Foreign Affairs Committee on April 19th, 2016

[Gen Jonathan Vance]

Okay, because I'm all about reducing harassment in the armed forces to zero.

[C/Supt Barbara Fleury]

Thank you for the question.

We often have this discussion in the world I live in, the international community, because we talk about the UN's desire to have more women police. My colleagues in the international police world say the same thing, “If only we had more at home, domestically, to provide to the UN”. As a matter of fact, I believe the Secretary-General of the UN, when he was in Canada recently, said we need more women police, and the commissioner said, “Well, so do I”.

The RCMP's objective is 30% at this point. As of 2015, the percentage and composition of regular member police in the RCMP was 21%. In the most senior ranks, women represent about one-third of the commissioner's senior executive committee. Female officers lead five out of 15 of the RCMP divisions.

Do we strive to achieve more? Absolutely. When I look at the start of my career, one of our goals was to get to 20%, and we really didn't think that was realistic. We've passed that. It takes time, but it takes consistent energy to try to recruit more people and to retain them.

Sometimes we focus a lot on the numbers. We also need to focus on the positions and the roles and importance of what those people actually do.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

We have a few minutes, so we'll go to the second round, and we'll go to Mr. Levitt.

[Michael Levitt, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, first of all, for coming here today and for adding your voice and your perspective to what has been an absolutely challenging and fascinating area of study that we've been addressing over the last month. It's been a real eye-opener for many of us who didn't have as clear a perspective on this issue. Again, the range of speakers, including yourselves, has been fantastic.

General Vance, can you talk about accountability for the CDS directive on integrating gender perspectives into military planning and operations? How do you assign responsibility for achieving results, and do you think it can be used as an example for similar accountability measures in non-military organizations?

[Gen Jonathan Vance]

The accountability rests with the commander, ultimately with me, regardless of what sector or domain of the operation we undertake. One of the strongest parts of our culture is the concept of accountability by commanders for every decision taken and for the results of the operations.

We have a planning mindset. It's deep in our DNA. We plan and we execute with the same people with whom we plan. As we put gender-based analysis plus into the mix, we will treat it the same way we treat the management of fires, manoeuvres, and protection against all perils. It will become a combat function, an action, one of the principal factors.

When we'd look at the intelligence picture of a place we were going to operate, we'd look at the ground, the topography, the infrastructure, and we'd understand the enemy. In Afghanistan, we learned to understand a wider range, the civilians, so we didn't just understand the red side of the equation; we started to understand other actors in that space. Friendly forces that aren't yours, that are from another country: civilians, civil society, NGOs, the list goes on. The commander, and I was one in Afghanistan, has to take all that into account as he or she considers prosecuting an operation. You're not just enemy-centric; you need to firmly understand what you're going to do as a result of a military action, and what you are going to leave as a result. What did you try to improve? If it's just a matter of destroying some part of the enemy, that's fine, but you can't do that in an irresponsible way that would somehow lead to civilian casualties or make it impossible for the civilian population to recover after the fact, so we hold our commanders accountable for the tasks we give them in operations. We are very good at assessing, because we plan, we execute, and we also have a strong assessment function: did you achieve what we asked you to achieve?

There's another whole body of work around running the armed forces as an institution. Being an institution within Canada and a respected one, the accountabilities still rest with people like General Whitecross and me, the leadership of the armed forces, to not only be able to conduct operations correctly in that chain of command, but also to run our institution wisely and correctly, and to take into account all aspects of gender-based analysis and the spirit behind the action plan for peace and security to make certain that we have an institution that's a good place for everybody to come to work. Holding ourselves accountable and being held accountable to that, I think, is and must be on a par with all the other objectives that we are to achieve in this institution, so it can't be buried. It can't be seen as a side bolt on part of what we do. It has to be fundamental to how we are held accountable.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

For the last question, we'll go to Mr. Clement.

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

General Vance, what's the biggest thing you think we can learn in this area from other jurisdictions, and what's the biggest thing that we should avoid looking at in other jurisdictions, given your familiarity with them?

