The Former permanent representative of India to the United Nations, Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji, delivered the second lecture in the 2nd C.B. Muthamma Memorial Lecture Series.
I would like to thank Global Order and its two dynamic promoters, Rishi Suri and Hindol Sengupta, for inviting me to deliver the Second CB Muthamma Memorial Lecture.
The First Lecture looked at the role and significance of Ambassador CB Muthamma as the first woman to become a Grade 1 Indian Foreign Service Ambassador.
In this Lecture, I propose to look at how the concept and principle of gender equality, applied to render justice to Ambassador Muthamma, has evolved in international relations since India became a founder-member of the contemporary multilateral structures of global governance.
This narrative includes the remarkable contributions of Indian women activists in the creation of the first international policy framework upholding the human rights of women, which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR, adopted on 10 December 1948.
It also touches upon the significant role that the principle of international cooperation has played in bringing together women activists from across the world, including India, in creating the first dedicated institution to implement gender equality, which is the Commission on the Status of Women or CSW.
In the third part of this Lecture, I will discuss how gender equality has been incrementally integrated into the central agenda of the contemporary multilateral system through the United Nations, and some major challenges facing gender equality today.
This Lecture is a good opportunity to recognize and welcome India’s historic appointment in 2022, seventy-seven years after the UN was founded, of Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj as the first woman Permanent Representative of independent India to the United Nations in New York, and the first Indian woman President of the UN Security Council (UNSC).
The UNDHR
The UN Charter, which was negotiated and adopted in San Francisco in June 1945, contained references to human rights. While the Preamble referred to “equal rights of men and women”, and Article 8 upheld that men and women would participate in the UN “under conditions of equality”, the provisions of the Charter did not specify what these human rights were, and how gender equality would be implemented in practice.
On 23 January 1946, Sir Ramaswamy A. Mudaliar of India was elected the first President of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) by the UN General Assembly (UNGA). He oversaw how the ECOSOC, using the mandate given to it by Article 68 of the UN Charter, established a 9-member Commission on Human Rights (CHR) with a Sub-Commission on the Status of Women on 16 February 1946 to take forward proposals on human rights, including the rights of women. The CHR elected Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as its leader.
The discussions in the CHR oscillated between proposing a legal convention with obligations enforcing human rights to be adopted by UN member-states, and proposing an international bill of rights that would contain standards for human rights, which would be used by countries to provide substance to their human rights agenda. By the end of 1948, the second option became the focus of the CHR, and the UDHR assumed its status as a Declaration rather than a treaty.
The UN records credit Hansa Mehta of India with changing the phrase “All men are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal” in Article 1 of the Declaration. Lakshmi Menon, India’s delegate to the UNGA’s Third Committee, insisted on referring to the “equal rights of men and women” in its Preamble.
Hansa Mehta embodied the spirit of gender equality that enabled men and women to jointly oppose British colonial rule during India’s freedom struggle. She would subsequently become the Vice Chancellor of Baroda University.
Lakshmi Menon was an educationist and political activist, who was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Nehru. After Nehru’s death in 1964, she worked in the All-India Women’s Conference, becoming its President, prioritizing the education and empowerment of women.
Vijayalakshmi Pandit was involved as a woman activist in the First Session of the UNGA, when she was designated the Leader of the Indian delegation. Raphael Lemkin has written in his autobiography of how spontaneously she supported his proposal for India to become one of the three co-sponsors of the mandate for negotiating the UN Convention on Genocide. In 1953, Vijayalakshmi Pandit became the first ever woman to be elected President of the UNGA. During her term, she worked closely with the indefatigable Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations, to give meaning to the principles of the UN Charter.
The CSW
While the CHR enabled the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights with gender equality included in its first Article, the focus of women delegates from three Scandinavian countries, Bodil Bergtrup of Denmark, Aase Lionaes of Norway, and Ulla Lindstrom of Sweden was on making the Sub-Commission on the Status of Women, which was subordinate to the ECOSOC, into a full Commission. They felt that a full-fledged Commission would ensure the implementation of policies for gender equality in a more predictable and effective manner.
These three Scandinavian activists networked with the women delegates at the UN, including Minerva Bernadino of the Dominican Republic, who had collaborated with Bertha Lutz of Brazil in inserting the reference to “women” in the UN Charter during the San Francisco Conference, and Hansa Mehta of India, whom Bodil Bergtrup wrote about warmly in her public writings.
