High-Level Launch Event of the OHCHR Publication "Advancing Women's Rights and Gender Equality: The Fifteenth Anniversary of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls"

Good morning, Excellency', distinguished guests, colleagues and friends.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to this high level launch of the publication, Advancing Women's Rights and Gender Equality, the 15th anniversary of the Working Group Discrimination Against Women and Girls.
My name is Ivana Kostic and I have the honor of serving as vice chair of the working group.
I'm also delighted to moderate today this event, which takes place during the 44th session of the working group.
I would like to thank our distinguished speakers today, Mr.
Ryder and Secretary-General for Policy, miss Fuentes Julio, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, and miss GumbanZanda, your Women Deputy Executive Director, and also the Ambassador Kim, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea.
I would also like to thank our co sponsors today, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Permanent Commission of Republic of Korea and Mexico.
We are gathered today to mark an important milestone, 15 years since the Human Rights Council established the mandate of the working group of discrimination against women and girls through its resolution 15 23.
Over these 15 years, the working group has continued to document discrimination against women and girls in all its forms, identifying structural and systemic barriers to equality and providing practical guidance to states and other stakeholders on how to advance women's and girls' human rights.
This anniversary is not only an occasion to look back.
It is also an opportunity to reflect on the present and to look ahead.
Around the world, important gains in women's and girls' rights are being challenged.
In some contexts, this take the form of open backlash against gender equality.
In others, it is reflected in stagnation, lack or inconsistent implementation, shrinking civic space and resources, attacks on women human rights defenders, renewed attempt to undermine the universality of women's and girls' human rights, and the widening gap between legal commitments and the lived realities of women and girls.
At the same time, women and girls continue to lead change in communities, institutions, social movements, academia, diplomacy, law, politics, and public life.
Their voices remind us that equality is not a symbolic aspiration, but a concrete obligation and a condition for justice, democracy, peace, and sustainable development.
Publication that we are launching today captures this dual perspective.
It documents the achievements of the mandate and also brings together reflections from current and former members of the working group and very importantly, the voices of girls and young women from different regions offering inspiration and direction for the years ahead.
The publication is available online, and we also have hard copies available in this room.
If you have not received a copy and would like one or more, feel free to ask our secretary.
It is now my honor to invite Mr.
Ryder and the Secretary-General for policy to deliver the opening remarks.
Mr.
Ryder, the floor is yours.
Well, thank you very much indeed.
Distinguished Chair and members of the working group on discrimination against women and girls.
Assistant Secretary-General Fuentes, a warm welcome to you.
Great to be with you again, Distinguished panelists, Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends.
It's my honor this morning to address you on behalf of the Secretary-General.
On the launch of this important publication marking the achievements of the working group on discrimination against women and girls since its establishment by consensus in the Human Rights Council and particular thanks to the permanent missions of Mexico and of the Republic of Korea for helping to make this event a reality.
The Secretary-General expresses his deep appreciation to all current and former members for their tireless dedication to fighting discrimination against women and girls worldwide.
The publication we launched today is a testament to the impact achieved by the working group, which has worked tirelessly for the human rights of women and girls since its inception.
Documenting discrimination in all its forms, providing analysis, guidance, and recommendations to member states upon request, and identifying barriers and helping translate commitments into concrete impact on the ground.
In doing all of this, you've made one thing unmistakably clear that discrimination against women and girls is not inevitable, it's systemic, and it can and must be dismantled.
The publication we welcome today serves to remind us how far we have come since the establishment of the working group and how an independent and expert driven mechanism can serve to find solutions and help dismantle entrenched inequalities.
But it's also a sobering reminder that the progress made cannot be taken for granted at a time when some seek to roll back hard won rights, we must hold firm and cannot afford to become complacent.
De colleagues, let's first celebrate the progress.
The number of women in parliaments worldwide has more than doubled.
More than 160 countries have adopted legislation to address domestic violence.
Some 50 million more girls have been enrolled in school globally, and these gains did not occur by chance.
They were secured through the strategic and sustained action of women and girls across all regions working alongside legislative bodies, national international institutions, and allies in civil society to change laws, transform structures, and strengthen the very institutions that are meant to protect their rights.
