United Nations News Centre - Gender equality must be enshrined in all post-2015 development goals – UN rights chief

United Nations News Centre - Gender equality must be enshrined in all post-2015 development goals – UN rights chief

10 February 2014 – The United Nations committee mandated to ensure
compliance with the global treaty to end all forms of discrimination
against women opened a new session today with a call for gender equality
to be fully integrated into the post-2015 agenda.

“We believe there should be a stand-alone goal or goals on equality and
non-discrimination that addresses all kinds of discrimination, including
discrimination on the basis of sex,” UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights Navi Pillay said at the opening of the 57th Session of Committee
on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
(CEDAW) being held in Geneva until 28 February.

The UN is currently formulating a new post-2015 agenda to chart the
course of global development for decades to come, expanding on the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
adopted at a UN summit in 2000, which aim to slash extreme hunger and
poverty, cut maternal and infant mortality, combat disease and provide
access to universal education and health care, all by the end of 2015.

Ms. Pillay also called for the overall strengthening of treaty bodies to
meet the triple challenge of a significant backlog, chronic
under-resourcing and insufficient compliance with reporting obligations.
“If no prompt action is taken to rectify these problems, the treaty
body system is threatened with collapse,” she warned.

But she also paid tribute to what CEDAW has managed to achieve over the
past three decades. “The struggle has been long, and it seems to me
that, rather than just mulling over our setbacks or assessing the
challenges ahead, we too rarely pause to appreciate our accomplishments
along the way,” she said.

High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré