Foreign Affairs Committee on May 3rd, 2016

[The Chair (Hon. Robert Nault (Kenora, Lib.)), Liberal, Bob Nault]

Colleagues, I think we're all here and accounted for.

Thank you for your presence.

I want to go back to our study on women, peace, and security, as per Standing Order 108(2).

Before us today are Anne Marie Goetz, professor of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University; and Robert Jenkins, professor, faculty of political science, Hunter College.

We'll have opening comments by both presenters and then we'll go right into questions.

Ms. Goetz, the floor is yours.

[Professor Anne Marie Goetz, Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University, As an Individual]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs, and members of the committee for inviting me today.

I want to commend the committee for holding these hearings and for its serious approach to improving Canada's role on women, peace, and security internationally.

I'd also like to express my appreciation and endorsement of the recommendations in the brief presented to you by Women, Peace and Security Network-Canada.

My remarks come from 10 years of experience working on women, peace, and security at the UN as the chief adviser, first to UNICEF and then UN women on governance, peace, and security. I'm also an academic and have conducted research on this topic, including with Rob here.

The first point to make is that Canada is not starting from scratch. In the past, it has played a strong role. It's funded women's organizations in fragile states. It's built up the female component of its peacekeeping contingent and encouraged others to do the same. It supported efforts to increase the numbers of women in mediation.

Canada's support for these efforts has, at times, been uneven, and Canada could and should do more to be a standout international leader on women, peace, and security.

You've heard, from previous testimony, that resolution 1325 and related resolutions have been, maddeningly, poorly implemented. You've heard that the protection component, and notably the effort to address sexual violence as a tactic of warfare, has received much more attention and action than has the participation or the leadership component.

Let's get straight to the reasons for this poor or uneven implementation.

Sexual violence in warfare committed or condoned by warring parties is a very serious international crime. A failure to include women in peace talks is not. A failure to address gender issues in ceasefire agreements is not. A failure to contribute women soldiers and police to peacekeeping is not an international crime, nor is a failure to promote women's participation in international foreign affairs decisions. There's an obvious difference in the strength of the accountability frameworks between international law and the more political challenging project of promoting women's participation and leadership.

To promote women's progress in the area of domestic competition for power and voice in conflict resolution, this is a political project. It's a tricky process and no one knows exactly how to do it.

A lot of hope is put into ideas, such as supporting gender quotas in post-conflict elections. We all know very well that building the physical presence and visibility of women in decision-making forums doesn't necessarily lead to influence in advancing gender equality policies, although it can help. What is needed is consistent efforts to support gender parity and other forms of inclusiveness among those who participate in conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery, but also a strong support for gender justice in the agreements reached in these processes. By gender justice, I mean full attention to gender differences in the harms experienced in warfare, and full promotion of gender equality as a crucial component of inclusive recovery and of democratic governance.

The tough question is, if it's no crime to fail to include women, then what are the tools available to Canada to make women's participation a bigger international priority?

I'm going to touch on a few processes through which Canada could do this, or could do it better. I'm going to look at the following: first, leveraging Canada's position in international institutions and global affairs; second, building a global community of practice on women's political leadership and gender equality in ceasefires, peace deals, constitutions, and other political settlements; third, building capacities for effective spending on women, peace, and security; and fourth, linking the national action plan to all areas of Canada's footprint in fragile states, notably in extractive industries but also in relation to climate change and natural disasters.

First, on leveraging Canada's position in international institutions and global affairs, as we all know, Canada is planning a Security Council bid for 2020. Between now and then is the time to be very strategic about asserting Canada's role as a global human rights leader. Let me mention a few opportunities in which this can be done in a stitched-up and strategic way.

First of all, of course, Canada is the long-standing chair of the UN friends of 1325 group, which is a collection of about 45 like-minded countries that meet regularly to support a strong constituency to back implementation of resolution 1325. I have to say that you are very lucky—we are very lucky; I'm a Canadian too—to have had such dedicated staff at the UN mission of Canada working on this committee, and I'm going to name them: Mel Stewart, Chantal Walker, and Simon Collard-Wexler. They have done an amazing job in promoting 1325, emboldening support amongst member states.