Even in the most challenging of circumstances and often at great personal risk, women and girls continue to organize, to advocate, and to assert their rights, and their voices are amplified through the sustained engagement of this working group.
Colleagues, while significant progress has been made, challenges, of course, persist.
Full gender equality has not yet been achieved in any country.
No indicator under Sustainable Development Goal five has been met or is close to being met.
In 105 economies, legal frameworks still deny women equal rights in areas such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and decision making within the household.
The gender pay gap remains significant and economies continue to rely on women's disproportionate unpaid care and domestic work.
This perpetuates inequality and limits opportunity.
Violence against women and girls continues to exact a devastating toll on individuals, on families, and on societies.
New technologies, notably artificial intelligence are creating conditions to allow new platforms for violence and abuse, normalizing misogyny and online revenge.
But none of these are inevitable conditions.
Discriminatory laws and patriarchal structures can and must be changed.
Barriers hindering women from leading government, making policy decisions, leading business and negotiating peace processes can and need to be dismantled.
Because when women and girls lead, democracies become stronger and communities more resilient.
Economies grow faster when women participate fully.
Peace agreements are more durable when women have a seat at the table, and families thrive when girls complete their education.
In conflict and crisis settings, ensuring women and girls full and meaningful participation in justice and in recovery processes that affect them is essential to advancing gender equality and building inclusive, sustainable outcomes.
It is a matter of justice, and it is a foundation of sustainable development and of lasting peace.
This is why the Secretary-General, through the United Nations system wide Gender Equality acceleration plan, put gender equality at the core of all work of the United Nations, not only because it is a fundamental right, but because it is a prerequisite for everything that we seek to achieve.
Colleagues, this publication demonstrates what sustained and principled engagement can achieve and the vital role of this working group.
We must act decisively so that member states have the support needed to build the enabling environments in which women and girls can contribute their full and extraordinary potential and invest in their capabilities in furtherance of the full promise of the Beijing Declaration and platform for action and of United Nations Security Council Resolution 13 25.
So I conclude congratulating the working group, the Office of the High Commissioner, and all contributors to this important publication and for all of your tireless efforts.
Let's continue working together to realize a world of equal rights, of dignity, and opportunity for all women and all girls.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Vr, for your important opening remarks and also for situating today's discussion within the broader priorities of the United Nations at this critical moment for gender equality and human rights.
We know that you have a very busy schedule, and we are very pleased and grateful that you could join us today.
We are also very pleased to welcome miss Elena Koudri from the Rule of Law Unit in ESG.
I now have the pleasure of inviting miss Claudia Flores, chair of the working group to introduce the publication to present the vision behind this book and reflect on the significance of this 15th anniversary for the mandate and for the broader struggle for substantive equality.
Claudia, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Ivana, and thank you, Under Secretary-General Wer, for your opening remarks and for setting the stage so eloquently.
Excellency's distinguished colleagues and dear friends, it is a great pleasure to be with you today to launch this OHCHR publication, marking 15 years of the working group on discrimination against women and girls.
When the Human Rights Council established the working group in 2010, it was responding to a reality that continues to persist today.
Women and girls in every region of the world continue to face discrimination woven into our laws, our institutions, and into the fabric of our daily lives.
The working group was created to respond to this reality, to identify the discriminatory laws, practices, and structures that constrain the lives of women and girls and deprive them of the dignity and equality that the human rights system promised and to call on states to dismantle all of these conditions, circumstances, and policy choices.
That is the work that we have pursued with independence and rigor across every sphere of life and in every corner of the world.
Over these 15 years, the working group has built a body of work that is both principled and action oriented.
It has conducted 27 country visits across all regions, issued 14 thematic reports, sent nearly 1,000 communications to states and other actors, and it has made more than 100 public statements, engaged through hundreds of media interventions, developed technical guidance and position papers on key issues affecting women and girls, and submitted amicus briefs before international, regional, and domestic courts, and UN treaty bodies.
But the true measure of the work is not found in these statistics alone.
It is found in how these tools have been used by states reforming laws, by courts interpreting rights, by national human rights institutions shaping recommendations, and by civil society and human rights defenders in their tireless advocacy.