[Gen Jonathan Vance]

Other military jurisdictions?

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

Yes.

[Gen Jonathan Vance]

I think I'll ask General Whitecross to pitch in here, because she's been around the world and talked to other jurisdictions in other countries.

It seems to me that as we're dealing with the specifics of gender-based analysis plus, we have to see it from the perspective of the intent and the ability to operationalize it. We can't use it as whitewash. It's not just something you do after the fact. It's not “add women and stir”. It has to become an essential part of what you do.

I won't name where I think this is the case, but I think the record out there is a bit spotty as we look across our allies and across NATO. Those who have incorporated this deep into the essence of military planning and the execution of operations understood the nature of warfare today and how to prosecute warfare today. I think those are the allies from whom we can take the greatest direction, counsel, and collaboration.

Before I hand it over to General Whitecross, I would just say that it's important to share the lessons learned and to work with those other jurisdictions to see what works and what doesn't. We can't claim to be alone in this. As we undertake coalition operations, sometimes we're only held up as good as the lowest common denominator in the coalition.

It's to our benefit, certainly with our principal allies and partners, to make certain the nature of conflict as it relates to vulnerable populations and how we can do things better needs to pervade and be shared. Some of our allies are great at sharing, and they put a great deal of effort into sharing knowledge. NATO is a great place to share knowledge.

Where it seems to work is when you put the necessary effort and resources behind it. It does take resources. It does take a concerted effort, and then it becomes second nature.

[LGen Christine Whitecross]

Thanks, sir.

In our deliberations with our major military allies, it's really about that culture change at the grassroots level. Everything that General Vance is talking about in terms of putting in the policies and all that kind of stuff has to come out of this genesis of ensuring every person of your military force agrees with the premise of due dignity and respect for all. Our main military allies agree with that in terms of the difficulty they're getting into moving the yardstick forward.

I would say that our policies in general are a bit more open than those of some of our allies in terms of unconscious bias and a couple of other things. We do have a lot of work to do, but it's creating the environment where there is a general understanding and deep respect for dignity for all in the culturalized sense.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Colleagues, we're going to have to wrap it up there.

General Vance and Chief Superintendent Fleury, we want to thank you very much, with your colleagues, for this presentation and for speaking with us on what we have come to believe is a very important study we're working on. We hope to make some solid, comprehensive recommendations to the government on how to make this that much better out there than you see in the rest of the world.

I thank you for your presentations. Keep in mind we may come back at a later date to ask for more information as we work our way through this study.

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, we'll take a five-minute break. They're going to set up for video conferencing, and then we'll go from there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

We are resuming our study on women, peace, and security.

On video conferencing, we have UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme. We have with us Nahla Valji.

We also have Randi Davis with us.

I didn't ask the obvious question. Who's starting first with a presentation?

[Randi Davis, Director, Gender Team, United Nations Development Programme]

Nahla, you go ahead.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

That will be UN Women.

Go ahead with your presentations, one following the other, and then we'll get into questions. Thank you very much for appearing.

[Nahla Valji, Deputy Chief, Peace and Security Section, UN Women]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting us here to testify in front of you today.

My statement to you is going to be informed by my role as the head of the secretariat to the global study on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325, which was undertaken last year for the 15-year anniversary of Resolution 1325, as well as my current role as deputy chief of the peace and security section at UN Women.

I want to begin by saying that as a Canadian and as UN Women's lead in relation to our Security Council work, I had a tremendous sense of pride to be in the audience a few weeks ago at the UN when Prime Minister Trudeau was there at the Commission on the Status of Women and announced Canada's bid for a seat on the Security Council in five years.

Of course, Canada was last on the Security Council in 2000 when Resolution 1325 was passed. At the time, it was a historic first for the world's highest body on peace and security to recognize the integral role of women but also gender equality in relation to international peace and security.

Over the past 16 years, Canada has led the Group of Friends of Women, Peace and Security in New York through their mission there, and for the past two years at our request led the Group of Friends of the Global Study on Resolution 1325, something which I was incredibly grateful for.