Canada plays other crucial convening roles, and we could ask whether more can be done in these other forums. For example, Canada is chair of the C34, which is the general assembly committee on peacekeeping operations. As chair, Canada has to play a neutral brokering role, but it's also a member of the committee and negotiates usually in common with Australia and New Zealand. This is known as the CANZ group. In the past, it has tried to negotiate gender-related proposals through the CANZ voice, and this could actually be intensified. For example, last year there was an attempt to influence issues around corrections facilities to ensure the application of principles on gender equality and protection of women in the UN's corrections work.

Canada has been working to support troop-contributing countries to include more women in their military and police deployments. This includes a valuable program where Canada provides coaching to vetted women police officers in some contexts. But I think we should ask, and especially Canada, as the 10th largest donor to peacekeeping, should ask whether enough is being done seriously by troop-contributing countries to address this issue of low contributions of women to the police and military. The common excuse is that women don't want to go into these security sector jobs. I think we need to look at that again. These are highly desirable positions, especially to be recruited to a peacekeeping contingent, which comes with funds, salary, and career advancement. These are things that usually men have the first crack at in many countries. What can be done to encourage more women to be promoted to these opportunities?

Last year, UN Women presented a memo in the process of the three reviews of the UN's peace work. The memo suggested that a gender premium could be supplied, a financial premium, to troop-contributing countries to encourage or to create an incentive to promote more women to peacekeeping.

If we look ahead, Canada has other crucial policy-influencing roles coming up. It's going to be a member of CSW from 2017 to 2021, as we know. This is a position to ensure that gender, peace, and security issues are addressed. Beyond the UN, Canada will host the 44th meeting of the G7 in 2018. This is a valuable midpoint towards 2020 and the Security Council bid, and an important opportunity to use this platform to advance key concerns around the neglected elements of women, peace, and security, especially this issue of women's political leadership.

Lessons could be learned from the way William Hague championed work on sexual violence via Britain's chairmanship of the G7 in 2013. Is there scope to do something similar around women's political leadership?

My next point is around building a global community of practice on women's political leadership. One of the problems with advancing women's influence in these processes is that they often lack the network and the political experience of male counterparts. Political power, credibility, and legitimacy is not something that external actors can build, and it's not something that happens overnight. But there are things that can be done, actually, to build women's skill and networks in these areas. The first has been mentioned over and over in previous testimony—support for women's organizations, core operational support.

But a second element could be support for training and for networking. The trouble with training is that it's often ad hoc and random, but Canada actually has a very interesting model that could be expanded. It could build on its practice in supporting the Justice Rapid Response initiative, which I think was mentioned by one of your previous witnesses.

Justice Rapid Response is a multi-stakeholder facility that brings together states, international and regional institutions, civil society, and private sector. Canada is a core and founding member and has been an important funder until recently. Justice Rapid Response offers training to magistrates, police officials, judges, lawyers, prosecution, and defenders all over the world on a range of international criminal, human rights, and humanitarian law matters.

Recently, about five years ago, it started working with UN Women to develop a training course on prosecuting and investigating sexual violence in conflict. The professionals who are trained in this course become part of a global network and are deployed very quickly when opportunities come up to strengthen domestic investigations or investigations of regional bodies or international bodies when it comes to abuses of women's rights during conflict or related to conflict.

Barbara Fleury, who was one of your witnesses a few weeks ago, is the police adviser to the UN mission here in New York. She mentioned three women police officers who've been deployed to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to support the investigation and prosecution of crimes of sexual violence under the Khmer Rouge. Those three police officers were trained by Justice Rapid Response.

This is a valuable initiative that really merits your consideration. It's very much paid off. You can tell by looking at the quality of the output of international and regional criminal tribunals and international commissions of inquiry that the quality of investigative work on gender issues has improved dramatically in the last few years.

Could a version of this model be developed to support a global community of practice on the range of skills needed to support women's participation and leadership in conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery? For example, skills are needed in ceasefire monitoring, mediation, negotiating peace agreements, conducting political analysis, constitutional and legal drafting, and economic planning. Region-specific expertise is needed to ensure that these skills are context appropriate. Such an initiative could, above all, support the vital networking that's needed to generate technical and political support for women's efforts to get through the doors to peace talks and political settlements.

