Development Channel

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark resolution recognizing the importance of women as leaders in the peace and security sector, not merely as victims of conflict. I recently hosted Nahla Valji—the head of women, peace, and security work at UN Women—to discuss international progress on the resolution and the U.S. role in its implementation. In both 2004 and 2005, the president of the Security Council urged member states to adopt national action plans (NAPs) to guide implementation of resolution 1325. So far, fifty countries have done so, including the United States and—most recently—Afghanistan. The evidence from the last fifteen years demonstrates that increased participation of women in peace and security matters and is associated with reduced conflict, violence, and extremism. Afghan civil society groups initiated the call for a national action plan in 2007, and official meetings on the potential document started in 2009. To garner support, activists and policymakers were careful to frame women’s social equality as critical to Afghan development and security priorities. Mahbouba Seraj, a member of the Afghan Women’s Network who worked on the NAP, asked “resistant men to imagine Afghanistan as a half-crippled body. Without the inclusion of 50 percent of its citizens, how could Afghanistan really achieve national peace and reconstruction?” Furthermore, the drafters worked with religious leaders to link the argument with Islam and de-emphasize the NAP’s Western roots. Yet the implementation of the Afghan NAP will likely be dependent on foreign—predominantly Western—governments, as those donor countries will provide the funding for these gender initiatives. As Miki Jacevic, vice chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security, notes in ForeignPolicy.com, “If you don’t have the money for it, we should not kid ourselves that Afghans will implement this.” Enter the U.S. National Action Plan—a document that calls for empowering “half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building peace in countries threatened and affected by war, violence, and insecurity.” The U.S. NAP is international in focus, and though it does include mention of the “recruitment, retention, treatment, and integration of women into U.S. Armed Forces,” much of the strategy faces outward, on women outside the United States. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) criticizes this tendency in the NAPs of developed countries in its 2014 study on UNSCR 1325. “National implementation strategies are relevant for all countries, not only for those involved in conflict,” the report reads. “Several studies have already pointed out that including more women in military and peacekeeping structures and operations has the potential to greatly enhance management and military operational effectiveness. “The Women, Peace and Security agenda not only focuses on situations where peace is immediately threatened, but also aims at ensuring higher female participation in the political sphere overall. It is not possible to comply with this agenda by suddenly including more women only in conflict or post-conflict situations—women must be included in everyday political and military life and operations to make their participation meaningful.”

