Minister Howlin and Panel – OGP Dublin
300 delegates - 100 speakers 50 Civil Society Groups - 2 day Conference - 1 Action Plan -1 Historical Castle…
…Limitless possibilities
I am blogging today from the historic centre of Dublin, a site which has been a settlement since the 1st century A.D. It has variously been held by the Celts, the Vikings, the Normans, the Tudors and the English Crown. Over the last 2 days it has been occupied again, but this time by invited guests for the Open Government Partnership Europe Regional Meeting.
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.
Following the collapse of Ireland’s banking system and economic turbulence in 2008, it is incumbent on us, the Government, to re-build trust and confidence in government, politics and the democratic system here in Ireland.
The importance of bringing government closer to citizens is a principle understood by both governments and civil society across the world.
Investment in the human rights of women and girls is not only just and right, it is, we believe, essential to achieving stable democracies based on fairness and dignity. Gender equality has become a cornerstone of the constitutional and legal frameworks of modern democratic states and is a key principle of international human rights law.
Untapped Potential European Foundation Funding for Women and Girls
Извор: WUNRN – 08.05.2014
Joy Ogwu, the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations and the president of the Security Council in April 2014, shown in her office. JOE PENNEY
By Mirva Lempiainen - April 30, 2014
As increasing numbers of women embark on careers as diplomats, the United Nations headquarters in New York is slowly but surely undergoing a big change in demographics: the female-to-male ratio of diplomats is becoming — dare it be possible — more balanced.
Of the UN’s 193 member countries, about 30 women currently represent their nations as permanent representatives, a record of 15 percent. This Group of 30, as they are nicknamed in UN circles, may not appear seismic, but at the world body, a male bastion since its start in 1945, it is a meaningful number. As more women have been assigned to the UN as ambassadors for their countries, they have become a larger presence on the Security Council, the UN’s most important body. Of the 15 council members, five are now women, representing Argentina, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nigeria and the United States.
“It’s quite a significant development,” said Joy Ogwu, the Ambassador of Nigeria and the President of the Security Council in April, a rotating position.
Ogwu as president marks the third month in a row that a woman has been leading the proceedings of the Security Council, which is addressing such sticky situations as a rebellion in South Sudan and a risk of genocide in the Central African Republic as well as long-term mandates on its agenda. The council is also meeting on the crisis in Ukraine and on the long war in Syria. Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg held the presidency in March; in February, it was Lithuania’s turn, led by Raimonda Murmokaite.
McKinsey’s survey of global executives finds that corporate culture and a lack of convinced engagement by male executives are critical problems for women.
April 2014 | bySandrine Devillard, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, and Charlotte Werner
In a 1976 McKinsey Quarterly article, the firm’s Jim Bennett noted that companies taking an honest look at how they handled the advancement of women were likely to uncover a number of “thorny attitude-based problems” that “will take much longer and prove much more difficult to solve” than “sex-based differences in benefits plans and obviously biased employment literature.”1 Our latest gender-diversity research—a survey of 1,421 global executives—suggests that cultural factors continue to play a central role in achieving (or missing) diversity goals. That underscores just how long lived and challenging the issues flagged by Bennett are.2
Women executives are ambitious and, like men, say they are ready to make some sacrifices in their personal lives if that’s what it takes to occupy a top-management job. Many, however, are not sure that the corporate culture will support their rise, apparently with some justification. Although a majority of organizations we studied have tried to implement measures aimed at increasing gender diversity among senior executives,3 few have achieved notable improvements.
This user friendly primer is a first easy reference for grassroots and national level civil society organisations to understand the linkages between the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) and The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGP). CEDAW was adopted by the General Assembly in 1979 and came into force in 1981. In June 2011, the Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the Guiding Principles and created a new special mechanism, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. This creative booklet is the result of numerous requests from NGOs wanting to constructively engage with businesses and corporations. We hope this primer will help users to understand and discover the effective mechanisms to promote and advance women’s human rights. A more detailed and complementing text document can be downloaded at our IWRAW official website: http://www.iwraw-ap.org/. We would like to thank contributors who had attended our Regional Consultation on Exploring the Engagement with Non-State Actors using CEDAW (December 2012). We would also like to express our appreciation to Frances House and Katharine Jones from the Institute of Human Rights and Business (IHRB) that provided the initial expert advice on UNGP for the 2012 Consultation.
We are especially grateful to Amy Lynne Locklear (consultant & former IWRAW a programme officer) and Kathryn Dovey (Research Fellow–Gender, Institute for Human Rights and Business), who researched and authored this primer. Without them, this primer would not have been possible.
Our appreciation also goes to Dorathy Stanislaus Benjamin who coordinated, edited and designed this primer as part of IWRAW Asia Pacific’s strategy to facilitate the exchange of ideas on CEDAW. Part of the strategy is also to build the capacity of local and national level activists and groups in the use of different tools for the promotion and advancement of women’s human rights. We also appreciate the generous support of Oxfam Novib which made the production of this primer possible.