Third, on building capacities for effective spending on women, peace, and security, a lot has been said about reaching 15%, but could Canada support this process by providing data on what is actually happening on the ground? We have to remember, we actually know very little about the real amount spent. The estimates are all based on using a gender marker, which is applied by project managers when they're developing projects. There have been no serious gender audits of actual spending on women, peace, and security. There are also trust funds and women's rights funds that could really use greater investment.

My time is short, so I'm rushing on this, but more details are in my written statement.

The fourth area—and I've run out of time—is linking to all areas of Canada's footprint in fragile states. I'm going to mention two. The NAP can't cover everything, obviously, but many witnesses have spoken of the need to avoid silos. I would have thought an important connection to make is between Canada's women, peace, and security work and its work on disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response, whatever the cause of the crisis. We all know that climate-related displacement will increase, and that gender and age greatly affect people's capacity to cope with these crises. Linking the national action plan to Canada's work on climate change, both adaptation and mitigation, is crucial.

Second, Canada has a large extractive industry sector that is active around the world. Currently, international and domestic regulations on oil and mining companies tend to focus on issues such as corruption or environmental impact. Is there a national or a global code of conduct that could be considered or developed that addresses the relationship between the personnel of these companies and local populations to avoid instances of sexual abuse?

Finally, let me return to my starting point. Canada is not approaching this subject from scratch; it has a track record. It would be valuable to learn from and build on good experiences and good practice and to revive institutional memory.

Canada has made unsung and sometimes very modest but often hugely significant investments in some areas that are relevant to this discussion. I want to leave you with one example.

In 2008, the then DFAIT and its global peace and security fund provided a small grant to enable UNIFEM and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to convene a meeting in Wilton Park, Sussex. This brought together Security Council ambassadors, as well as Ambassador Henri-Paul Normandin, UN force commanders such as Patrick Cammaert, police commissioners such as Colin Farquhar, who has just served in MINUSTAH in Haiti, and human rights defenders such as Leymah Gbowee. The topic of discussion was sexual violence in conflict. At the time, this was seen as a humanitarian problem, not a matter for the Security Council's attention.

In that meeting in May, parts of what was to become Resolution 1820 were drafted and debated. Three weeks later, it was passed. Canada made a crucial contribution at that moment, and the rest is history. This tiny catalytic investment was extremely important.

Surely this is Canada's strategic challenge that you're addressing in your committee. Canada is in a unique global position to use its diplomatic leverage, its resources, and its principles to make a significant difference for women in conflict-affected situations. My point today is that it is a political project, not a technical project and not a legal project. It requires unswerving political determination in every possible area of Canada's engagement with fragile states.

Sanam Anderlini has just joined us, so we'll bring her to the table.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Professor Goetz, and welcome to Sanam Anderlini.

Now we'll go to Professor Jenkins for his comments.

[Professor Robert Jenkins, Professor, Faculty of Political Science, Hunter College, As an Individual]

I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to testify today.

You've already received a wealth of valuable testimony over the course of the preceding weeks from an impressive array of experts and practitioners, including Dr. Goetz who spoke before me. Much of what needs to be included in Canada's national action plan on women, peace and security has already been spelled out and discussed, often more than once. Rather than reaffirming the importance of the compelling recommendations already offered, I'll use this opportunity if I could to add one proposal to what is, admittedly, already a very crowded agenda.

The proposal I'd like to make is that Canada make the right to work a central element of its strategy for preventing the outbreak and recurrence of armed conflict, and that women's empowerment and gender equality be at the forefront of the government-run employment programs that will be created to operationalize this right in fragile and conflict-affected states. While this proposal falls most directly under the relief-and-recovery pillar of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, it's intended to be just as relevant to the participation and conflict-prevention pillars as well.

I'll start with some background. Works programs to provide temporary employment have been used in many post-conflict settings, and have received financial and technical support from UN agencies and other international actors. The specific approaches adopted are varied, but the general thinking has been that a lack of livelihoods drives popular disaffection, and that providing even temporary employment through such programs, doing things like repairing drains, painting road signs, and so forth, could serve as a visible peace dividend in places where conflict has decimated economic life.

Government provision of waged labour would, in other words, enhance state legitimacy and reduce the incentive to return to violence. That's been the logic. Guidelines for the operation of temporary employment programs have been issued by the International Labour Organization, and in recent years have included provisions to ensure gender parity in access to such programs. The UN committed to fulfilling this commitment in its seven-point action plan on gender-responsive peace building, which was introduced in 2010. UN Women is working to advance this objective.