There were three peace and security reviews that were undertaken by the UN last year: one on peace operations, one on the peace-building architecture, and the third on the 15-year review of women, peace, and security. Ours was the only one of the three reviews that did not receive staffing and resources, so the support of member states and Canada's leadership were particularly important to the process.

For the review of the current national action plan and the plans for the next NAP that will be undertaken, these consultations and Canada's announcement could not come at a more opportune moment. Globally, we are facing a depth and a complexity of challenges that are unique in recent history in terms of peace and security.

The number of civil wars has tripled in the past 10 years alone. Around the world, more people are displaced than at any time since the end of World War II. Humanitarian needs, many of them caused or exacerbated by conflict, have reached $20 billion. These factors are all exacerbated by climate change, rising violent extremism, and global health pandemics with security dimensions.

It is no coincidence, as I mentioned, that last year the UN undertook three reviews on peace and security, of which the 15-year review on women, peace, and security was one. There's a clear sense that our institutions and traditional responses are ill-equipped for the current context, but the moment is also opportune, as Canada has been a leading figure on an agenda that is gaining recognition as a credible tool to strengthen our peace and security efforts.

Last year, to inform the global study, we consolidated over a decade of research and practice and added to it through global consultations and new commissioned research. The clear finding and message to emerge from the review process was that we now have an unquestionable evidence base that women's meaningful participation is critical to our operational effectiveness in building sustainable peace and inclusive security.

We know that where we have greater numbers of female peacekeepers among UN troops it increases the credibility of our peacekeeping missions on the ground. It increases the level of reporting of sexual and gender-based crimes. It increases our ability to access the communities that we are intending to protect. It in fact decreases the incidences of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse.

When we prioritize gender equality in our humanitarian assistance, it leads to more effective humanitarian assistance, not only for women and girls, but for women, men, boys, and girls, for entire communities. When we target women for post-conflict economic recovery, we see that it has knock-on impacts on families and communities and accelerates economic growth and stability.

Coming out of last year, we now have both a quantitative and a qualitative evidence base with regard to women's meaningful participation in peace processes and transition. Quantitatively, we now know that women's meaningful participation in these processes increases the sustainability of peace by 30% over 15 years. Across 40 processes that were examined, we see that the meaningful participation of women leads to the conclusion of talks, the implementation of agreements, and the sustainability of peace.

We drilled down to look at why this might be the case. Once we began to look at different case studies, it became quite evident. If we use the example of South Sudan, where we primarily have two actors sitting at a table discussing issues such as immediate ceasefires, security arrangements, territory, access to oil wealth, and government positions, we have an agreement that meets the needs of the two main actors. What we are not bringing to the table is the broader constituencies, the communities that have been affected by the conflict and need to protect peace agreements in the long term.

Bringing women's meaningful participation to these processes brings a broader constituency, shifts the dynamics at the peace table, and ensures, as I mentioned, the conclusion of talks and the implementation of agreements.

Fifteen years after the passage of Resolution 1325, however, we still know that the number of female peacekeepers at the UN remains at only 3%. Moreover, research conducted for the global study by the OECD found that less than 2% of funds to fragile contexts goes to furthering women's rights and needs. Only a fraction of this 2% goes to the women's organizations that are on the front lines of response in these countries.

Despite the disjuncture between what we know and what we seem to practise, the 15-year anniversary of Resolution 1325 last year provided us with some important tools to begin to fill the gap, many of them captured in Security Council Resolution 2242, which was the eighth resolution on women, peace, and security passed.

On the funding front—and I'm just going to mention a few of them—we now have the global acceleration instrument on women, peace, and security and humanitarian engagement. This is a pooled UN trust fund that has been established with donors, the UN and civil society in particular, to conduit funding to crisis contexts and directly to women's organizations on the ground.

In the Security Council, we now have a new mechanism, the informal expert group on women, peace, and security. This group had its first meeting in February, focused on Mali, at which the deputy special representative of the Secretary-General in Bamako joined us by VTC for 90 minutes to tell the council what the situation was in relation to women in Bamako, the peace agreement implementation, concrete gender conflict analysis, and what the mission was doing to increase women's participation, as well as protection from sexual violence crimes.

