Calls for input: Addendum to General Recommendation No. 30 (2013) on women in conflict prevention, conflict, and post conflict situations in relation to the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda
Human Rights Watch appreciates the opportunity to provide input in this important process.
The increasing importance of the WPS agenda
This is a key moment for the WPS agenda. Twenty-five years after the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325, we have important lessons about what has worked in implementing WPS. We are also in a context where the need for the WPS agenda is intensifying. Rising conflicts around the world are causing deeply gendered harms, and a global backlash against women's rights risks fraying the consensus that supported adoption of Resolution 1325.
Because of these threats, it is more important than ever that states, the UN, and bodies like the CEDAW Committee vigorously defend the WPS agenda and push for its full implementation. We have not come close to achieving full implementation of Resolution 1325, which is integral to upholding CEDAW-and now we face serious backsliding.
The WPS agenda is of utmost importance first because women comprise more than 50% of the world population and often suffer impacts of conflict in gendered ways. It is a matter of equality and justice for women to participate in all decisions impacting their lives. Second, research shows that women's full, safe, equal, and meaningful participation is key to ending conflicts and helping countries recover. Women's participation is literally lifesaving.
Resolution 1325 and its subsequent resolutions provided a framework for ending harmful gender norms and a profound shift toward a more peaceful world. Then-UN under-secretary- general Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka in 2020 correctly described 1325 as "one of the crowning achievements of the global women's movement and one of the most inspired decisions of the United Nations Security Council." We owe it to everyone aspiring to live in peace to use that framework fully and fight back ferociously against efforts to water it down or set it aside.
Progress and setbacks in the implementation of Resolution 1325
There have been important achievements in implementation of Resolution 1325. Feminists in countries around the world are using the WPS framework to advance women's rights. The role women's rights defenders created for themselves as experts briefing the Security Council and other international bodies is deeply impactful, though it has sometimes come at a great cost to those women, who have at times endured reprisals for their courage. Resolution 1325 helped open that space; their voices forced decision-makers at the highest level to appreciate the expertise of women's rights defenders and better respond to how conflicts/crises affect women and girls. States coming together as shared commitment holders on WPS has been important in supporting this effort.
The large number of countries developing national actions plans (NAPs) for the implementation of Resolution 1325 is a powerful indicator of the relevance of the WPS agenda in every country. These plans reflect the advocacy of women's rights defenders and offer a powerful vehicle for them to affect policy.
But there are disappointments. Some NAPs have gathered dust. When tests of the WPS agenda come, including during peace processes, too often women's participation still tokenized, sidelined, or shut out entirely. The UN itself has oftenfailed to defend women's right to full participation and has even excluded women from processes organized by the UN. Recently, resolutions in multilateral fora have reduced the protection for women, including deleting gender-based violence as a designation criteria in Haiti UN sanctions--part of a broader campaign of problematic edits that appear to systematically seek to delete the term "gender" from resolutions.
We have seen examples in recent years of autocratic governments falling, including in Bangladesh and Syria. While women played keyroles in protest movements in both countries, they are often shut out of next steps.
At the Security Council, the number of women civil society briefers is falling and increasingly shifting to online, according to datacollected by the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security. While draconian visa restrictions imposed by the United States may block many potential briefers from traveling to UN headquarters in New York, given the availability of virtual briefing options these alarming figures also suggest declining acceptance by Council member states that a civil society briefer should be part of all debates. Women with disabilities are hardly ever invited to testify on their specific experience as women with disabilities, even after adoption of Resolution 2475, where the Council expressed its intention to invite people with disabilities, including women, to brief.
Evolving understanding of the gendered impact of conflict and crisis, and key areas that deserve greater attention
In the 25 years since Resolution 1325 was adopted, we have deepened our understanding of the gendered impact of conflict/crisis, including by hearing from women's rights defenders at Security Council debates.