The international community's approach in this area needs to be much more ambitious, I would argue, if employment programs are to reach their full potential as instruments of both peace building and women's empowerment. Not only have too few conflict-affected and fragile states actually had jobs programs, but where these have existed, such as in Sierra Leone for instance, they've been far too small and extended for much too short a period of time.

Three other crucial shortcomings should be noted of these employment programs in post-conflict settings. First, they have not been conceived in terms of rights or a rights-based approach to development and recovery. Second, they lack the means of ensuring public participation in the prioritization of the works projects that will be undertaken through such programs. Third, they lack civil society engagement in ensuring accountability for how funds are used. Yet, it is by carefully designing each of these three key elements—rights, participation, and accountability—that gender equality and women's empowerment can be placed at the forefront of large-scale employment programs in conflict-affected and fragile states.

As it happens, a rights-based framework, avenues for public participation, and civil society engagement in program accountability have also been defining features of what is currently the world's largest and most successful public-sector jobs program, which is India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly known as NREGA.

NREGA, which I should mention is the subject of a forthcoming book I co-authored with Professor James Manor of the University of London, fulfills the right to work by guaranteeing every rural household in India 100 days of work annually at the statutory minimum wage, on government-operated public works projects located no further than five kilometres from their homes, to be made available within 15 days of workers submitting an application. NREGA is a legal obligation of the government, not a temporary relief activity. Workers build roads, dig wells, maintain irrigation works, and undertake many other activities. But crucially, the program has built into its authorizing legislation a far-reaching set of institutional mechanisms to ensure participation, transparency, and accountability.

Local residents and workers engage in a consultative process for identifying which works to undertake, and they work with civil society groups to carry out social audits of the projects for which financial and administrative records are made publicly available.

In addition to its many benefits for distressed rural communities, NREGA's design and the way it's been implemented have provided direct benefits for women. Thirty per cent of the workdays created must be allocated to women, and it has often been 50% or more in practice, which is very unusual internationally.

Child care must be provided at NREGA work sites, and NREGA creates opportunities for women to serve as work site supervisors. Research has shown that women's priorities are different from men's, for the most part, and women's priorities for which types of work projects to carry out get a fair hearing and are often adopted.

NREGA wages are the same for men and women, which is not usually the case in private employment in rural India and many other places, including the United States, I should mention. Women must be paid their wages directly rather than through their spouses.

India's employment guarantee scheme also makes indirect contributions to gender equality by creating opportunities for women to enter the public sphere in places where this has been constrained by cultural practice, and by incentivizing women to enter the formal financial sector by setting up individual bank accounts to receive their NREGA wages.

One study found, on the basis of research conducted only in certain parts of India, that women who participate principally in NREGA experience lower rates of domestic violence. While NREGA was not conceived as a means of reducing conflict-related violence, recently conducted research has found that the extension of NREGA to districts in rural India where anti-state armed group violence had been prevalent has led to a decrease in the levels of violence they experienced.

This is a finding of relevance far beyond India, including for practitioners in the field of conflict prevention in general, and women, peace, and security in particular.

India is of course not a conflict country as such, though it faces a number of long-running insurgencies that might allow it to qualify according to some definitions. India is also endowed with a functioning state bureaucracy, an enduring democracy, and growing financial means, so replicating India's right-to-work experiment in war-torn countries that have none of these assets is not what is proposed here.

The proposal rather is for Canada to advocate and financially support, both in individual country settings and through its engagement in multilateral institutions, the creation of suitably adapted forms of rights-based employment programs in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and to do this on the basis of a model that makes gender equality and women's empowerment an explicit and highly visible element of these efforts. This would apply to countries that have not yet descended into a state of armed conflict, just as it would to post-conflict countries.

As a first step, Canada could work with like-minded governments and international actors, official and non-governmental, to develop a model program and assess potential buy-in amongst its partners. Among the multilateral settings where this might be pursued are the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, etc.

Of particular note is the possibility of undertaking a rights-based and gender-equality focused “jobs for peace” initiative through the Commonwealth, of which Canada; India, whose technical expertise would be essential here; and many conflict-affected states are members.