The working groups thematic reports, for example, have helped shape Human Rights Council resolutions, informed reports of the Secretary-General to the Commission on the status of women, and supported national strategies, policies and programs.
In Guatemala, for example, the report on women's human rights in the changing world of work informed a national labor policy and concrete measures for the economic empowerment of women and girls from marginalized communities.
In Mexico, our reports inform judicial reasoning and public policy discussions on care and the gender dimensions of poverty.
In Qatar, the National Human Rights Institution drew on our analysis to recommend the repeal of discriminatory laws and practices in cultural and family life.
In Italy, activists used our work on health and safety to strengthen advocacy on obstetric violence.
The country visits that we've conducted have also been critical to prompting concrete reforms, allowing us deeper engagements with national circumstances.
Recognition that sex without consent is rape in Greece, the restoration of access to emergency contraception in Peru, the halting of plans to reinstate corporal punishment in schools in Samoa, processes to revise discriminatory family law provisions in Senegal.
These are all concrete changes in the lives of women and girls.
Our communications have also supported numerous on the ground efforts, reform of nationality laws so that women can transmit their citizenship to their children on an equal basis with men.
Challenges to discriminatory marriage laws.
And drawing attention to the prosecution and detention of women human rights defenders in some cases contributing to their release.
Our amicus briefs have also supported landmark judicial outcomes, the decriminalization of abortion in the Republic of Korea, the return to school of girls excluded because of pregnancy in the United Republic of Tanzania, and advances in access to justice for women arbitrarily detained in connection with sex work in Nigeria.
These impacts matter profoundly and never more so than now at a time of backlash and deepening polarization over the future of women's rights and girls' rights.
The lessons of the past 15 years is that the human rights vision is reachable, but it is not inevitable.
It must be defended by all of us with evidence, with vigilance, and with courage.
The publication we are launching today brings together reflections from the current and former experts of the working group, as well as the voices of girls and young women from different regions impacted by our work.
It looks back at the 15 years of work of the working group, but it also looks forward towards the unfinished task of realizing substantive gender equality for all women and girls in all of their diversity.
As the current members of the mandate, we are very aware that we inherit a powerful legacy.
We are deeply grateful to the former members of the working group whose expertise and resilience built the foundation on which we stand.
The working group's regional composition with each member representing a geographic region has been essential to this work, enabling us to understand discrimination and its remedies in its cultural, social and political context while identifying patterns that are global in nature.
We are grateful to OHCHR for its sustained partnership and to the Assistant Secretary-General Fuentes Julio for her presence here today and her longstanding support of our work.
We extend our sincere thanks to the government of the Republic of Korea, whose generosity made this publication possible and to the government of Mexico, our steadfast sponsor of the mandate.
I should note that this publication was actually intended to be available in all UN languages.
Given the current liquidity crisis, we've been able to produce it in English only.
History and the stories of the many people who made it possible belongs to women and girls everywhere, and we hope to make it accessible to all.
We welcome any member state present who wishes to support this effort with an earmarked voluntary contribution.
I'm told that it's $5,000 to translate into each language for those of you interested.
I cannot close without acknowledging those whose efforts are so often where change begins.
The civil society organizations present here and around the world, the women human rights defenders who work tirelessly, the feminist movements, girls and young women demanding their basic rights, and men and boys committed to real equality for all.
And the advocates across the world doing this work in their villages and communities.
Their work is where this mandate finds its meaning and where hope endures.
May this publication serve not only as a reflection of what has been achieved, but as a call to a renewed commitment to listen to women and girls, to confront discrimination wherever it persists, and to ensure that the promise of dignity and equality becomes a reality for all of humanity.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much, Claudia, for presenting the publication and for reminding us that the work of the mandate is both retrospective and also forward looking, grounded in the lessons of the past 15 years, but also oriented toward the urgent challenges ahead.
Now, I have an honor of inviting miss Juentes Julio, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights to offer her reflections.
Miss Fuentes Julio, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Distinguished friends, excellencies and members of the working group, colleagues and above all friends.
