Baroness Jolly
Main Page: Baroness Jolly (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Women: Equality and Advancement
Baroness Jolly Excerpts
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. Looking at the list of speakers, it is not the least bit surprising that it has been so well informed and interesting. I am pleased to be here to answer this Question for Short Debate on the Commission on the Status of Women, which I shall refer to as CSW, if noble Lords will excuse me. The UK Government are committed to improving the lives of women and girls both nationally and internationally, and prioritise the advancement of women’s rights.
The Prime Minister has called for a special focus in 2014 on ending violence and discrimination against women and girls. We have heard today about two excellent conferences that have been held in short order on those issues. It has been an aim of the Foreign Office to address the greatest challenge of the 21st century—women’s full political, economic and social participation. We work tirelessly at both national and international level to improve the rights of women everywhere, and our involvement at CSW is one way to do this.
CSW is the primary forum of the United Nations for promoting gender equality and the human rights of women and girls. As such, participating in its annual meeting allows the UK to display leadership in gender equality, to campaign for women’s rights on a global stage, and to use its outcomes to inform our national and international equality policies. Our strong commitment to CSW demonstrates our belief that it is a crucial element in the campaign for global equality. We send a strong delegation each year. My noble friend Lady Hodgson of Abinger attends regularly, and this year three Ministers attended—the Minister for Women and Equalities, the Secretary of State for International Development and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development. I know that it is already in the diary of the Minister for Women and Equalities for next year.
Another strength of CSW is the role that civil society plays. My noble friend Lady Hodgson made that clear during her speech. Civil society organisations from around the world attend CSW to represent their constituencies and lobby member states. In the UK we have a very good relationship with our NGOs. We meet them regularly in the run-up to CSW, including at ministerial level. This helps to inform our position and our negotiating objectives. At CSW it is wonderful to see civil society come together from around the world, with people sharing their stories, their plans and their aspirations. Thousands of women from around the world come together at CSW: our own NGOs are well represented, and many hundreds of women from the UK attend.
CSW is co-ordinated by UN Women. We are fully supportive of the work of UN Women and were, until recently, its largest donor. CSW provides an opportunity to encourage support for better representation of women in decision-making. In both the political and the economic sphere we all need to do more to ensure that women are involved in making the decisions that affect us all. That point was raised by my noble friend Lady Bottomley. CSW enables us to ensure that gender equality becomes a reality not just for the UK but for women everywhere.
To best respond to the question about what CSW’s impact on gender equality and the advancement of women is, we should remind ourselves what it is that CSW aims to do. In 1995, at the UN’s Fourth World Conference for Women, 17,000 participants and 30,000 activists arrived in Beijing to lend their voices and support to the campaign for gender equality. The UK and 188 other member states created the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which laid out a series of promises by Governments to work towards the eradication of inequality.
The platform for action remains one of the most comprehensive and forward-looking texts on gender equality, and its manifesto underpins the UK’s work on empowering women.
Since 1996, the main focus of the work of the CSW has been the follow-up to the platform for action. Its annual gathering allows Governments to share their progress and ideas on gender equality, learn good practice from each other and, crucially, allows progressive member states, including the UK, to display leadership and influence global policy on equality, helping women everywhere to live better lives.
CSW-agreed conclusions are set global norms and recommendations for action by governments and intergovernmental bodies. They provide a benchmark that can be used to support other international negotiations and agreements. For example, the UK drew on the agreed conclusions from CSW 57—the one held last year—to inform the recent WHO violence resolution and UN Human Rights Council resolutions. The conclusions are also used as a lobbying tool by civil society at both national and international level.
This year’s CSW focused on the achievements and challenges of the millennium development goals, and was an important opportunity for the UK to help to shape the post-2015 development agenda. I am delighted to be able to say that in the agreed conclusions CSW called for a post-2015 development goal on gender equality and for women’s rights to be mainstreamed across the post-2015 agenda. That strong outcome was achieved despite determined efforts from some countries to roll back previously agreed positions on women’s rights. We were successful in securing strong language on UK priorities, including ending violence against women and girls, economic empowerment, leadership and participation in decision-making, strengthened data collection and disaggregation by sex and age, and ending harmful practices, including child early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation. That picks up on a point made by my noble friend Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne.
Next year, on the 20th anniversary of the Beijing platform for action, CSW will review Governments’ progress in fulfilling the promises made in the Beijing platform for action 20 years earlier in 1995. Moving to Beijing+20, member states are being called on to complete comprehensive national reports on their progress in the 12 critical areas for women identified in the Beijing platform for action.
The UK has today submitted its national report to UN Women, and we have some very good stories to tell on the progress that we have made in critical areas—particularly violence against women and women’s economic participation—but, guarding against complacency, the report has also shown that this is a good opportunity to identify where we need to do more to fulfil the promises that we made more than 20 years ago.
As noble Lords will be aware, 2015 also brings to a close the millennium development goals plan and marks the creation of a new strategy on global development. This is therefore a unique time to place the rights of women and girls at the heart of discussions on human development, and CSW has been an important means to achieve that. In 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action called for the eradication of gender inequality. Twenty years on, that document remains forward looking, because we have yet to achieve a world in which men and women are treated equally. CSW plays a crucial role in advancing the rights of women and girls everywhere.
I will take whatever time I have left quickly to address points raised by noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, talked about reform of the CSW. We believe that the CSW could be made more effective. We are discussing with UN Women whether there is scope to reform the format of CSW to try to reduce combativeness and move away from entrenched positions.
My noble friend Lady Nicholson spoke about honour killings. The UK takes action to tackle honour killings both at home and abroad. We believe that challenging social norms requires long-term work with communities, working with men and boys as well as women and girls. We are supporting this work with communities at grass-roots level.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on joining this debate. I am sure that he was not at all out of place as the only noble Lord among us. I congratulate him on the work he has done on fistula. I have seen this in Zambia. A couple of years ago I was at a bush hospital where they were taking women in in their fourth and fifth month of pregnancy to try to help them through the pregnancy and minimise fistula. That work is progressing. We are training people in the UK, not in surgery, but just to do certain work in this area.
My noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone said that the empowerment of women is a key thread in the CSW. I do not think that anybody here would disagree with that but we need more third-world role models in this area. Perhaps the CSW needs to think about setting a challenge to first-world corporates working in the third world; perhaps we need to think about our own responsibility challenge and how that might be replicated elsewhere.
All noble Lords questioned the area of development. The UK is engaged in the development of the post-2015 development framework. We are clear that there must be a stand-alone goal on gender equality which will address many of the issues raised by noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, threw down the glove on the political side of things. I was looking at women in political spheres, not in connection with this but with something else, and we are not doing too badly at local government level. On representation in the House of Commons, it is very much in the hands of political parties to ensure, as she says, that more women are selected to fight key seats and all major political parties are working their socks off to try to achieve that for the next general election. Looking at the pattern of appointments to your Lordships’ House since 1997, increasingly more women are selected with each tranche of new Peers.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington on getting in during the gap and on her enthusiasm and work with UNICEF, cohosting today’s Girl Summit.
This has been a fascinating debate. I have run out of time but the Government are certain that their support for UN Women and the Commission on the Status of Women are to be continued.