Let me close by echoing a former senior UN official, Graciana del Castillo, whose research has demonstrated that the economic policy dimension of peace building, including its gender dimensions, are far too often constrained by excessive faith in markets to speed recovery and move on to long-term development. Supporting entrepreneurship and promoting market access—useful in training women entrepreneurs—and easing their access to credit are worthwhile endeavours, but market-oriented solutions are insufficient and budget austerity can make matters worse.

Ambitious public sector action financially and technically supported by international partners is a necessary complement. Placing the right to work at the centre of such an effort through a rights-based, government-implemented employment program that forefronts women's empowerment can send a strong signal about a fledgling state's commitment to transformative and inclusive peace building.

I look forward to any questions or comments the committee may have, and I thank its members again for the opportunity to speak here today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Professor Jenkins and Professor Goetz.

We are going to take this opportunity to ask you some questions so we'll go right to that.

We'll start with Mr. Clement.

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

I'm deferring to Mr. Kent.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Dr. Jenkins and Dr. Goetz. The paper you wrote last fall on missed opportunities echoes in different ways many of the bits of testimony we've heard from previous witnesses. There are echoes in former Under-Secretary Banbury's writings earlier this year that suggest between fine theories and concepts there is a gap between the conceptualizing and the actual implementation. In fact, one line from former Under-Secretary Banbury's paper said, “There is today a chief of staff in a large peacekeeping mission who is manifestly incompetent.” It goes on to say “...it is virtually impossible to fire someone at the United Nations.”

I'd like to ask, in this year when the United Nations will be electing a new Secretary-General, whether we should address structural problems in the organization responsible for overseeing all of these fine concepts of gender, of women, peace, and security in an organization that seems to be not just somewhat structurally dysfunctional, but as Under-Secretary Banbury characterized the United Nations, it's a Remington typewriter in a smart phone world.

I wonder what you might suggest Canada could do constructively. Your suggestions are all exceptionally worthy, but I wonder what can Canada do to help shake up what has been going on at the United Nations for too many years now.

[Prof. Anne Marie Goetz]

Anthony Banbury's op-ed in The New York Times, of course, articulated what a lot of people feel already. There's actually a network of individuals very committed to reform at the UN who are coming up with proposals for whoever the new Secretary-General is, which we hope she will be able to take up on her first day in office.

There is no question that profound structural reform is needed. When you were talking I was thinking of what Churchill said about democracy, that it's an awkward system but it's the best that we've got. Likewise, the UN is really in trouble, but it's our best hope for global governance and it needs a huge amount of work.

I see Canada as actually a very constructive player inside of the UN in terms of supporting reform processes. It's very active in General Assembly committees in seeking value for money in UN spending, and in looking at reform in staffing processes. But there is absolutely no question that Canada could strongly support things like really much clearer, stronger, and more transparent action around culpable sexual harassment of all kinds, including, of course, what is called sexual exploitation and abuse but is sexual violence committed by peacekeepers and humanitarian workers. There needs to be much stronger and decisive action in those areas. This is a difficult thing to push, there's no question, but more has to happen on that. There is also the matter of corruption involving financial mismanagement, and also there have to be measures to dismiss staff. There is no question of that and it's not impossible.

It does happen, but it does require serious backbone.

As you know, I'm a member of a small organization that campaigned to elect a woman to be the next Secretary-General, so we do hope that the next Secretary-General will be a woman, a feminist, and someone with extraordinary management experience, and the spine and the backbone to take up these challenges.

[Prof. Robert Jenkins]

I'll just chime in briefly by saying that I think you've put your finger on many of the deep structural problems of the United Nations. These are not simply those having to do with some of the administrative constraints that were outlined in the Banbury op-ed, such as the difficulty of posting people to field missions and having them work under the guidance of other departments as a result of the inability to harmonize the conditions of service amongst people working in two different UN agencies.

The difficulty of untangling those administrative knots is something I don't know the details of, but at root it would seem to be a difficulty that many of the reforms that are being driven to try to make that system more streamlined seem to be coming from some of the countries that are already seen to have disproportionate influence over the United Nations through their funding, etc. That tends to kick-start an automatic reaction from other groups of countries who feel that any such reform is clearly being done to further heighten the power of certain groups in the United Nations. Then you end up with a standoff.

