With conflicts and military takeovers wiping out gains on women's rights, and with the safety and prospects of women and girls on the ground and in political and economic spheres being driven backwards, regional organizations have an important role to play in promoting women's participation in peace and other decision-making processes, almost 60 speakers told the Security Council today in a ministerial-level open debate on women, peace and security.
The United Nations will bestow the first United Nations Trailblazer Award for Women Justice and Corrections Officers to Téné Maïmouna Zoungrana of Burkina Faso at a ceremony at United Nations Headquarters in New York today.
A Zimbabwean peacekeeper who recently completed her assignment with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), will receive the 2021 United Nations Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award.
For the first time on record, the number of forcibly displaced people around the world had topped 100 million, propelled by the war in Ukraine and other conflicts, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports.
Jayathma Wickramanayake, the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, and The Body Shop, launched a campaign today that seeks to get young voices into the halls of power. The campaign, “Be Seen, Be Heard”, seeks to create long-term structural changes that will make decision-making more inclusive of young people and ensure their participation in political life.
Senegal’s armed forces were approved today to receive funding from the Elsie Initiative Fund to assess barriers to the participation of women in United Nations peace operations. Senegal is the sixteenth largest troop-contributing country and has 987 personnel deployed as of February 2022, of whom 38, or 3.8 per cent, are women.
Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Gender Caucus high-level event “In pursuit of gender equality for strong land stewardship”, in Abidjan today:
With conflicts proliferating and the world’s social fabric increasingly under strain, the use of sexual violence as a tool of power and dominance is also on the rise, experts warned the Security Council today, as delegates from around the world considered the current status of “war’s oldest, most silenced and least-condemned crime”.
The United Nations team in Myanmar remains alarmed by deteriorating humanitarian conditions amid continued fighting, particularly in the country’s south-east and north-west. Across Myanmar, more than 900,000 people are displaced, including more than 560,000 people who remain uprooted since the military takeover in February 2021.
Increasing reports of sexual violence and human trafficking in Ukraine — allegedly committed against women and children in the context of massive displacement and ongoing fighting — are raising “all the red flags” about a potential protection crisis, the Executive Director of the United Nations gender agency warned the Security Council today.