It is a great pleasure to be here with you this morning to this high level event to celebrate actually this OHCHR publication marking the 15th anniversary of the working group on discrimination against women and girls.
Gender equality has always been a matter that has been close to my heart at the personal level because as you all know, the personal is political.
And also at the professional level.
I always make a point to make sure that we to try to dismantle traical barriers in my positions that I have held before and certainly this will be the case now as well.
As I assume my functions as Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights earlier this week, it is therefore a particular honor to be here to celebrate how far we have come, but also, most importantly, to reflect on how much remains to be done to achieve equality for women and girls.
I wish to begin my deep appreciation to the members of the working group, past and present for the dedication, expertise, unwavering commitment to the rights of women and girls over these 15 years.
Since its establishment by the Human Rights Council in 2010, the working group has become a cornerstone of the International Human Rights S's efforts to advance gender equality.
It has played a vital role in documenting discrimination, identifying structural barriers, and providing concrete guidance to states and other stakeholders.
Let me put it in a more colloquial language.
I am a fan of the working group because they mixed principle commitments with actionable guidance, and at the same time, they have always been very professional, rigorous with their work, and always independent.
This anniversary, let me say, is both a celebration and a call to action.
15 years on and over three decades since the Beijing Declaration and platform for action, we can point as it was said before, important progress.
More girls are in school, more women are participating in political and public life.
Legal and policy frameworks have evolved in many countries, yet progress remains quite slow, uneven, unfair and certainly insufficient.
No country has achieved full gender equality.
Women hold only about one quarter of parliamentary seats globally.
Their participation in the labor force remains significantly lower than of men and globally, women earn around 20% less while carrying a disproportionate share of amp care work.
As has been emphasized by Secretary-General, violence against women and girls remained the most pervasive human rights violation in the world.
Every ten minute, a woman is killed by a partner or family member.
One in three women experience physical or sexual violence during her lifetime.
Discrimination persists in law and in practice with women in many countries still denied equal rights in areas such as marriage, family relations, or economic decision making.
Harmful practices including child marriage and female genital mutilation continue to affect hundreds, if not millions of women and girls worldwide.
These realities underscore a fundamental truth.
Progress is neither automatic nor irreversible.
Today, we're also witnessing and this has been the source of many discussions in the working group, a traveling global backlash against women's and girls' rights.
Hard won gains are being contested, misogyny and gender based hatred are being amplified, included and especially in the digital space.
Efforts to advance equality are increasingly met with resistance around the world.
Excellence is in this context, the role of the working group is more critical than ever.
Its impact has also been more possible in part due to its low and mutually reinforcing cooperation with our office.
Promoting an inclusive gender equality agenda is a core institution priority for OHCHR, guiding our efforts across all areas of our work.
It is also a system wide priority for the United Nations and Celtra to achieving sustainable development goals.
We thank the Deputy Executive Director of UN Women for being here today and look forward to our continued partnership.
OHCHR and UN Women co lead the development of the political strategy for implementing the Gender Equality Clarion goal under the UN system wide Gender Equality acceleration Plan.
Offering system wide guidance to count backlash, safe world progress, and drive transformative change.
Over the years, my office has played a sustained role in close cooperation with our United Nations colleagues in advancing and supporting the implementation of human rights and standards and norms on women's rights and gender equality.
Working across global, regional and national levels, we have brought together and engaged closely with special procedures, treaty bodies, member states, national human rights institution, and civil society to promote the equal participation of women and girls in all their diversity across civil, political, economic, social, and cultural life.
The publication we launched today stands as a testament to that collective effort.
It captures not only key achievements, but also the persistent gaps and emerging challenges.
It reminds us that discrimination against women and girls is deeply rooted in structures, institutions, social norms, and that addressing it requires sustained, coordinated and transformative action.
As we look ahead, allow me to highlight three priorities for action.
First, we must accelerate the effective implementation of international human rights norms and standards.
This means reviewing and reforming discriminatory laws, ensuring accountability for violations, and investing in policies that address structuring inequalities, including care and support systems, social protection, and of course, access to justice.
Second, we must protect and expand civic space.
