EU Explanation of Position – UN General Assembly 2nd Committee: Women in Development

Thank you Mr Chair,

I have the honor to speak on behalf of the EU and its Member States.

The Candidate Countries Montenegro*[1], Serbia*, Albania*, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, the potential candidate country Bosnia and Herzegovina* and the EFTA country Iceland as well as Andorra align themselves with this statement.

Gender equality is a core value of the European Union. The EU is a strong and steady supporter of women and girls’ full enjoyment of all human rights, the full realization of gender equality, as well as the empowerment of all women and girls. These values centrally informed our engagement with the Women in Development resolution this year. We would like to thank the facilitator and all engaged delegations.

We entered the negotiations hoping to achieve a text that would send a strong message of commitment by all member states to achieving SDG 5 and helping women and girls in developing countries who face an unprecedented situation of interlinked and mutually reinforcing crises. Instead, we found ourselves having to defend consensual language from several years back and unable to make progress to address the issues that are constraining women and girls in development in 2022.  

The EU has long held the view that the Women in Development resolution needs to be updated to properly reflect the central importance of the Agenda 2030. We are therefore dismayed, that while a number of other resolutions in this year’s second committee were updated to reflect outcomes from relevant intergovernmental negotiations, the same was not the case for this resolution. We would have expected the resolution to reflect the strong consensual outcome on SDG5 from this year’s HLPF Ministerial Declaration. Given that climate change and biodiversity loss have a detrimental impact on women and girls, especially those living in developing countries we would also have expected the outcome of this year’s negotiations to draw on language from CSW66, which had this as its theme.

In 2019 in our EoP on “Women in Development”, we stated that we hope that the spirit of consensus will be restored to the negotiations also for this resolution and that we will work constructively with all delegations to make this happen. We regret that the zero draft presented crossed several of EU red lines, and we were open and transparent about this concern throughout the negotiations. The co-facilitators text that was put under silence procedure met the requirements that we had clearly stated to allow us to join consensus, but did not meet our expectations and priorities for this text. In a spirit of compromise, we decided not to break silence. However, the text was then further weakened, and as such, we had to table amendments to bring back agreed language, including a core paragraph on the implementation of the Beijing Declaration Platform for Action and the International Conference on Population and Development and the outcomes of their reviews that appears in several other consensual texts.

Once again, we would like to highlight that the difficulty of the process of negotiating this resolution this year reflects the stark differences that do exist in the position of delegations on issues related to women’s rights and gender equality. It is unfortunate that it is this topic that divides us so deeply, and we consider it essential that we reflect on how we should engage with the issue of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in the second committee in a way that adds value to the implementation and follow up of the 2030 Agenda and truly supports women and girls in development. The HLPF this year showed us that consensus on this issue is possible.

Mr Chair,

We regret that while the SGs report highlighted that women’s physical and mental health, including sexual and reproductive health, has borne the brunt of the crisis, largely owing to disruptions in access to health-care services and overwhelming paid and unpaid care work stresses, the resolution once again fails to include a reference to SDG 5.6

The EU remains committed to the promotion, protection and fulfilment of all human rights and to the full and effective implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and the outcomes of their review conferences and remains committed to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), in this context. Having that in mind, the EU reaffirms its commitment to the promotion, protection and fulfilment of the right of every individual to have full control over, and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality and sexual and reproductive health, free from discrimination, coercion and violence. The EU further stresses the need for universal access to quality and affordable comprehensive sexual and reproductive health information, education, including comprehensive sexuality education, and health-care services.

We have traditionally joined consensus on the Women in Development resolution. This year the core agreed language on this text was weakened to the extent that a similar regression is unprecedented in its scale and severity in the normative work of the second committee. With the approval of the amendments introduced by the European Union, the text again meets what we consider to be the absolute minimum standard on this issue.  We thank all delegations who supported the amendments.

Mr Chair

Gender equality is an essential precondition for equitable and inclusive sustainable development, which will not take place if half of the world’s population is left behind.

We owe it to ourselves, to each other and to all women and girls to do better.

Thank you.

* Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.