However, each region of the world must be represented – without fair representation there is the danger of Western states being accused of cultural imperialism.

UN Women can be a useful body for the creation of new international frameworks for women’s rights. However, cooperation with these standards still largely falls down to the individual State’s willingness to change their laws and practices. If Saudi Arabia does not invite UN Women to intervene in its country, there is little UN Women can do apart from exert political and diplomatic pressure. Saudi Arabia’s presence on the board may lead to the expression of some less progressive views on women’s rights, but it may also encourage a change of mindset for some Saudi policy-makers. Next year, UN Women will begin to operate, and we must hope that the Executive Board members undertake their offices in good faith, and with a good understanding that their position requires them to make furthering the freedom of women their main goal.

"It is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict" - Ten years on from the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security

Ten years ago, the UN Security Council made it legally-binding to involve women's perspectives and voices in conflict resolution and peace building. Still, the burden of conflict and war continues to fall heavily on female soldiers. There is a long way to go in the struggle to empower women as actors in peace processes and give them a say in the decisions that so deeply affect their lives. However, UNSCR 1325 points us in the right direction.

Bill Clinton once said: “If we’d had women at Camp David, we’d have had an agreement”.[1] His words recognize the contribution that a different approach to conflict resolution can achieve. From Serbia’s Women in Black to Israel and Palestine’s Jerusalem Link and our SAVE anti-terrorism platform, women are forging understanding at the grass-roots level across ethnic and religious divides in order to contribute to peace negotiation efforts.

Ten years ago, the United Nations made a landmark recognition that peace-building efforts have historically been half-blind. On October 31, 2000, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. It recognized the need to promote women’s involvement in all levels of the decision-making process, and legally-bound all UN member states to increase their efforts to combat gender-based violence in combat situations, and promote the involvement of women’s organizations in peace processes.

Promoting women’s involvement in peace making is not only important because women are good at peace making, it is also important because women should have a say in decisions that affect their lives. Peace accords shape how post-conflict societies are run, and war itself is a phenomenon that impacts just as much, if not more, on women as on men.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert once commented: “It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict.” In his capacity as UN Peacekeeping Operation commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he should know what he is talking about. Rape as a weapon of war has reached pandemic proportions in the African country, where last year over 8,000 women were raped – one for every hour of the day. Systematic rape as a method of ethnic cleansing, intimidation, and a way to disintegrate and polarize communities was brought to the world’s attention during the Bosnian war, when somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped over the three and a half years of conflict. That conflict led to war rape being classed as a crime against humanity, but it already was and continues to be a chillingly common weapon.

Rape is admittedly one of the worse ways women are affected by conflict, but there are many other channels through which the burden falls heavily on female shoulders. War has become much more democratic over the last century. Back in the early 1900s, 90% of war casualties were soldiers. Nowadays, 90% are civilians. And the majority of these civilians that become victims of conflict are women and children. Even when not killed by war or raped by combatants, women are often left with an almost insurmountable burden when their male relatives become casualties. The nature of patriarchal societies inherently means that it is harder for women to support their families when they are left without the male bread winner. Discriminatory laws and practices making it harder for women to inherit property, secure an income and protect themselves against exploitation, serve to exacerbate the difficulty of post-conflict situations for women, especially those supporting a family on their own.

However, women should not be portrayed simplistically as victims of war. Their status as one of the main groups affected by war should mean that, democratically, they play a major role in the conduct and resolution of conflict and post-conflict reconstruction. It is not sufficient that men make decisions for women, however inclusive and non-discriminatory these men try to be. It is time that women be allowed to exercise their human rights, make their own decisions and promote the specific needs and interests of women.

Even so, men make up 97.6% of signatories on peace agreements, with on average only 5.9% women in negotiating delegations. Considering the magnified adverse effects that war and its ongoing consequences have on women, this situation is not only hugely unfair and undemocratic, it is also untenable if conflicts are to be resolved on a lasting basis. Currently, over half of all conflicts reignite within a decade of peace being made. This signals that peace-building efforts are not targeting the root causes of conflict nor re-constructing societies on terms that are inclusive and acceptable to all. In peace agreements, the interests and needs of sections of society may be neglected – for example in the Dayton Peace Accords, which effectively banned certain segments of society from reaching the highest echelons of the political hierarchy – but with women we are not talking about a minority. The rights and interests of half – sometimes more than half – the population are consistently ignored.

It is easy to dismiss the resolution as a “soft issue” that the UN will never be able to follow up. But it is not a difficult resolution to keep. It is largely about changing attitudes. It should not be an extra effort to incorporate women in peace-keeping missions and negotiating teams – women already exist; you don’t have to make them. It doesn’t cost any extra resources to involve women and consider their needs. The legal framework that the resolution put in place obligates peace-keeping missions and negotiating teams to consider the perspectives and needs of women before they make decisions that concern the whole population. Focusing on HIV/AIDs awareness, making women’s rights an integral part of policy-making on subjects such as repatriation and resettlement (women and children make up 80% of the world’s refugee populations), electoral and judicial systems, and eliminating impunity for those who have carried out gender-based violence will help build healthier societies. 

Post-conflict societies need stability and socioeconomic development. Empowering women is possibly the surest way to achieve this. In the words of Kofi Annan: “"No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, or to reduce infant and maternal mortality. No other policy is as sure to improve nutrition and promote health -- including the prevention of HIV/AIDS. No other policy is as powerful in increasing the chances of education for the next generation… But whatever the very real benefits of investing in women, the most important fact remains: women themselves have the right to live in dignity, in freedom from want and from fear.”

---

[1] Swanee Hunt and Cristina Posa, „Women Waging Peace”, Foreign Policy, May-June 2001.