At Human Rights Watch, we see through our research how broad the gendered impacts of crisis and conflict are. We are increasingly committed to holistically documenting the harms suffered by women and girls. That includes considering the following:
a) Gendered experiences of lost livelihoods. This includes women and girls losing livelihoods either because their own source of income has disappeared, or because of loss of livelihood of other breadwinners in the home, which could include that of family members, often men or boys, who left to fight or have been killed. Lost livelihoods can drive decisions within families, often influenced by harmful gender norms, about issues that could include child and forced marriage, distribution of food, education, caregiving, participation in harmful child labor and other unsafe employment, and exposure to human trafficking.
b) Gendered barriers to accessing water and food. Gendered roles within families may mean women and girls have primary responsibility for obtaining water and food for their families. This can mean women and girls are most affected when water or food become more difficult or dangerous to obtain. Shortages of food, rising food prices, and water points drying up or being contaminated can all affect women and girls, forcing them to travel further, exert greater efforts, struggle to secure water or food, and sometimes face insecurity and danger as a result. Lack of access to clean water, often compounded by lack of privacy and supplies, can make it difficult for women and girls to manage their menstrual health and increase risk of infection. Women with disabilities face greater difficulties accessing water and food.
c) Gendered barriers to accessing aid. In areas affected by conflict/crisis, aid can be an essential lifeline. But often decisions about aid delivery are made without women's full participation, and gendered barriers obstruct women from accessing adequate aid. Distribution systems linked to an identified set of households may exclude or create barriers for women and girls by designating a man head of household, giving him control over use of rations, and potentially excluding households headed by women or girls. If aid is distributed by men, it can be more difficult for women to access. Sexual exploitation and abuse linked to aid delivery disproportionately affect women and girls. The selection of aid items may neglect needs of women and fail to provide necessities like menstrual hygiene and contraceptive supplies. Inaccessible distribution sites make it harder for women with disabilities to access aid.
d) Gendered barriers to education. In a conflict/crisis setting, children and young people often lose access to education. This disproportionately affects girls. Families may have less tolerance for risk for girls, due to threats including sexual violence and be more likely to keep girls home in a worsening security environment. Girls' education may be less valued, due to harmful social norms; this may lead to girls being removed from school first when families face new stressors. When schools are targeted for attack or military use, girls are often first to drop out and last to return, if they return at all. Attacks on education are often gendered, with girls, and their educators and schools, often a target. Girls with disabilities have left school due to fears by their families that they wouldn't be able to flee if a school was attacked. Due to lack of physical accessibility, reasonable accommodation, and stigma, girls with disabilities are often excluded from school-an issue exacerbated in conflict/crisis.
e) Changed and increased caregiving responsibilities disproportionately affecting women and girls. Conflict/crisis can create increased needs for caregiving; gendered social norms mean these increased responsibilities often disproportionately fall on women and girls. Children no longer in school, family members injured in the conflict/crisis or who cannot access health care due to the crisis, and older family members or family members with disabilities who require support that they can no longer access are among those who may need increased support from within families. This can affect women and girls in the family in terms of their workload and their ability to engage in other activities including study, paid work, rest, and self-care. While lacking access to needed care and support, older women and women and girls with disabilities may also face increased family caregiving responsibilities.
f) Barriers to accessing health care, including sexual and reproductive health care. Healthcare provision is often harmed in crisis/conflict. Women and girls' healthcare needs can lead to them being disproportionately affected by gaps in healthcare provision. Access to contraceptive supplies, abortion, and maternal health care can be interrupted. Survivors of sexual violence, predominantly women and girls, need access to urgent and specialized health care, including treatment of injuries, evidence collection, prophylactic care for sexual-transmitted disease and incontinence, prevention of pregnancy, and abortion care, that is often unavailable during conflict/crisis and even afterwards. The structural nature of gender discrimination often leads healthcare facilities to redirect resources toward patients experiencing trauma related to the conflict/crisis, reducing capacity for what is perceived as "non-emergency care" such as obstetric care. Care that exists may not be accessible to women with disabilities.
g) Barriers to maintaining health. Women and girls' ability to maintain their own health may be compromised during conflict/crisis. Lack of access to menstrual products and spaces with privacy and adequate clean water complicates menstrualhygiene, causing harms including infections. Women may also be unable to access incontinence products and hygiene.
