Participation

The Government has adopted a national policy for women's advancement and a national plan of action. A women's development implementation committee, headed by the Minister for Women and Children Affairs, monitors the implementation of policies for women's empowerment. It has also created a gender-based budget. We are benefiting greatly from all of those initiatives.

Some initiatives of the global community in the first decade of its adoption have been praiseworthy. The establishment of a new body, UN-Women, and the appointment of a Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict have been two significant developments that have placed women at the top of the global agenda.

In Bangladesh, based on our experience with nation-building and women's empowerment, we have embraced this view and developed a model that our Prime Minister, Her Excellency Sheikh Hasina calls a “peace model”. She believes that if peace is attained and maintained, development and prosperity will follow. The central message conveyed in the model emphasizes the empowerment of people, including women and other vulnerable groups.

We encourage the Council to remain seized of the need to deploy women protection advisers to peacekeeping and special political missions. The inclusion of relevant information in country-specific reports and in mission mandates must also be considered.

Over the past two and a half years, we have witnessed a renewed dedication by the United Nations, as well as troop- and police-contributing countries, to developing and implementing tools to prevent and address sexual violence, consistent with their mandate to protect civilians.

Moreover, legal systems have to be capable of addressing the special situation and needs of women and children, particularly in societies traumatized by conflict, including through special legislation and appropriate programmes of assistance and by abolishing laws and practices that discriminate against women and pose obstacles to their full and equal participation.

My fourth point concerns the situation of those most vulnerable to the impact of conflict and postconflict situations. An effective response has to address the particular needs of those people, such as women and children, who are not only more vulnerable, but also so often targeted and used as soldiers or as instruments of war, as is the case with sexual and gender-based violence. Rule-of-law tools are also fundamental in that regard.

Secondly, women and children must be placed at the centre of transitional justice mechanisms. We commend the Council for its efforts in combating impunity for sexual and gender-based violence, in promoting gender-responsive justice reforms and in securing women's participation in all aspects of postconflict recovery.

On the implementation side, we welcome the new monitoring, analysis and reporting arrangement on conflict-related sexual violence requested under resolution 1960 (2010), which now is operational. We also very much welcome the recent progress made by DPKO on the completion of new training modules on protection issues for peacekeeping personnel and we look forward to their roll-out in the near future.

Peacekeeping operations are one of the most important tools available to the United Nations to protect civilians in armed conflict.