We also have a concrete focus in Resolution 2242 on countering and preventing violent extremism and some concrete recommendations within that. One of them, echoing the Secretary-General's report on women, peace, and security in October, calls for increased funding for gender equality and women's empowerment within our counterterrorism efforts. Specifically, the Secretary-General's report called for a 15% target for the UN system, which is something that UN Women is now taking forward and encouraging member states to adopt as well.

In revising the national action plan, I would encourage that Canada look at the best practices and lessons learned captured in the chapter on national action plans in the global study. This includes, in particular, the importance of widespread consultations, the role of civil society, dedicated funding allocations, and proper monitoring and evaluation included in the design.

It is important that the new national action plan reflect the current realities globally. In this regard, I would encourage Canada to take the lead, in particular on the issue of preventing encountering violent extremism, as echoed in Resolution 2242.

There is perhaps no form of conflict that has made the gendered underpinnings of insecurity and violence more clear than the rise of violent extremism that we are currently witnessing. These groups target women's and girls' basic rights to exist, to health, education, public life, and rights over their own bodies, but they equally use gender stereotypes for their own ends in their radicalization and recruitment efforts as well as in their use of young girls as suicide bombers, as we are increasingly seeing by Boko Haram.

In Mali, our office recently found evidence of social media targeting urban youth in the north with anti-gender equality and anti-women's rights messaging and language in order to lay the foundations for radicalization and recruitment, something that was then conveyed to the Security Council during the first informal expert group meeting that focused on Mali.

In looking forward across the next five years, I would encourage Canada to make women, peace, and security the centrepiece of their campaign for the Security Council. A resolution that was barely accepted by the council 16 years ago has grown beyond a rights agenda to be perhaps one of the most significant tools we have to meet the peace and security challenges of today. Canada, as a founding member of that agenda, is well placed to lead in realizing its full potential.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much.

We'll go right to Randi Davis.

[Randi Davis]

Thank you very much.

I can only echo my colleague's statement in appreciating the opportunity to be here in front of you today. I would also mention how much of a pleasure it was to have the Prime Minister here, showing so much leadership on the issue. We both happen to be Canadians before you, so we have a bit of a dual allegiance here.

Let me begin my remarks with some background on the work of UNDP, because my remarks will be contextualized in the type of work we do. I will give you a bit of a global overview of what we're seeing going on in the field.

UNDP is the main development arm of the United Nations. We work in nearly 170 countries and territories around the world. Our mandate spans the full range of development challenges, from those related to sustainable growth and development, to those related to governance and peace-building, and to those that relate to climate and disaster resilience. We also are the main arm of the United Nations when it comes to recovery from conflict or disaster.

We're engaged around the world helping countries to conduct free and fair elections, undertake constitutional political processes as well as legal reforms, and we're quite engaged in working with other parts of the UN, including UN Women, to strengthen the rule of law and build judicial institutions in crisis and in non-crisis countries.

Putting that in context, when we look at what we do on gender equality and women's empowerment, these are very central features of all the work we do. By and large the strongest aspect of our work related to the women, peace, and security agenda relates to the participation pillar of the agenda, and specifically to efforts to promote women's participation in post-crisis and transitional governance processes. This means ensuring that women participate in constitution-making, in elections, and in public administration.

We know that post-conflict transitions provide unique opportunities to jump-start women's progress on women's political participation. We have seen this realized in countries across the world. I would argue that if we look at the Resolution 1325 agenda, this is the area where we've seen some progress—not enough, but progress.

Unfortunately, as Nahla was pointing out, there has been less progress when we look at women's role in formal peace processes. I won't go into the statistics, which we already heard. We do see a little bit of progress in recent peace processes in Colombia and the Philippines, but this is really an area where I think global attention needs to be focused going forward.

Canada, along with other member states, can use a number of diplomatic channels, including bilateral and multilateral channels, and play an important role in urging parties to negotiations to include women in their delegations, identifying and supporting women leaders, and demanding that internationally sponsored negotiations create and finance processes for women's engagement.

