Behind every successful woman…

In the months since the last Council session, Star Wars has come to dominate my home life. My son asks endless questions about the characters, while the rest of the family begrudgingly take turns to act them out. I’m most often cast as Jabba the Hutt while my Jedi son brandishes his light sabre and my wife and daughter take turns to play Princess lost the will to live. The old films I grew up with didn’t do much for women’s empowerment so I’m happy that the latest one finally has a woman playing the central role.

The Council doesn’t lend itself to an easy division between those on the side of goodness and those fighting for the dark side – there are too many countries and characters who sit somewhere in the middle. But how a state approaches women’s rights is a strong indicator of where they appear on the spectrum of good and bad. The June Council session focusses heavily on women’s rights and UK Minister Baroness Anelay made this the central issue during her visit in week one. She was joined by High Commissioner Zeid and a range of women and men Ambassadors at a major side event which brought together a number of initiatives in Geneva on women’s empowerment. The event helped to keep up the momentum for the next UN Secretary General to be a woman and the Minister’s call for “a world where every woman and girl has a voice, choice and control”, was shared by many others. In the build-up to the event, hundreds of men and women delegates tweeted messages and pledges on women’s rights and empowerment. My personal favourite was by my EU colleague Louise – “behind every successful woman is herself.”

In her speech to mark the Queen’s 90th birthday on Thursday evening, the Minister paid tribute to British Member of Parliament Jo Cox, whose awful killing has shocked the country. She was an incredible role model who made change happen in her own country and around the world, and politicians across the UK have come together to pay their respects.^.

While the global fight for women’s rights is far from won, the international human rights system has a range of legal and expert structures to keep up the pressure for positive change. But for those facing violence and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, no such mechanism exists. Discrimination remains state policy in more than one third of the world’s countries, with laws prohibiting homosexuality in over 75 countries, and in 11 of these, people can be executed just on the grounds of sexual orientation. This session a group of Latin American countries comprising Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, is seeking to set up a new Independent Expert of the Council to look at violence and discrimination against LGBTI people. It’s a welcome move but will face firm opposition from those members of the Council who maintain the most repressive national laws and practices against lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

To mark the Council’s tenth anniversary, the Swiss organised an event to bring together all 10 Human Rights council Presidents. As the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Council, I’m one of the select few who has been here for them all. It prompted a mixed set of feeling which ranged from pleasant nostalgia to mild post-traumatic stress disorder. We’ve been fortunate that so many of the Council’s Presidents have been good, but the shortage of women Presidents was striking. Only one President, Laura Dupuy Lasserre from Uruguay, has been a woman, and this is something we’ve got to do much better at in the future if the Council’s going to live up to its own rhetoric on women’s rights.

I wish you all a pleasant rest of session. I’ll be trying to do my bit to advance the forces of good during the day. But I’ll be spending my evenings suffering for the dark side before watching my wife send Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to bed. There’s no doubt where the real power lies in our house, and it’s not with the men.