This is the fourth post of a new series on the Development Channel, "This Week in Markets and Democracy." Each Friday, CFR’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Program, will highlight the week’s noteworthy events and articles. Gap in climate finance The six big multilateral development banks (MDBs) released a new report on climate financing this week. In 2014, multilaterals spent $28 billion to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to help countries adapt to climate change. South Asia and Latin America received the largest share of this record outlay, up over $4 billion from last year. Still to meet the 2020 goal of mobilizing $100 billion to help developing nations cope with climate change, the MDBs are being asked to stretch their “balance sheets and crowd in more capital.” The World Bank and others are pushing to bolster low-emission investment, particularly from the private sector. And at next month’s Third International Conference on Financing for Development, public, private, and NGO sectors will focus on clean energy financing and climate resilience among other development priorities. Technology versus corruption European researchers from Cambridge and several other universities are developing a tech platform to make Europe’s public spending more transparent and easier for citizens to scrutinize. To identify corruption in public spending, the Digital Whisleblower project (DigiWhist) will collect public spending information from across thirty-four European countries, link this data to corporate information and political officeholder records, and using sophisticated algorithms, sniff out corrupt behavior. Ultimately, the DigiWhist platform will not only map risk of corrupt behavior and contracts on the national and regional scale, but also track suspicious suppliers and pinpoint individual contracts. China too is using technology, releasing an app through which citizens can anonymously submit proof of government corruption, specifically officials abusing public funds for personal consumption. Improving humanitarian aid The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ (OCHA) annual Global Humanitarian Overview Status Report revealed a huge gap in resources for humanitarian crises. With only 26 percent of the necessary $18.8 billion committed, nearly 80 million people across thirty-seven countries remain vulnerable. In the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, David Miliband and Ravi Gurumrthy of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Michael Barnett and Peter Walker of George Washington University and Chatham University, respectively, discuss this and other challenges facing humanitarian aid. In addition to resources, the IRC’s Miliband and Gurumrthy argue for focusing on outcomes rather then inputs—for instance measuring functional literacy not number of new schools. They also argue for reducing bureaucratic red tape, consolidating response efforts, encouraging competition among humanitarian organizations to improve delivery, and shifting the focus from international goals like the Millennium Development Goals to country-specific targets. Barnett and Walker emphasize local partnerships as the means to improve accountability and design effective programs. South Africa Ignores the ICC This week, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s again evaded arrest for the genocide and war crime charges brought against him by the International Criminal Court (ICC). South African President Jacob Zuma’s administration ignored the ICC’s request to arrest al-Bashir when he attended the African Union Johannesburg summit. This incident raises questions about the ICC’s credibility in Africa more broadly, as South Africa’s action follows Kenya’s refusal to cooperate with investigations into senior officials’ roles in inciting electoral violence in 2007 and Ugandan call for African nations to withdraw from the ICC altogether. Zuma’s choice also flouted South Africa’s High Court, which had ordered al-Bashir to remain in the country pending a judicial decision over whether to hand him over to the ICC. CFR Senior Fellow John Campbell sees Zuma’s decision as a threat to South Africa’s rule of law. Read his analysis here.

Earlier this month, Pakistani authorities revealed that eight of the ten men accused in the 2012 attack on Malala Yousafzai were acquitted, despite a previous announcement that all ten were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Malala’s case is especially remarkable considering she won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, recognizing her advocacy for girls’ education even after being shot in the head for her work. The regional deputy police chief, Azad Khan, was quoted in the New York Times saying that the men “were released for lack of evidence,” chalking the verdict up to a failure of Pakistan’s justice system. The trial was reportedly held in one of Pakistan’s secretive anti-terrorism courts, where decisions are made behind closed doors in an attempt to protect judges. According to the same article, “such trials are hampered by poor evidentiary standards and the security forces’ widely documented pattern of rounding up suspects, sometimes on flimsy grounds, and of obtaining confessions through torture.” Yet the acquittal of Malala’s attackers comes at a moment when Pakistan is coming under scrutiny from human rights organizations for the opposite reason: exceedingly harsh punishments—including nearly 140 executions in the last six months—from the same flawed anti-terror courts. A recent New America Foundation paper details the recent changes in Pakistan’s counterterrorism legal system, instituted following the December attack on a school that killed over 130 children. The paper argues that although the amendments have the “commendable goals of reducing delays and ensuring better security for judges trying terrorism cases, the legitimacy of the process has suffered from stripping away the traditional protections like an open trial, right to counsel, and burden of proof on the prosecution” that used to be afforded the accused. While this disregard for the legal and human rights of terrorism suspects is a significant flaw in Pakistan’s justice system, so too is the inequality evident in the handing down of sentences from these courts. While terrorism suspects are hanged “left, right, and center,” members of extremist groups who are suspects in cases of gender-based violence, like Malala’s, or attacks on religious minority groups go unpunished. According to International Crisis Group, women in Pakistan have long been the “principal victims of state policies to appease violent extremists.” Despite a pledge from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on March 8, 2015, International Women’s Day, that the “government would take all necessary legislative and administrative steps to protect and empower women,” it is clear that such legal reforms are still lacking. Pakistan’s justice system is flawed in many ways, and reform is necessary to ensure the protection of the human and legal rights of the accused. Yet any reform must also address the unequal application of the law toward women and girls, like Malala, who are survivors of gender-based violence.