Women to get fair representation on NPC
The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, says the government is committed to ensuring a fair representation of women on the National Peace Council.
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“I have heard about the unfortunate very low representation of women on our Peace Council in Ghana, and we are committed to ensuring that the lapses are addressed,” she stated.
Nana Oye Lithur gave the assurance in response to a complaint by participants in the closing ceremony of the just ended ECOWAS/West Africa Network for Peace-building (WANEP) conference on the annual experience sharing to mark the United Nations’ Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325.
UNSCR 1325
The conference was on the theme: “15 years of the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 in West Africa: Looking back and Looking forward.”
It was organised by the West Africa Network for Peace-building (WANEP), in collaboration with the ECOWAS, to provide a platform for participants to highlight the successes and best practices and the lessons learnt in implementing national adaptation plans for the UNSCR 1325 in West Africa.
The two-day conference, which brought together 55 participants from member states of ECOWAS, also sought to examine the challenges and the way forward, having in view the emerging peace and security threats in the region.
Nana Oye Lithur described the conference as very timely, because in a few weeks there would be a global discourse on the implementation of the UNSCR 1325.
“This sub-regional conference is timely and it is relevant because by then we will have our foot firmly in the door of the global discourse where we will have a report on the West Africa sub-region story on the extent to which we have implemented UNSCR 1325.”
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“It is timely because of our political context in the West Africa subregion. Conflicts have reduced, some have emerged; in fact, we also have Mali, Burkina Faso and other countries.”
Conflicts
“We have some that have emerged from conflicts, and are reconstructing or have reconstructed, that is Liberia and Sierra Leone,” she said.
“But then we saw what happened last year with the Ebola scourge and that tells us that we can never rest on our oars. We have peaceful elections in terms of our political context and Nigeria is one clear example that shamed most of the people who thought that there will be an explosion,” she added.
The minister said: “As a sub-region, we have re-embraced multi-party democracy and we also have our constitutions as our legal framework and as our political documents.”
She noted that “obviously, the UNSRC 1325 has made sure that the sub-region has certain successes and has charted the path for effective integration of gender concerns in peace-building and also in conflict resolution and implementation. It has also worked in some instances and has not worked in other instances.”
“I wish that we have regular, if possible, annual engagements as we are having now, but I know that there are resource constraints in that respect. But this engagement and experience sharing has given us an opportunity to track progress and to monitor and also share and hear best practices, as well as some of the initiatives that have failed,” she said.
Priority areas
Nana Oye Lithur said: “We have identified as a subregion five priority areas: prevention, protection, prosecution, critically monitoring and evaluation and documenting our experiences.”
She said access to justice was very important, declaring that “there is no peace when there is no justice.”
She noted that early warning system was critical in conflict prevention and stated that Africa generally had made some gains; which may not be directly linked to UNSRC 1325 but in terms of gender justice and addressing some of the crimes against humanity and some of the atrocities of war.
"I will just speak specifically to the remarkable judgements in the International Tribunal for Rwanda and also the Sierra Leonean Court where for the very first time in the history we had some classic judgement on rape and we had prosecution and conviction of persons who were engaged in the Rwanda genocide and committed acts of rape.
We also have the same in Sierra Leone and subsequently we have seen that the Rome Status reflects this and rape is firmly entrenched. This is where we want to go in West Africa, in terms of fairly entrenching and ensuring that we address some of the atrocities, as it relates to women and children,” she said.
Vulnerable groups
She said women and children were vulnerable especially during conflicts.
“Moving ahead, apart from implementing and addressing the UNSCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions, we need to look at the fundamentals of gender inequality, culture, tradition and gender based violence on daily basis,” she said.
The minister also observed that Ghana was committed to implementing the UNSCR 1325 and addressing women issues and appealed for support from development partners and the international community.
The Executive Director of WANEP, Mr Chukwuemeka B. Eze, said experience throughout the world had shown that excluding women in all aspects of life, be it political, economic or social, made sustainable peace and development a mirage.
He said the UNSCR 1325 addressed not only the inordinate impact of war on women, but also the pivotal role women should played in conflict transformation, prevention and sustainable peace.
“There is no doubt that the UNSCR 1325 has brought women and their roles the needed political and media attention. It is obvious that there can be no security where women are exposed to violence and no peace where they are ignored,” he stated.
He lauded ECOWAS and the Ghana Government for sponsoring the conference.
The Director of Gender, Youth, Sport, CSO, Employment, Drug Control at the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Sintiki Ugbe, called for resource mobilisation towards the full implementation of the UNSCR 1325 in the subregion.
—GNA