The Indian freedom struggle’s experience in which men and women had fought together as equals in opposing British colonial rule was brought into the discussions of this group of women delegates by Hansa Mehta, who had presided over the All-India Women’s Conference. Bodil Bergtrup wrote that Hansa Mehta’s experience and views impressed her. The four priorities set by this group were to seek equal rights for women in the political, citizenship, socio-economic, and education spheres.
The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was established, and met for the first time in 1947. All its 15 representatives were women. Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali from Vadodara in Gujarat, who had presided over the All-India Women’s Conference, represented India.
The CSW provided an interface for non-governmental organizations which had consultative status with the ECOSOC to focus on setting standards and supporting national legislation to end discrimination against women, as well as legislation to empower women. The work done by the CSW over the decades, using data provided from the ground level, has enabled governments represented in the UN to adopt human rights laws to raise the status of women globally.
Today, the CSW has 45 member states elected by the ECOSOC on the basis of geographical representation. Of these, 13 states are from Africa, 11 from Asia, 9 from Latin America, 8 from Western Europe and 4 from Eastern Europe.
The CSW has contributed to the major international legal instruments on women’s rights. In 1953, it drafted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, the first such law to recognize and protect the political rights of women. Its two legal instruments in 1957 and 1962 codified women’s rights in marriage. The most significant outcome of the CSW’s work was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or CEDAW, adopted by the UNGA in 1979.
India ratified CEDAW in 1994 with two carve-outs.
First, the Indian state would not interfere in the “personal affairs of a community”.
Second, it felt the compulsory registration of marriages requirement was impracticable in a country as diverse as India.
The upholding of CEDAW’s core principles of non-discrimination and empowerment of women has been demonstrated in the political sphere by India’s election of two women as head of state, Presidents Smt. Pratibha Patil in 2007 and Smt. Draupadi Murmu in 2022. Indian women like Smt. Meira Kumar and Smt. Sumitra Mahajan have presided over the Parliament as Speaker of the Lok Sabha between 2009-2019.
The decision to declare 1975 as the International Women’s Year was recommended by the CSW. This focused on the contribution of women to peace and development on equal terms with men, and was marked by the First World Conference on Women held in Mexico City. Twenty years later, the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing resulted in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which has remained the template to evaluate the progress of gender equality at the international level till today.
The steady accretion of specific gender equality initiatives in the UN resulted in the decision in July 2010 to converge the different areas of into a single entity, known as UN Women, which functions as the Secretariat of the CSW. The former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was nominated as the first head or Executive Director of UN Women from 2010 till 2013. She was assisted by Ambassador Lakshmi Puri of India, who served as Deputy Executive Director of UN Women from 2011 till 2017.
Agenda 2030
The CSW story embodies how the international community has used an institutional mechanism to achieve the objective of gender equality through the ECOSOC. However, the significance of gender equality on the ground revolves around four main areas. These are education, health, employment, and technology. All three are an integral part of the ambitious, universal and unanimous Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, adopted by world leaders in September 2015.
The origin of this disaggregated perspective on development, which resulted in the 8 Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), applicable only to developing countries, proposed in a top-down manner by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000.
The lessons of the challenges facing the implementation of the MDGs, particularly regarding financial flows and adjustments to disparate ground situations, led in 2012 to a mandate to negotiate bottom-up goals with proposed means of implementing these. In September 2015, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were applicable universally to all countries were adopted as Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development.
The concept of sustainable development is significant for gender equality. Michelle Bachelet, the first head of UN Women, had emphasized the holistic perspective in which gender equality needed to be viewed. She said that:
“Advancing gender equality is not just good for women, it is good for all of us. When women enjoy equal rights and opportunities, poverty, hunger and poor health decline and economic growth rises. Advancing the equal rights of men and women creates healthier and more sustainable societies and economies.”
The aspirations of women in former colonial developing countries were reflected through the G-77, bringing together the 77 developing countries in the UN in 1964. In response to the G-77’s demand for a dedicated interface for development-related issues in the UN, the UN Development Program or UNDP was created in 1965. Since then, gender equality issues within member-states of the UN have been supported with the assistance of the UNDP, which is active in 170 member-states of the UN, including India.
Proposals for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) to achieve accelerated development by the G-77 in its Charter of Algiers adopted in 1967 led to a robust response from developed countries at the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, positioning environmental protection and development as contradictory objectives.