Some people have argued that until the basic political settlement around the Security Council's permanent membership is figured out, it will be impossible to take all the necessary steps, some of them obvious and some of them non-obvious to those of us who are from the outside. It's certainly the case that the more one layers within institutions—let's say specifically the peace and security sector, such as the creation of the UN Peacebuilding Commission, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and the UN Peacebuilding Support Office back in 2005—the institutions aren't leading to the coordination of work in other parts of the UN system. They're just adding new voices around the table, which has grown increasingly cacophonous.

That's not always the case, but it's frequently the case. Canada has been a member of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and has done great work there, but I'm sure those who've engaged with it on a day-to-day basis would have the same feeling, that there needs to be a streamlining rather than a layering of additional reform elements, because that's what UN reform tends to be—new layers, more difficulties.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

Mr. Fragiskatos, please.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for participating. These are very interesting comments all around.

I wanted to ask both of you a question. It stems from the comments that Professor Goetz raised with regard to Justice Rapid Response.

I agree wholeheartedly with your comments, Professor. At the same time, there are critics who would say that this approach would really be an imposition of a foreign model or an outside model.

How do you address that concern? I have certain perspectives on that, but I'm much more interested in hearing your views on that, because I think it is so critical. One thing we have really learned in this study as a committee is that local ownership over a peace process is vital. How do we get around that argument about the imposition from outside, so to speak?

[Prof. Anne Marie Goetz]

Sanam also wants to pitch in and certainly she's responsible.

The JRR model is targeting justice and security professionals in fragile states; it's seeking to train individuals from those states. It's training them in international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. Certainly an argument could be made that these are international laws. This is not about imposing western or northern positions or internationally agreed frameworks. Many of the people who are deployed to commissions of inquiry or to regional or international criminal tribunals are people from the region or from fragile states. It's a remarkably democratic initiative in that sense.

It also has another element, which is very interesting, an apprenticeship or mentoring component where specialists in international law—police, magistrates, and so on—work side by side with people in fragile state settings.

Rather than imposing anything, they work with people, look at their portfolio, look at the challenges they are facing, and provide support. This is hugely valuable, and also takes advantage of the fact that a number of international criminal tribunals have closed, releasing a wealth of expertise that can be sent to the regional levels to support strengthening justice responses there.

The same is not true when it comes to the kind of thing I was talking about, a global repository, a community of practice on mediation, on constitution building skills, and so on. There are plenty of experts around. Sanam knows most of them in Islam, but more has to be done to build up that wealth of knowledge.

When it comes to imposing a foreign model, we hear this all the time. Of course one of the things that's very important is women's role in peace building, in promoting equality, comes from societies all around the world, often predating western feminist movements.

I'd like to give an example of how this kind of thing can work so effectively and not be seen as an external imposition.

In 2011, Swisspeace and UN Women, jointly trained women up and down the coast of West Africa in mediation skills, peace building, and engaging in constitutional reform. It was really interesting training. It lasted two weeks. These were women who had been ministers of gender, who had run NGOs and private sector organizations, been in government and out, and it was all over West Africa.

Six months later the Islamist groups and radical groups took over the north of Mali. Three of the women who had been trained in this course marched into UN Women's office saying there had been a horrible invasion, and President Compaoré in Burkina Faso next door was holding peace negotiations and preliminary ceasefire talks, and not a single woman from the women's group had been invited. What was the point of training them if they were not invited?

So UN Women put them on a plane, and they got in there, but the point is they were able to use the networks they had developed and the training—much more important than the content—and the networks to call up people in Burkina Faso, to call up women up and down the West African coast, to lobby for their inclusion. They ended up being successful.

This kind of thing isn't seen as a foreign imposition at all, these were women in Mali who took it upon themselves to get themselves to the table.

[Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, Co-Founder and Executive Director, International Civil Society Action Network]

Thank you. You'll be hearing from me in a minute, so I'm not going to take up too much of your time.

My organization, the International Civil Society Action Network, works with an alliance of independent and locally grounded and founded women-led organizations across many conflict zones. What we're finding is that they often are the answer. If we engage them and they're included in the processes that we're talking about, they have the most culturally relevant and sensitive approaches to engage on these issues.