h) Sexual, gender-based and reproductive violence. Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is a serious risk in any conflict, and we still lack sufficient mechanisms to prevent and investigate CRSV, assist survivors, and ensure accountability and reparations. Many forms of sexual and gender-based violence occur at elevated levels and with greater impunity during conflict/ crisis. This can include domestic violence, child and forced marriage, abduction, human trafficking, sexual slavery, other acts of sexual violence, and attackson reproductiverights. During a conflict/crisis, survivors of sexual and gender-based violence often faced increased barriers to accessing services. Survivors of sexual violence often suffer serious stigma, discouraging them from seeking services, justice, or reparations. Women with disabilities, who are at higher risk of gender-based violence, often face additional barriers to accessing services, justice, and reparations.
i) Forced displacement/relocation, and implications for women's land rights. Conflict/crisis can drive displacement, sometimes on a huge scale, and women experience displacement in gendered ways. Fear of losing access to land, including housing and other immovable property, is a significant factor preventing women from fleeing conflict areas. In situations where woman's land and property rights are tied to her relationship with male relatives, such as husbands, fathers, or brothers, if these men are killed, leave, or the family structure breaks down, women are frequently denied access to homes and fields by family members, in-laws, or neighbors.
When women flee or are displaced, this worsens gender gaps regarding property and land tenure rights. Displacement worsens pre-existing land inequalities: women may have access or use rights before conflict, but displacement can erase these entirely, leaving women without documentation to prove ownership or use rights. This means women, or women-headed households, may face greater risk of not being able to regain possession of their land and property, or return if they leave. Post-conflict, women face disproportionately higher rates of land grabs, false claims, no-consent sales, and eviction threats than men. Male-dominated dispute resolution systems often undermine women's legal and customary rights, with communities or male relatives forcing women to waive claims.
j) Gendered experiences as IDPs and refugees. When women and girls are displaced, their experiences as IDPs or refugees are often very gendered. Women and girls can face gendered risks during flight, including elevated risks of sexual violence and trafficking for sexual exploitation. In settlements and camps of IDPs and refugees, women and girls may faceinsecure environments, and experience sexual harassment and sexual violence, and constricted movement due to the threat of violence. They may experience barriers to accessing health care, menstrual hygiene, and incontinence management, and challenges related to caregiving specific to these environments. Lack of protection including from police, lack of services, and barriers to asylum or other protection based on well-founded fears of domestic violence, as well as overly bureaucratic IDP and refugee management systems, and systems managing IDPs and refugees in family units, may make it difficult for a woman or girl who wishes to leave a relationship due to domestic violence or other reasons to do so.
k) Gendered experiences as combatants. Women and girls also participate in conflicts as combatants and have gendered experiences in doing so. They may face sexual harassment or violence in that role, and discriminatory treatment in functions assigned to them and health and sanitary facilities accessible to them. Because women and girls are usually a small proportion of combatants, their needs are often overlooked during efforts to demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate former fighters. Reintegration is also difficult because of stigma and a societal presumption of sexual violence.
l) Gendered barriers to accountability and reparations. Because women and girls experience harm during a conflict/crisis in gendered ways, mechanisms for accountability and reparations need to be gender-competent. Accountability mechanisms have often neglected, or mis-charged, or under-charged crimes committed against women and girls, and international legal frameworks should be strengthened to more fully recognize and provide accountability for gendered crimes and rights violations. Systems providing reparations should always be co-designed with victims and survivors including full, safe, equal and meaningful participation by diverse women.
Intersectionality and gendered impact of conflict, and an intersectional approach to women's participation
The key to responding to the issues discussed in the previous section is the requirement at the heart of Resolution 1325-women's full, safe, equal, and meaningful participation in all decision-making processes. It is important to also think about which women need to be participants. Conflicts/crises affect different women and girls differently, depending on their intersecting identities. Gender is key to how people experience conflict/crisis, but it is only one factor. When advocating for women's participation, we should consistently call for participation by diverse women. The diversity of the women at any negotiation table should reflect the intersectional impacts of the crisis/conflict and prioritize including women who experienced the greatest harms.
Age
Human Rights Watch research has found that older people can experience the same abuses during conflict/crisis as younger people and can face heightened risk related to their older age. Older women experience the same gendered impacts and abuses as other women and girls, including increased caregiving, heightened risk of sexual violence, and barriers to accessing health care. They may also be targeted for violence based on perceived vulnerability and face additional obstacles to fleeing conflict due to lack of financial resources, limited access to transportation, disability, or because families cannot assist their flight. Human Rights Watch has documented how armed forces have raped, shot, injured by indiscriminate fire, killed, and burned to death older women left behind in conflict zones. They may also be overlooked in prevention efforts and by providers of services and humanitarian assistance.