The voices and leadership of women's rights organization, feminist movements, and women's human rights defenders are indispensable to progress.
They must be supported, heard, and protected from threats and reprisals.
Third, we must stand united against backlash.
Disinformation and polarization.
I reaffirmed my office strong commitment to working with all of you member states, partners, civil society to advance rights of women and girls in all their diversity.
The 15th anniversary of the working group is an opportunity to act to renew our commitment and strengthening our partnership, and of course, to accelerate progress towards sustained equality and women's rights across the world.
I thank you so much.
Thank you, miss Fuentescuo for your very critical remarks and also for giving us a way forward.
You identified three steps to accelerate implementation, to protect an expensive space, and to stand against backlash and we also believe that this is the way forward.
We also want to thank you for our friendship and to wish you all the best in your new post.
I now have the pleasure of inviting miss Gumunsanda she is a UN Women Deputy Executive Director to address today.
I want to underline that UN Women has been a crucial partner in advancing women's rights and gender equality globally.
We look forward to hearing your reflections on the importance of the working group's mandate and on the way forward in strengthening collective action for women and girls.
Miss Gunsanda, you have the floor.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It's such a beautiful day for us to be doing celebrations.
Thank you, Chair for according us you and women the floor and for us to join the esteemed panel for the discussions.
Your Excellencies, you chose to be the best place for today and it's this moment and thank you for the decisions that you have made.
I also want to acknowledge our Under Secretary-General, Guy Ryder, who was here which shows a clear commitment from the leadership of the United Nations to the issues of non discrimination, which is very important, especially addressing discrimination against women and girls.
My sister Claudia, at the heart of the United Nations Charter, is peace and security, human rights, and development, and we cannot achieve peace nor development without human rights and the greatest expression of peace and human development is human rights.
Thank you so much for all the support and providing to the working group.
I had a great pleasure to meet with the working group members yesterday.
I'm still bubbling from the good energy of our interaction yesterday.
I also want to appreciate the member states who continue to provide and resource the work of the working group on non discrimination.
More than 15 years ago, I was sitting in those meetings in Geneva for over two years plus.
We were lobbying, we were engaging with the member states.
We were insisting, and we celebrated when the decision was taken to establish the working group on non discrimination against women and girls.
For us today, 15 years down the line, what we are celebrating today and congratulating the work that is being done is at the heart of the charter.
The charter starts with we the people.
And yet in life every day, women and girls do not experience the same opportunities, the same possibilities, the same protection of their rights as is envisaged with the people.
Article 55 of the United Nations Charter reminds us of the importance of non discrimination.
It really implores on the member states and on all of us to address the social, economic and cultural issues that underlie the core commitments to the United Nations Charter.
It is there that the working mandate of the working group is embedded.
It's to advance the commitments of the United Nations Charter.
For us as UN women, we were born a year earlier than the working group.
We are 16-years-old, the working group is 15-years-old, so we can talk about being adolescents in the UN system.
Today, I'm profoundly honored to be able to share these remarks in terms of our experiences on advancing the commitments of the Charter, of the convention on elimination of discrimination against women, the core commitments that as member states we have made in the Beijing platform for action 30 years ago, as well as in Resolution 13 25 on women peace and security, and what it tells us that it's good to throw a good tantrum as an adolescent.
And today the working group has thrown an excellent tantrum and shared with us what is the reality through the publication, is telling the story, providing the facts, providing the analysis so that we are also clear.
On what is positively progressed, and we are also clear on the work that is yet to be achieved, and we are also clear that we cannot achieve the sustainable development goals when inequality exists.
I am here, and I want you to join what you said, Claudia, that the person is political.
I'm a Black woman from Africa who experienced racial discrimination because I was born when we didn't have independence.
I understand inequalities as a rural girl, where climbing a bus was a luxury.
I understand how discrimination hurts.
But I also understand as a woman with disability now and a leader in the United Nations, the issues around non discrimination and the work of the working group is profoundly so much at the daily experience of billions of people in society today.
I really celebrate this publication.
I celebrate the 15th anniversary because it's reminding us on where we are.
Notable progress has been made.
Notable progress on women in decision making, but not sufficient enough.
