UN Commission produces Agreed Conclusions
The 60th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW60), held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, from March 14 to 24, 2016, has produced a set of Agreed Conclusions.
Advertisement
The 30-point Agreed Conclusions highlight the economic, education, health and humanitarian needs of women and girls and underscored the relationship between these needs and achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The meeting also agreed on the importance of a gender-responsive approach to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), calling for an end to violence against women and girls in order to achieve the goals, stressing the need to ensure that no one was left behind in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Equal rights
The Commission recognised that women’s equal economic rights, economic empowerment and independence were essential to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It underlines the importance of undertaking legislative and other reforms to realise the equal rights of women and men, as well as girls and boys where applicable, to access economic and productive resources, including land and natural resources, property and inheritance rights, appropriate new technology and financial services (including microfinance) and women’s equal opportunities for full and productive employment and decent work, and equal pay for equal work or work of equal value.
The Commission further recognised that the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development required the full integration of women into the formal economy, including through their effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life and through changing the current gender-based division of labour to ensure that unpaid care and domestic work was equally shared and recognised, reduced and redistributed.
Women's leadership roles
It recognised the need to ensure that women were empowered to effectively and meaningfully participate in leadership and decision-making processes and that their needs and interests were prioritised in strategies and responses towards the promotion of the human rights of women and girls.
The Commission urged governments to, among other things, strengthen women's leadership and participation in decision-making in all areas of sustainable development; strengthen normative, legal and policy frameworks, including by adopting and reviewing implementation of laws that criminalise violence against women and girls; and promote and protect the human rights of all women and their sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights (SRHR).
Closing resource gaps
On finance, the Commission called for closing resource gaps and mobilising financial resources from all sources, including domestic resource mobilisation (DRM), official development assistance (ODA) and strengthening North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation towards the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
The Commission affirmed that it would contribute to the thematic reviews of progress on the SDGs taking place at the high-level political forum and exercise its catalytic role for gender mainstreaming so as to ensure that follow-up and review processes benefit all women and girls and contribute to the full realisation of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by 2030.
The Commission also reaffirmed that the promotion and protection of, and respect for, the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women, including the right to development, which were universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, should be mainstreamed into all policies and programmes aimed at the eradication of poverty, and also reaffirmed the need to take measures to ensure that every person was made to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development.
Climate change
On climate change, the Conclusions recognised the challenges that climate change posed to achieving sustainable development and noted its disproportionate effects on women and girls, as well as its impact on other environmental issues, such as coastal erosion and ocean acidification, deforestation, and desertification.
The Commission, therefore, recognised the need for countries to respect and promote gender equality and women's empowerment when addressing climate change, in line with the Paris Agreement which sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming.
Side events or activities organised outside the formal programme of the session of the Commission provided an excellent opportunity for member states, UN entities and NGOs to discuss themes of the Commission and other critical gender equality issues.
Media partners
During one of such side events, UN Women launched ‘Step it Up for Gender Equality Media Compact', with the initiative calling on media partners to become gender champions through their reporting, editorial decisions and corporate practices, in order to increase attention to women in the media, including women in decision-making and leadership roles, and disrupt biases and stereotypes.
The partnership is expected to serve as an alliance of media organisations committed to advancing gender issues within the framework of the SDGs.
Observing that when reporting was “predominantly by men, about men, it was actually misrepresenting the real state of the world,” UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said, the partnership will strive to ensure that, the media worked for gender equality and women's rights.
Representatives of member states, UN entities, and UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) accredited non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from all regions of the world, attended the session. The priority theme was “Women’s empowerment and its link to sustainable development”, with “The elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls” as the review theme.