Girls and younger women can be at particular risk for abuses such as child and forced marriage, and denial of access to education. They can often face even greater barriers than women who are older in accessing sexual and reproductive health care during a crisis/conflict due to stigma about sexuality, especially for unmarried girls and women, and pressures for married girls and young women to be forced into pregnancy and child maternity.
Disability
Persons with disabilities, including women and girls, can be at higher risk of harm during fighting and may be less able to flee attacks when others do, especially if there is no one to help them or if they have limited or no access to assistive devices. People who are blind or have low vision may require support from others to flee. Failures by parties to armed conflict to consider the specific rights and needs of people with disabilities when ordering evacuations or providing advanced warnings of attacks can put them even at a higher risk. Women with disabilities are also less likely to ask a non-related males for help and can be significantly impacted by the degradation of support systems that existed prior to the conflict.
Human Rights Watch has documented situations in which women, girls, and older persons with disabilities stayed behind or were abandoned, including during attacks, while others fled, due to the risks of fleeing in inaccessible terrain and potentially complicating their family's or neighbors' escape attempts. For those who manage to flee, Human Rights Watch documented that women and girls with disabilities, especially if displaced, can face serious obstacles to meeting basic needs, such as food, water, sanitation, health care, electricity, education, and support services. They remain overlooked in humanitarian aid efforts. The lack of access to proper nutrition, health care, assistive devices, and rehabilitation can exacerbate existing disabilities or create new ones.
Race/ethnicity/caste/religion
Women and girls' gendered experiences of violence, displacement, exploitation and other violations can be compounded by their race, ethnicity, caste, and religion. They may face increased risks of gender-based violence and have their access to aid and services restricted due to their identity. Conflicts have exacerbated existing systemic inequities of women and girls, which are rooted in political and social structures.
Sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE)
During conflict/crisis, women and girls can be at heightened risk due to their real or perceived sexual orientation and/or gender identity and expression (SOGIE). Due to prejudice, people with SOGIE perceived to not comply with hetero- and cisnormativity can be at higher risk of violence, whilst simultaneously facing barriers to accessing services. When forced to flee, their relationship or family unit may not be recognized. If women, girls, and others assigned female at birth or perceived to be female or gender non-conforming do not hold an identity document that matches their gender identity, they might not be able to cross borders or access services. Asylum processes might not recognize the specific risks that women and girls of non-conforming SOGIE experience.
Recommendations for strengthening implementation of UNSC 1325
- The UN should consistently be a leading champion for the WPS agenda, including insisting on full, safe, equal, and meaningful participation by diverse women in all processes including peace talks, multilateral treaty negotiations, all other international and national forums.
- All states should push for women's full, safe, equal, and meaningful participation in all processes.
- States, including but not limited to those that have joined the shared commitments on WPS, should increase their efforts to ensure that there are diverse women civil society briefers at all Security Council debates, including by urging the US to grant visas to briefers and, when unavoidable, facilitating remote briefings, and ensure that a gender-competent approach is integrated into all council meetings, processes, and products.
- States should ensure justice and accountability for all violations of women's rights. They should do so by pursuing and advocating for accountability strategies that center gender, including: pushing for inclusion of provisions strengthening gender justice, including the creation of gender apartheid as an international crime, in the new UN crimes against humanity treaty; moving forward with a planned International Court of Justice case on violations of CEDAW; and supporting prosecutions of gender persecution at the International Criminal Court.
- The UN and all its member states should ensure that all justice and accountability efforts, including reparations processes, are rights-based and survivor-centered, to avoid replicating harm, promote recovery, and address root causes of violations, such as discrimination and inequality.
- States should increase funding and support to local women-led, women's rights, and LGBTQIA+ organizations, networks, and movements, and support initiatives that promote gender equality and feminist leadership.
- States should hold all UN actors and systems accountable for fulfilling the UN's obligation to provide leadership on implementing the WPS agenda and for integrating WPS into all work by the UN, by monitoring UN's actions on 1325 and immediately raising concerns when the UN falls short.
- States should fully implement their WPS NAPs, keep them up to date, and develop them in full partnership with women's rights defenders.