I'd like to address the issue of sexual violence in conflict. Today we do have a much more comprehensive normative and international legal framework for addressing sexual violence. Organizations like the United Nations are certainly doing more to provide comprehensive services for victims and to build the structures we need to end impunity, including training police and military in countries, supporting investigations, and supporting transitional justice mechanisms. However, despite the increased global attention, prosecutions are way outpaced by violations. The wheels of justice are taking decades instead of years.

What I really want to call for is that we redouble our efforts and invest more in preventative action. While a prevention agenda requires greater investments in early warning systems and preventative diplomacy, above all else we require greater investments in addressing the structural and underlying inequalities that are the root causes that drive conflict. This demands intensified investments in basic gender equality programming in not only fragile and conflict-affected contexts but in stable contexts as well.

We know that when women are educated, when they have access to resources and opportunities, and when their political, economic, and social rights are secured, they are less vulnerable to violence in all its forms.

There is a growing body of research showing that the security of women is one of the most reliable indicators of the peacefulness of a state. We have heard that already; it's a view included in the global study. Therefore, a key component of conflict prevention itself is greater investment in women's and girl's empowerment. We have to see that link as essential.

These are areas in which Canada has some of the best global expertise to offer, working on bread-and-butter gender equality work around the world, on reproductive health and rights, on education, on economic and political empowerment. This type of bread-and-butter gender equality support is still underfunded. We continue to see a lack of investments in women's empowerment in all areas.

I would now like to reflect upon some of these new contextual challenges, which my colleague mentioned, that have really come to the fore in recent years.

First, crises, whether resulting from conflict or climate-related events, are causing profound and lasting displacements and migration trends that threaten to stall and even reverse progress for women and girls in communities. If we take the Syrian crisis, for example, we see early marriage rising from 12%, I believe the estimates were, in 2011, until by 2014 the number was as high as 32%. We can safely assume the rate has gone up and that their number is probably underestimated.

We know that more than two million Syrian children are out of school and that in many host countries, Syrian women and girls do not have papers to access services or employment. Ensuring that these women and girls are educated, employed, and able to participate in the decisions that affect their daily lives is vital to building their resilience and reducing their vulnerabilities to violence.

We need to look at violence from the point of view not only of protection and response, but of how we reduce the vulnerabilities. It is also vital to invest in these women and girls if we are going to have future leaders or a future society upon which to build a future Syria. If we want to bridge the humanitarian nexus, which is the focus of the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit, we must focus on investing in what I call development in humanitarian contexts. This is not what is going on at the moment. Other challenges that must be addressed include the rise and spread of violent extremism, which was mentioned, the proliferation of non-state actors to conflict, and the protracted nature of conflict and recovery.

We must recognize that groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and others use sexual violence as deliberate and central tactics to repress populations and destroy the social foundations upon which any recovery must be built. It is hard when we look at these conflicts to envisage how long it's going to take, even if we have a cessation of violence. The progression from conflict to cessation of hostilities to peacemaking and peace-building is not at all linear any more, if it ever was. We need to recognize that preventing sexual violence must be a fundamental and priority component of countering violent extremism and conflict prevention.

What can Canada do? Canada can use the development of its next national action plan to think broadly about conflict prevention in this new context and put gender equality at the centre of strategies. The broader agenda on conflict prevention must be centred around the question of how we build inclusive societies based on social, political, economic, and cultural rights. Canada is a great example of an inclusive society.

When I asked actors on the ground what they would like me to convey to you today, they told me time and again that Canada's leadership is needed more than ever to provide alternatives to what are now primarily militarized responses to bring about peaceful societies. People are looking to Canada to speak up, to engage in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy through formal and informal channels, to promote a human security and human dignity agenda that is backed by investments in the full range of human rights. They are looking for governments like Canada's to find a way to halt the alarming trend of violations against human rights defenders, who are being silenced via actual or threatened violence.

