Thank you very much, and good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I especially want to thank our representative from UN Women for her inspiring words.
I, on the other hand, I'm going to start with some bad news, and then come to some concrete examples. I work for DPPA, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. We support mediation processes, as some of you know, around the world in some 40 different conflict contexts. Inclusion is one of the central planks of this work, and it continues to grow.
But it continues to grow in a context where, in the last 10 years, most all conflicts that have ended up in peace agreements is only 4%.
That is compared to the early 2000s, it used to be a quarter, 25%. It's a dramatic decline.
And in a world where you have more and more and more increased military spending around the world, it is not surprising that we face the backlash against women's rights, but also the lack of success in ending wars and the lack of success in achieving comprehensive peace agreements.
We see ceasefires. We see attempts at ceasefires. But the work on comprehensive peace agreements is faltering. This is happening at the UN. So it was mentioned that the UN is doing this less, but I would say that at the regional level also, the problem is similar.
War is back in a way that we haven't seen in decades. And that's really our our context.
Around the world, I think we see a shift towards more autocratic leadership, more transactional deal making, and a retreat from international norms.
So we've always said that we are opposed to elite bargains. We want comprehensive processes. We want more inclusive processes because they are more sustainable and they last longer.
In fact, the pendulum is going the other way. This is not a recipe, of course, for giving up. It means that we need to constantly rejig and think about what we are going to do, especially in the subject that we are discussing today.
We know the top-down crisis response alone is not enough, and lasting peace demands conflict prevention from a bottoms-up approach, and that includes women, especially, and in terms of protecting their rights.
So the UN support has a certain convening power to advance women's meaningful participation.
I want to mention the Secretary-General's Common Pledge on Women's Participation, which very briefly is about, first of all, appointing women as lead mediators and moving towards parity in mediation teams.
It's about advocating for concrete targets on women's direct and meaningful participation, and it's about consulting broadly with women leaders and women-led civil society. And it's about securing gender expertise to ensure peace processes and agreements are gender responsive.
I want to give a few concrete examples, because otherwise we will keep speaking in generalities or saying how difficult the world is.
In Central Africa, the UNOAU office has backed deployments by FemWise to strengthen civil society engagement and promote women's participation.
I'm especially glad to see Madame Mula Mula here today, who's, of course, a great collaborator of ours.
In terms of senior leadership, we continue to promote senior women mediators through opportunities like the DPPA Standby Team and also senior leadership calls that you may have heard about.
This is a constant effort that has to be reinforced and strengthened in terms of appointments.
It's very easy to move from gender parity to, again, a trend towards, well, less gender parity.
In terms of direct participation: In Libya, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Ms. Hanna Tetteh, has been leading efforts for the structured dialogue advancing the Libyan political roadmap. She has established a Libyan women's caucus, which is consulting with close to 100 women, including young women, women with disabilities, women from marginalized regions, and the diaspora, to support effective advocacy for the shared priorities of the broader Libyan women's constituency.
And in Somalia, the UN mission that actually closes its shop tomorrow. Tomorrow is its last day - UNTMIS, is working with UNDP through the Constitutional Review Support Program to engage women civil society and women's representatives.
We have similar efforts. I'm not going to go through all the examples, but we made similar efforts in places like Haiti, in Western Africa, through our various special political missions.
But all of it to say, That there's a body of work and there's a body of expertise that the UN has deployed in different places that is available for the Global Alliance also. And at these meetings, I've always tried to make the point that we want to make sure that our expertise is available rather than speeches made by people like me and meetings like these.
So we hope that the Global Alliance continues to connect women across the tracks and mobilizes regionally to leverage mediating actors. Amplify local grassroots, women's civil society priorities, support cross-learning of good practice, and continue to share leadership opportunities through things like the UN Global Call and the standby team of senior mediation advisors that I just spoke about.
So we are now As you know, the UN is heading into a new phase. We have an election coming up. We may or may not have a woman as Secretary-General.
I cannot speculate, but we will see. But of course, this is a time of change. It's also a time of opportunity. And I hope that we will continue to engage with the Global Alliance through both our colleagues here in New York, including through UN Women, but also with you directly.
Thank you.
Watch his remarks on UN Web TV here.