I'll give you an example. We have a colleague in Sri Lanka who founded an association of parents of missing servicemen. Her own son went missing in the war in Sri Lanka in 1998. She led a group of mothers into the jungle. They were the first ones to make contact with the LTTE—the Tamil Tigers back then—and much of the engagement that she then had subsequently led to the peace talks that ultimately failed when the government got involved.

The access she had to that region has served her well, because people in that area know her and they trust her, and now, as the reconciliation process is going on, she's able to reach out to communities and work with them. She's been working with the police up in the north and northeast of Sri Lanka.

One of the things she's done is that she's adapted the Resolution 1325 agenda, the women, peace and security agenda. She has taken the materials that we've developed internationally and used them in a local context to work with the police and to inform them about what this broad agenda is. She has asked them what they thought the issues were that they were dealing with. The police identified gender-based violence in the communities as one of their key concerns, and they came up with their own ideas of how to engage communities around issues.

As a result of this entry point, the trust between them and local communities has also gone up. By virtue of being a local actor herself whose son was in the army, she also had access to the defence ministry, so she was also able to lobby the defence ministry to send Tamil-speaking women to serve in these police stations and in the military units up there so they could communicate directly with local populations, because the army was mainly Sinhalese-speaking.

This was nothing imposed externally. It was a local actor who took the norms that we had, adapted them to her region and to her context, and has now had an incredible multiplier effect in terms of making it indigenous and responsive to the needs on the ground.

In the Middle East-North Africa region, we are finding that one of the things we'd like to do—and we would welcome Canada's involvement and support—is that it's really important to pull together the different ways in which women's organizations around the Middle East have dealt with the issue of sexual violence in their communities. These are huge taboo subjects, but in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, etc., there have been all sorts of different innovations.

What we want to do is bring that diversity of approaches to the Iraqi context so that our Iraqi colleagues can see and learn from that, and then, with seed funding, enable them to carry on that work. It doesn't have to be expensive. It is culturally relevant, as they're learning from each other. That peer-to-peer exchange is absolutely critical, but we, as international actors, have the access to and the knowledge of what's going on, so our role really has to be to facilitate and enable our local partners to have that information and enable them to have the best practices and adapt them to their own context.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, do I have time for a quick follow-up? No?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

No, unfortunately not.

We'll try to keep the answers a little shorter, if I can be so bold, so that we can get in another couple of questions from each member.

Now we'll go to Madam Laverdière.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for these very interesting presentations. I particularly appreciated the explanation about why more attention is very often given to sexual violence than to the participation of women in the process, because it is not the same accountability framework, as you said. It's quite interesting.

Generally, I prefer the carrot to the stick. When it comes to including women on the forces of countries that provide peacekeeping troops, I think you mentioned that funding for those countries could be increased. That said, could there also be a stick-type aspect that would prevent troops from participating if they didn't have a minimum number of women?

[Prof. Anne Marie Goetz]

I'll send you the memo that goes through a range of options about how to encourage troop-contributing countries to increase their contribution of female peacekeepers. Like yours, their preference is to choose positive incentives and positive reinforcement. This memo calculates that the cost of a gender premium wouldn't be enormous, even if you raised considerably the financial contribution to countries providing troops. It would actually be manageable.

Of course there could be a penalty. Of course many troop-contributing countries are very eager to contribute troops, so they would not want in any way to lose opportunities. In relation to sexual exploitation and abuse, there has finally been a discussion of a penalty. Finally, the Secretary-General has said no further deployments shall be permitted from countries whose troops are abusing or committing crimes against the local population. There will be no further deployments until they have an action plan to deal with this and show a commitment to prosecuting.

I just want to say that the UN has for many years been terrified of imposing an obvious penalty like that because of the fear of not getting troop contributions, which are so desperately needed. The fear was that as soon as you did that there would be no more contributions. The surprise was that as soon as the Secretary-General announced this at the end of last year, some of the countries that were in trouble immediately went to the department of peacekeeping operations and asked how they could get out of this mess and what they would have to do step by step. They were eager immediately to sort out the problem.

I think more creative thinking is quite possible on the idea of penalties or shame or disapproval, and that we will find that we're not discouraging troop-contributing countries. We might find much more alacrity in response.