We have seen high-profile murders in countries like Libya and Honduras recently. It is not only this, but women face violence when they try to run for office or when they try to expose corruption in their communities. This is a real issue that is silencing the ability of local actors to bring about change in their communities.

Finally, let me underscore that advancing this sort of agenda requires supporting and partnering with civil society organizations working on the ground. These are the organizations at the front line of countering radicalization and providing alternatives for youth and vulnerable groups in identifying and capacitating the leaders who we want to engage in decision-making.

Whenever we have seen women participate effectively in democratic processes, it's because of these civil society groups. Yet, as we heard earlier, the funding is way insufficient for them to really operate and have any meaningful impact.

Let me conclude by saying that I'm not sure if from Ottawa you can see the change that the Government of Canada recently has had in terms of setting a tone with a new gender-balanced government, with the participation of the Prime Minister in the CSW. There's tremendous enthusiasm around the world. People everywhere are looking towards our country to play a leadership role on an agenda for women, peace, and security, and gender equality more broadly.

I think this new action plan is a fantastic opportunity for Canada to meet these expectations, to put the commitments into action, but it requires an integration of an approach towards women, peace, and security that brings this together with the development and foreign policy agenda of the government.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you for your presentation and your recommendations that are included in your presentation.

Colleagues, we're going to go straight to questions now. I understand that Mr. Genuis is going to start.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I'm going to try to get in a couple of different questions.

First of all, I would just say parenthetically that I appreciated hearing Ms. Valji's comments about the value of a Security Council bid, and I think all of us here would hope to see Canada play that role. Our hope in particular though is that Canada, in the process of trying to achieve that seat, does not sacrifice our values in the pursuit of that role, that we don't end up, let's say, doing too much to cozy up to regimes that don't respect our values and don't respect human rights.

I want to ask Ms. Valji one question that interests me.

We hear often in the west narratives of helplessness and rescue when it comes to women in conflict zones, and sometimes we mistakenly buy into this idea that women in some of these situations are totally helpless and that we in the west need to jump in and fix the situation for them. But there's a lot of evidence in many conflict zones, of course, that there are networks of strong women that are resisting oppression on their own, sometimes with clandestine networks, and it's just the importance of identifying and working with those networks.

I was reading something recently by Elaheh Rostami-Povey about the situation in Afghanistan. I just want to read this quote because I think it's interesting:

As we have seen, a great many women school and university teachers were engaged in teaching girls, young women, and some boys in their neighbourhoods.

This is describing the situation under the Taliban.

The homes of these women and others with specific skills became community homes, financed and managed entirely by women, mainly for girls and women, but also for boys. It was by word of mouth that women and girls spread the news about the secret schools to other women and girls. They hid their books, notebooks, pens and pencils under their borga, risked their lives and went to the secret schools everyday.

I found that interesting as a description of what was happening under the Taliban. I would be curious to hear your comments about how we in the west avoid this narrative of helplessness and instead can identify and work with and empower these networks of women working in potentially very oppressive situations to make sure that we're using all the resources that are available.

[Nahla Valji]

I'll begin with that comment about the Security Council bid, and I fully see that perspective about being weary. I would reiterate that if the theme of women, peace, and security is at the heart of Canada's bid, walking the talk on those values will be incredibly important, and will actually set a tone. We're at a point at the moment where we see a lot of lip service being paid to this agenda, but too few are actually walking the talk.

In October of last year, during the 15-year anniversary at the Security Council resolution, it was actually the largest open debate in the Security Council's history, not just the largest of debates on women, peace, and security, but the largest of any debate that ever took place in the Security Council. There were 112 registered speakers. Everyone was lining up to say how important this agenda is, but very few of them carry it through in terms of implementation. There is a real opportunity here to set that agenda and set that standard.

In terms of the role of women, I could not agree with you more. As UN Women, our focus has strongly been on women's participation and leadership and how we can support that, recognizing that there are important components of protection that do underpin that. The kind of insecurity and violence that women continue to face, both during conflict and post-conflict, undermines and weakens their ability to participate in economic recovery, post-conflict elections, etc., as Randi mentioned. Therefore, there are important elements of protection that do underpin participation, and the entire agenda does need to fit together when we look at that.