Yes, progress has been made on women in decision making.
But even us in the US UN women, you gave us the mandate as member states to also track women in decision making in the United Nations system itself.
Through the Secretary-General report, we provide the member states with an annual report on gender parity.
We are yet to say good morning, Madam Secretary-General.
We are yet to say that.
The work of the working group provides data, statistics, analysis that enables us to echo back to our public institutions on where we are.
More girls are in school, and yet I've just come out of Bangladesh where I was working from.
50% of the girls experience child marriage.
What we are calling marriage is rape, is sexual exploitation, is trafficking.
It's a lifelong experience of violence.
Yes, we celebrate progress, but As you know, it hurts.
Discrimination hurts.
It scares the soul and the conscience that we have.
The legal barriers exist.
CSW 70 told the story, the analysis there, and we appreciate the work with the Office of the High Commission and with the working group that provided all that information.
What is clear for us as UN women today in the work that we are doing is that progress has been made on formal equality.
We can open the laws, the constitutions of our countries.
We, we can see the baskets of formal equality.
But discrimination exists in practice.
Substantive equality is where the issues are the lived experiences.
Unfortunately, and sadly, We now have expressed regressions, a regression which pulls back on a positive law that a country has made.
That's really sad to see regressions on positive law, to see a pushback on language, on commitments that have been made before, the understanding that gender inequalities exist.
It's a human rights principle.
It's where the issues lie, but the questioning of even the word gender in itself pushes back the progress that we have made.
The stagnation, simple stagnation.
Today, non discrimination is no longer expressed only in the reservation to the treaties like CEO, CRC, and others.
Regression and pushback is also expressed through budgets.
Reducing budgets, it's a regression and a pushback.
It's being expressed through reducing the capabilities of our member states to deliver for gender equality.
Ministries of gender getting less or being shrank without clarity and those are institutions critical for delivering non discrimination, and the work of the working group is very clear on this end, we appreciate.
We're also seeing painful realities.
Today, I just need to mention that some regressions is carrying our conscience.
Afghanistan, Afghan women being denied the right to just be a human being who can walk to work, who can publicly engage for their families, for their communities, for their societies and having all those limitations.
When we talk about the work of the working group on non discrimination, it's enabling us to identify and understand some of these issues which are so much reminding some of us of apartheid, where society was so much segmented.
And yet that being expressed in the daily life.
So the work of the working groups is so important.
And indeed, the non discrimination, critical issues that we see in some of the context, I've just come from Cox’s Bazar.
I was in the Rohingya refugees and the women and girls were also talking of statelessness.
So we need the work of the working group because it's not just about generalizing discussions, it's about realities in actual context that we are talking about.
As UN women and executive director has continued to remind us that coordination is very critical in the UN system, and therefore, as I conclude, we also want to make three big recommendations to ourselves, to our member states, and to civil society and other partners.
Nondiscrimination unleashes the greatest potential of humanity, whether it's economics, whether it's quality of our governance, whether it's quality of peace and security, non discrimination, and universality and diversity is the essence of humanity.
Therefore, we should continue to strive to do this work.
We really appreciate that the working group gives us the necessary tools to do so.
Therefore, we should continue to recommit to with the people in the charter.
Secondly, we recommend a resourcing of this work.
This is work which at times is very difficult to resource, but which is so necessary.
At times, we look at trickle down of resources to women and gender equality issues.
As UN women working with the Office of the High Commission and the working group, we really are asking for solid resources that enable sustained systematic work around the work or non discrimination.
And thirdly, is to act.
Let's act where discrimination is rampant so that we go beyond naming The instances of discrimination, but we scale up the innovations and the creativities in the many member states.
But we also gather collective, collective courage for us to resolve the issues.
Asian women, we are and they've been strengthening our own capacities.
We established our big section on human rights and non discrimination in order for us to say, this is at the heart of the mandate that we have.
So we can commit, including within the context of UN 80.
Really, we commit to a stronger coordination amongst ourselves in the UN system, for us to deliver on women's human rights, for us to support the efforts of the member states to say we cannot go back, nor reduce the capacities, but we can draw on the experiences in the wake of the working group and other instruments in the United Nations for us to uphold that which we are.
