United Nations Fight Against Women Abuse

What does the United Nations (UN) do to combat women abuse around the world? The UN website is a veritable maze of councils, commissions, programmes and funds.

The UN is made up of six main sections, and these are:

• The Trusteeship Council which is kind of defunct 
• The International Court of Justice that arbitrates disputes between member states
• The Security Council
• The Economic and Social Council 
• The Secretariat
• The General Assembly

The Security Council is primarily responsible for bringing about and maintaining, as far as it can, world peace and security. One of its functions is to identify threats to international peace and to research ways to counter these threats.

In October 2000 the Security Council passed a groundbreaking resolution - On Women and Peace and Security. This resolution is based on the premise that peace and security can only be brought about if women are able to participate fully and equally in governmental power structures, as well as in the negotiations for conflict resolution.

It also addresses the particular forms of women abuse that proliferate in armed conflict and war situations.

The resolution - On Women and Peace and Security - is an 18-point resolution that calls for the United Nations to do a number of things, and includes the following:

• to increase the protection of women during wars
• to ensure that the special needs of women are catered for in refugee camps
• to prosecute the people who perpetrate crimes against women, especially those of a sexual nature
• to appoint more women to UN peacekeeping missions
• to ensure that more women are involved in decision-making processes at all levels, from the national to the international.

The UN's Economic and Social Council must work to attain acceptable living standards, and equal human rights for every person on the planet. This work is carried out by a number of commissions and committees, and one of these functional committees is the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

The Commission on the Status of Women must investigate, and suggest solutions to, women's rights and especially the abuses of these rights. Its 40+ members meet for about a week each year. In 1995 the CSW monitored the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. For the five years after that (1996 - 2000) it worked on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that arose from this world conference.

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