However, I do think far more attention needs to be paid to the role of women in securing peace and security. Just to mention Mali again, one of things that was mentioned to the Security Council during that informal expert group meeting on women, peace, and security was recent research that was undertaken in the north of Mali on the gender influences on demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants. What the research found was a very stark gender division in influences on ex-combatants. They were asked who it was that influenced them to take up arms, to continue fighting, and to come back and sustainably reintegrate. In just one of those areas, to come back and sustainably reintegrate and stay in their communities, the distinction was that 40% had been influenced by their mothers to come back. We miss the influence, the role that women can play in those kinds of societies.

We also miss the fact that women in communities are the first to notice the signs of radicalization in their families, and are at the front line of conflict prevention. We do need to be supporting that.

I just want to give you one final example. In Burundi, UN Women and the peace-building fund have been supporting a network of 500-plus women mediators in communities across Burundi. Given the incredibly tense situation there at the moment, these women have addressed some 3,000-plus community-level conflicts over the past 18 months. Some were social, some family, and some political. They prevented them from spilling over. They addressed rumours that were leading to population flights between communities. They defused tensions. They negotiated with government for the release of detainees. This is a group of 500 women who've been able to contain the tensions in many of their communities, so I think far more needs to go, in particular, to supporting women's organizations on the ground.

That is something we're trying to do with the new pooled funding mechanism. The global acceleration instrument, GAI, on women, peace, and security and humanitarian engagement is meant to be a funding mechanism of the international community to conduit that money directly where it's needed. In fact, the GAI is now supporting those women in Burundi to scale up those efforts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Sidhu.

[Jati Sidhu, Liberal, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you so much for presenting to our committee. I'm very thrilled that two Canadians are serving on the world stage. I thank you for that as well.

How does UN Women support justice and security institutions that protect women and girls from violence and discrimination? Could you give us a couple of concrete examples of how it works?

[Nahla Valji]

Absolutely.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples and then I'm going to hand it over to Randi, because the UNDP actually is the broader development rule of law justice focus.

The UN system in the past few years has actually undertaken an institutional arrangement of UNDP and DPKO being collocated in an arrangement called the global focal point for police, justice, and corrections. They are meant to be the point people on justice in conflict settings.

UN Women has seconded somebody to this team in order to ensure that gender is being mainstreamed into everything that the UN is doing in rule of law post-conflict: ensuring that women's access to justice issues is being addressed, that sexual gender-based crimes are being addressed, and that we are ideally earmarking a minimum of 15% funding for rule of law initiatives to support gender equality and women's empowerment. That's one way in which we're supporting. We have a global program on transitional justice, so we support truth commissions and reparations programs from Mali to South Sudan to Colombia as they get set up on their process there.

I think one of the most important initiatives for UN Women over the past few years has actually been a collaboration with Canada, a collaboration with the Justice Rapid Response, an intergovernmental justice mechanism that was created by Canada and the international community for the international community. In the past five years, UN Women has partnered with JRR to create a dedicated sub-roster of sexual and gender-based crimes investigators. This roster has been incredibly important, because it's allowed UN Women to second SGBV, sexual gender-based violence, justice experts to all UN commissions of inquiry and all fact-finding missions that the UN undertakes.

The documentation of crimes that we've been hearing about coming out of Syria over the past four years is due to this initiative. The evidence base we have on crimes by Boko Haram in Libya and Iraq from their fact-finding missions is due to this initiative and to our partnership with JRR.

Last year, we supported the International Criminal Court, and that led to the first confirmation in the Ntaganda case, a confirmation of all sexual violence charges. The chief prosecutor mentioned that it was a direct result of us having an investigator there. That partnership has been an incredibly important one. A Canadian initiative, a Canadian partnership, started it, and that Canadian partnership has allowed us to work, in particular, in the Middle East region, in Jordan and Iraq, supporting and mentoring first responders to identify sexual violence crimes and to respond to them.