On Sunday July 2, the High-level Panel on Coherence held a day-long consultation with over 50 civil society representatives from around the world in Geneva, Switzerland. This was a consultation on cross cutting themes of gender equality, human rights and sustainable development/environment.
June Zeitlin of Womens Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) presented a paper on Gender Equality Architecture and UN Reforms.

An excerpt of her presentation appears below:

This paper briefly outlines the successes and failures of the current UN system in addressing gender equality and womens rights, and puts forth several principles and characteristics that are critical to reforming the gender equality architecture in order to deliver consistent positive gender equality outcomes

Introduction: In the last decade, efforts to make the development, human rights and peace/security mainstreams work for women have resulted in impressive gains as well as staggering failures. In the 10 years since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action (PFA), a number of strategic partnerships forged between womens movements and policy reformers have placed equity and womens human rights at the heart of global debates in areas such as the International Criminal Court, Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, and in the Millennium Project Task Force on Gender Equality. In some regions, women have made striking gains in elections to local and national government bodies, and in entering public institutions; girls access to primary education has increased and women are entering the labor force in larger numbers; access to contraception is much more widespread; gender equality has been mainstreamed in some countries into law reform processes and statistical measures; and violence against women has been recognized as a human rights issue and made a crime in many countries.

However, gains for womens rights are facing growing resistance in many places and too often positive examples are the exception rather than the norm. They usually occur because an individual, a network, an organizational champion, or a unique confluence of push factors is responsive and receptive to change. Even then, these changes only come about when womens rights advocates invest extraordinary interest, time and effort and, where required, take significant risks. For instance, it took nearly five years of advocacy by women with support of a small number of donors to get Burundi women included at the peace table and, at the eleventh hour, it was the advocacy of Nelson Mandela that made it finally happen. This ad hoc approach, which too often requires high-level intervention, is not effective in producing consistent positive outcomes to support gender equality and womens human rights."

To read the full paper, please visit the Choike website and download the text at http://www.choike.org/documentos/gender_un_reform.pdf