Herefore, we the people, for a world of peace and security, for a world of human rights, in the world of development, in the world in which all humanity celebrates and enjoys who they are, for we are all born in dignity and in rights, but discrimination is reducing the dignity and the rights for women and girls.
Thank you very much.
Miss Gubenswanda, thank you so much, first of all, for being in Geneva 16 years ago and for fighting to adopt the resolution and to establish the mandate of the working group.
Otherwise, we will not be here today.
Thank you also for your wisdom.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and also for being such an inspiration for everyone and also for members of the working group.
Now, I have an honor of inviting His Excellency, Ambassador Kim, Deputy Permanent representative of the Republic of Korea, to the United Nations to deliver his speech.
Excellency, the floor is yours.
Thank you for giving me the floor.
I have to begin by saying that every time I attend a gender related conference like today, I seriously remind myself and my team in my mission that half of the global population is women and girls.
Anyway, it is a real privilege for Korea to take part in this lunch, and we are honored to do so alongside those who have shaped this mandate over 15 years.
Let me begin by paying tribute to the working group and to its current and former members.
This volume, as you see, captures their steady and principled work, work that has often required quiet courage.
I also recognize the leadership of Mexico as the main sponsor of this mandate.
Korea was honored to support the development of this advanced version.
We were also privileged to co organize the lunch held in Geneva earlier this year.
These contributions reflect our longstanding partnership with the working group and OHSHR a partnership we are committed to deepening.
Let me share three brief reflections on this volume.
First, on the framework at the heart of this volume.
The CREAT Create framework, which seems to me a very creative acronym is more than a summary of Atibs.
It is a practical answer to a question we have long faced in multilateral work.
Now, how do we move a substantive gender equality from words to action? Brings together the six pillars that reinforce one another.
They range from countering harmful norms to transforming patriarchal power structure to enhancing the agency of all women and girls.
Together, they offer state a tool that is both rigorous and practical.
We welcome this contribution and we encourage member states to engage with it seriously.
Second on the diagnosis of the volume offers.
The publication speaks plainly about the global backlash against the of women and girls and rightly so.
The backlash is real, it is coordinated and it threatens hard won progress in every region.
Our response cannot be defensible one.
It must be renewed commitment to the institutions, to the mandates, and to the partnership that have carried us this far.
My current delegation reaffirms its support for this working group and for the wider human rights systems to which it belongs at a time when both are most needed.
Third, on what comes next.
Thank you.
The working group has identified gender equality in our digital lives, including AI as a priority for its future work.
In our view, this is both timely and essential.
We have tried to contribute to these conversations in concrete ways.
At CSW sevent, we were honored to organize as events with the working group, the European Union and Estonia.
It was on artificial intelligence and women's and girls access to justice.
It raised the very questions this volume now invites the international community to take up.
In the same spirit, Korea, together with the 16 other member states will soon launch the group of friends for combating technology facilitated trafficking in persons.
This is a cross regional initiative.
It strengthen the multilateral response to one of the gravest form of digital crime.
It is a crime in which women and girls continue to suffer disproportionate harm.
Dear colleagues, if this volume carries one conviction above all others, it is the conviction expressed in its pages.
That the human right of women and girls must be, and I quote, believed reality rather than a theoretical entitlement.
Korea is committed to that route with a working group with which is HR, with the member states gathers here, and above all, with the women and girls whose voices resonate throughout this work, whose courage is the reason why we are here today.
I thank you.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Your Excellency, for a thoughtful contribution, but also for reaffirming the importance of member state engagement in advancing women's and girls' rights globally.
Now, I would like to close this meeting, but as we didn't have time for discussion to invite you all to come at three, this afternoon for the meeting with member states and where we can also give you more information on our mandate and reflect on our work.
But now, on behalf of the working group, I would like to thank you once again for coming.
I also want to thank all our greater speakers today for coming and for supporting the working group, but also to thank former members of the working group, all civil society organizations, member states, academics, everyone who contributed to this publication and to our work.
At the same time, we would like to thank, especially the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Secretariat, who is providing great help and support to the working group.
Thank you once again.