Thanks, Kieran.
Thank you very much for your time today. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to you on this important subject.
As you know, Afghanistan is approaching a crossroads. Reconciliation and reintegration are taking place. NATO has just opened safe passage for insurgent leaders to come into Kabul in order to hold those negotiations. We feel, and the women we speak to—the women partners whom we work with—feel and fear that in this process of reconciliation and negotiation we possibly stand to lose many of the gains we have won over the last ten years as a national and international community.
Right now there is no strong defender of women's rights in Afghanistan throughout the reconciliation process. You are aware of the inconsistent record on human rights within the government itself, both among the individuals and also in various pieces of legislation that have been passed, such as the Shia Personal Status Law, the amnesty law, etc.
We are concerned that women's rights may be part of the negotiation, part of the compromise that is reached in the effort to create a broader security. We're asking Canada to consider leading the international discussion on how the international community can try to stop that possibility from occurring. Women have come incredibly far in the last ten years, and they are concerned that this might be turned around.
The first section of the report is about that element of security. It's about how we can assure that the women are remembered, that their rights are guaranteed to a certain standard that the women themselves approve within negotiations and reconciliation, and that they in fact have their own voice within the negotiation itself so that they can defend their own positions.
The second part of the report is on economic and social development. This is an area in which Canada already excels. You have excellent programming in social and economic development; you have an excellent education portfolio; you have an excellent economic development portfolio; and you have an increasing maternal and child health...which I hope will turn into a priority, under the Muskoka initiative.
We believe that by changing certain key elements of that portfolio, Canada would be able to prioritize and focus on improving access to services for women within those key areas. Right now, and I can't overstress this, there is a disproportionate focus within the donor community on creating availability of services—building schools, building health clinics—and very little emphasis is going on ensuring that the women are able to access those clinics. In certain areas you can have 15 maternal health clinics in one square kilometre, and not a single women will be able to go because the socio-cultural barriers have not been sufficiently addressed. The donor community is so focused on availability that these access issues have been put by the wayside.
Canada has one of the most credible and one of the strongest engagements in Afghanistan on issues of access, because Canada is flexible and because Canada puts money into some of the more invisible barriers, and the Canadian successes have been very important. You have a very strong reputation for this, and we're encouraging a scale-up of some of those initiatives.
The third section of the report is on governance, rule of law, and human rights. We've heard many comments already this afternoon about the importance of the rule of law. One thing is sure: there can be no security in the absence of a rule of law, and there can be no establishment of genuine support for women's rights in the absence of a rule of law. But rule of law does not simply mean policing towards counter-insurgency. It doesn't simply mean having courts in place. It means ensuring that those service delivery mechanisms are capable of dealing with women's rights.
I'll give you an example on policing. Right now, new recruits to the Afghan police force go through an eight-week training. That is the limit of the formal training. There are other programs that offer other, alternative things, but the basis is an eight-week training program. Seven weeks and four days of that training is on counter-insurgency policing. One day is on community policing, and one half-hour is on women's rights.
A police force with that limited knowledge of its role as community protector, as protector of human rights and of women, of whom 87.2% have been abused over their lifetime and who require the services of the state to enable that they are not abused in the future or to enable that they have support they need to overcome the situation they're in....
The police sector, the justice sector--they do not have the knowledge or the skills to necessarily address those issue. So women remain in a state of fear, because they will often go to the services of the police and the justice system expecting support, hoping for support, and being either turned away or abused. Often that has to do with ignorance, and often that ignorance has to do with the fact that the international donor community and the Afghan priority at the most senior level is not focused on creating a community rule of law, such as the rule of law that we have in Canada and that is so fundamental.
We believe, if I may quote Ursula Franklin, that “Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of justice and the absence of fear.” We need to make sure that we get to the presence of justice and the absence of fear. We think that now that Canada is pulling out its military forces it can turn the breadth of its attention to the establishment of rule of law, in which women's rights are embedded concretely. The report has several recommendations on how that might happen.
Finally, we have a section on aid effectiveness. It's about the “how”. It's the collective wisdom of many organizations, both Afghan and international, that have experience in the country and know how things get done.
There was a reference made earlier this afternoon about culture. I believe it was Mr. Rae who pointed out the difficulties of addressing culture. I understand and appreciate this concern, but there are answers to it. Our concern is that in Afghanistan a lot gets clumped under culture. Anything that seems hostile or conservative or different from what we see in the west often gets clumped under the label “culture”. That means that many implementing partners and certainly many of the donors who are present in Afghanistan avoid it. If we actually explore culture, if we break it down into its constituent parts and find out how much is culture, how much is ignorance, how much is due to other factors, such as distance from hospitals or distance from schools or whatever it might be, the problem becomes far more practical.
I know you will have questions on this.
In conclusion, treat our report as a menu of options. Canada can undertake some; it can lead the international call on others; it can encourage other donors and the Afghan community itself to take up yet other options. This report outlines just how feasible and how practical it is for Canada to step into that position of leadership on women's rights, without increasing your portfolio size, but just making some very basic practical shifts in what Canada is already doing very well in the country.