[Prof. Robert Jenkins]

I would just briefly add that I agree with everything Dr. Goetz has just said except that I would introduce a distinction between penalties for sexual exploitation and abuse, which I think can be imposed without undercutting the supply, as it were, of peacekeepers. However, on the question you specifically raised, about penalties for countries that cannot supply contingents with significant proportions of women, I think that would be a much harder penalty to impose, because it's really a seller's market in the current environment.

I would argue it's probably going to become more of a seller's market if the trend towards more robust peacekeeping continues. In other words, if peacekeepers are going to increasingly be put in harm's way, it becomes more difficult to penalize those who don't produce a contingent of the sort we might all like to see.

On the question of sexual exploitation and abuse, that is definitely something that the international community should press hard for penalties on.

[Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini]

I would just add that I think there's a certain scope to offer the incentive of jumping the queue as a troop-contributing country if you meet the 20% or 30% target of women. If you think about Nepal, Sri Lanka, and many of the African countries, there are many women who were actually in non-state armed movements, so they have the military training and they would be perfectly capable of being trained as peacekeepers and would welcome those opportunities.

We've had conversations with them. They've been involved in workshops and so forth. They would be extremely good as peacekeepers if there was an incentive to draw them into these processes. There's no reason why there can't be small incentives, so if you jump the queue there's a little more money or something. We need to set those targets, because since 10 years ago the UN has been saying they can find only 2% women, and we know that unless there is some measure of a stick and a carrot, that 2% will remain a problem for the next 10 years.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Hopefully, when the next Secretary-General comes in, she will work on this.

[Prof. Anne Marie Goetz]

She certainly will.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

Mr. Levitt, go ahead, please.

[Michael Levitt, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Good afternoon. Thank you for making yourselves available and joining us this afternoon.

Professor Goetz, my question is going to be for you based on some reading I did, an article that was made available to us. It gets to the larger issue of accountability and the issue of political will. It's particularly around a quote taken from the article:

Despite the creation in 2011 of UN Women, an agency dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, neither objective appears to be a priority for the most powerful parts of the UN secretariat: the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).... are male-dominated and resistant to the idea that women’s empowerment is central to their missions.

It also talks about their paying lip service to getting to the 15% of their funds being used to promote gender equality and women's empowerment.

How do we go about moving this forward? We've heard from so many of the witnesses over the last month that this really is a sticking point and that it takes the creation of political will to move it forward. I heard from the previous comment that the answer to this might be a woman secretary-general, but maybe that's oversimplified and wouldn't change it enough and wouldn't move it forward enough. How can we start advancing this when the push-back is coming at the highest level in some of these organizations?

[Prof. Anne Marie Goetz]

Thank you. It's a great question.

I think that may have been from an article that we wrote together, certainly we've made this point in writing together.

It is a huge obstacle within the UN that the departments responsible for political work and the more military work lack, in my view, serious commitment at the very top. It's complicated and it's a long story, and what can countries do?

I want to throw that back at you because Canada is in a great position within the UN. It's an important country. Its views matter. It's got a lot of money. It's a huge international promoter of human rights, or should be. In bilateral discussions or with the leaders of DPA and DPKO, there is room for saying that this has to change, that we need to see more concerted effort.

To give a small example, DFAIT funded UN Women and DPA a couple of years ago to get more women on its mediation rosters, which is important, but still, with every single mediation appointment, with the exception of Mary Robinson, we keep seeing a man being appointed and we don't know what the short list looked like. We don't know if there was adequate attention to alternatives within that short list.

To add to that, you may have also seen recently a series of articles in the Centre on International Cooperation's Peace Operations Review, for example, on the number of women recently appointed to under secretary-general and assistant secretary-general posts at the UN. Something like 93% of appointments of USGs in 2015 were male.

There's a filtering process here and it's managed by these two major entities. They are hugely influential. They're supposed to have a fifty-fifty short list. We don't know if they do because that information isn't made publicly available.

I guess I'm dodging the question and throwing it back at you. What can bilaterals do to push these agencies? You're the boss at the UN; it's an intergovernmental organization. This is supposed to be your secretariat.

[Michael Levitt, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

I'll comment on that in just a little bit.

We've made the point that in re-engaging—and we've chosen to re-engage with the UN in a more fulsome way—we've said that we're going to use this opportunity to re-engage to push for reform where it's required most. Maybe we do need to start talking a little louder and making sure that message is getting heard, especially on the issue of a more active role for women, gender parity, and these funding levels being reached.