Economic and Social Council

Despite shrinking budgets and often-conservative political agendas, Governments throughout the world were making significant strides in expanding multisectoral approaches to eliminate violence against women, characterized by a range of integrated services to prevent abuse and support survivors, speakers said today as the Commission on the Status of Women continued its general debate.

Societies must be willing to examine the underlying causes of gender-based violence, the systems that facilitated it and the factors that exacerbated it, in particular, armed conflict, HIV/AIDS and poverty, senior Government officials stressed as the Commission on the Status of Women moved into the third day of its fifty-seventh annual session.

As the recent “horrific” abuse of women in India and around the world had laid bare, it was not a lack of normative or legal frameworks — but rather their effective implementation — that impeded efforts to combat such violence and end the culture of impunity that protected perpetrators, senior Government officials said today, as the Commission on the Status of Women moved into day two of its general debate.

With the scourge of violence against women and girls still rampant around the world, the international community must “rise to the occasion” and lay out concrete plans to tackle that long-standing, deeply entrenched crisis, stressed high-level speakers as the Commission on the Status of Women opened its historic fifty-seventh session today.

The fifty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women opens on 4 March at United Nations Headquarters, and will focus on the elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls, including two key areas — preventing violence and providing support services and responses to female survivors.

Calling for a universal response to the problem of violence against women and girls, Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN-Women said today that Governments were the key to ending the “pandemic” of violence targeting females worldwide.

Convening in a brief organizational session this afternoon, the Economic and Social Council decided on the division of responsibilities among its President, Néstor Osorio (Colombia), and four of its Vice-Presidents to Chair the various segments of its 2013 substantive session, to be held in July.

The Economic and Social Council concluded the first part of its 2013 organizational session today, adopting seven draft decisions that detailed much of its agenda for the year, and outlined the arrangements for the body’s substantive session, set to open on 1 July, at the United Nations Office at Geneva.

Calling strongly for concrete policy actions and targeted investments to enhance food security and scale up nutrition, top officials from the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly’s Second Committee (Economic and Financial) stressed today that “hope, focus, pragmatism and determination” — bolstered by deeper cooperation — were crucial to ending hunger, a global challenge that was “eminently solvable”.