It took an empowered woman from India to link the two objectives. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s statement that “poverty is the biggest polluter” provided the basis for a subsequent international negotiation that converged development and environmental protection into the concept of “sustainable development”.
The credit for this convergence goes to another empowered woman, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, whose Brundtland Report of 1987 provided the framework for the negotiation of the SDGs and eventually Agenda 2030 itself. In a vindication of Indira Gandhi’s position, the eradication of poverty was made the first and overarching SDG of Agenda 2030.
Challenges
In 2000, the UNSC took the initiative to bring women into the traditionally male-dominated UN peacekeeping operations by adopting resolution 1373 on “women, peace, and security”. This has provided a significant positive impact to the role of women in the formulation of peacekeeping and peacebuilding policies in societies torn by violent conflicts, as well as the ability of women to serve as women peacekeepers, including in civil war situations.
Indian women have been pioneers in this area in showcasing effective gender equality. In 2007, India became the first UN member-state to deploy a unit of all-women peacekeepers in Liberia as part of the UN’s 23-nation UNIMIL peacekeeping operation. At that time, 6% Liberian women were part of the country’s security sector.
The positive impact of India’s women peacekeepers as role models resulted in Liberian women accounting for 16% of their country’s security sector when India’s UNIMIL mission was completed in 2016.
In South Sudan, Indian women peacekeepers deployed as part of the UNMISS peacekeeping operation, one of the most challenging in the world, have been awarded UN medals in January 2023 in recognition of their role in a country and society wracked by civil war since 2013.
Within the SDG framework, gender equality issues feature prominently. SDG 5 is exclusively devoted to gender equality, although a look at all the other SDGs shows the importance of gender equality in achieving their targets as well. Only 15% of the targets under SDG 5 were “on track”, with “moderate progress” reported on about 60%, and the remaining 25% of the targets were assessed as being “very far off track”. These targets include increasing political representation of women in legislative and public offices, countering violence against women, expanding the access of women to socio-economic resources including education and entrepreneurship, and enhancing the use of digital technologies for empowering women.
The UN’s September 2023 Summit on SDGs declared that the “achievement of the SDGs in in peril”. The reasons for this were broadly due to the
“Persistent and long-term impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, continued poverty and widening inequalities, and the multiple interlinked crises that are pushing our world to the brink, particularly in developing countries and for the poorest and most vulnerable. ”
In a specific reference to progress on gender equality, the Summit reaffirmed that
“Gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls will make a crucial contribution to progress across all the Goals and targets. The achievement of full human potential and sustainable development is not possible if one half of humanity continues to be denied full human rights and opportunities. We will ensure full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all women and girls, without discrimination. We also resolve to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.”
Ironically, the Summit’s reference to the use of digital technologies to bridge digital divides appeared divorced from ground realities. Summit participants asserted that
“We will address barriers to girls’ education, gender and disability gaps and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in and through education and safe, healthy and stimulating learning environments that enable all learners to achieve their full potential and physical, mental and emotional well-being,”
There was no mention of the fact known to all UN member-states that 20 million women and girls in Afghanistan had been deprived of their basic human rights of education and employment since mid-August 2021, and what world leaders proposed to do about this gender apartheid. For an Indian, this is a priority issue due to the high-profile involvement of a prominent Indian woman activist, Ela Bhatt, and her non-governmental organization SEWA in the socio-economic development of Afghanistan from the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001 up to mid-August 2021.The work done by SEWA, which was also supported by the United States, empowered Afghan women through education and self-employment, which are the objectives of gender equality.
The UN Secretary-General’s report issued soon after the Summit, on 1 December 2023, conveyed that since 18 September 2023, women’s rights in Afghanistan
“Remained curtailed in all spheres of public life, with no change in the de facto authorities’ policies on female education and employment”, including “the continued severe restrictions imposed on Afghan female personnel working for the United Nations”.
What does the future hold for the evolution of gender equality through international cooperation? One answer would become known when the UN holds its “Summit of the Future” in September 2024. It is worth recalling that when the Brundtland Report had been presented in 1987, it had clearly emphasized that
“The challenge of finding sustainable development paths ought to provide the impetus - indeed the imperative - for a renewed search for multilateral solutions and a restructured international economic system of co-operation”.
Restructuring the existing structure and substance of multilateralism would appear to be the answer for the crisis in which gender equality finds itself in globally today.
Thank you.