AUSTRIA

PERMANENT MISSION OF AUSTRIA

TO THE UNITED NATIONS

UNGA Special Session

"Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace

for the Twenty-first Century"

Statement

By

H.E. Ambassador Irene Freudenschuss-Reichl

New York, 7 June 2000

It is a great honor and pleasure for me to address this Special Session of the General Assembly on the five year review of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in September 1995. Austria fully supports the Statement presented by Portugal on behalf of the European Union.

The Beijing Conference adopted - in the Platform of Action - a document of detailed analyses and prolific recommendations to redress discrimination against women, to mainstream a gender perspective into all policies and programs and thereby to promote equality, peace and development.

This week we must marshal a renewed political commitment and focus on concrete actions to overcome the persisting obstacles to women's full and equal participation in all spheres of life. We must also recognize that new challenges have emerged and seek to respond to them vigorously. It is my firm hope that we can break some new ground on such issues as HIV/AIDS and its particularly severe impact on women and children as well as on trafficking in women and girls.

The Fourth World Conference on Women looked at equality between women and men through the human rights prism. Already at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights the human rights of women and of the girl child were explicitly affirmed as „an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights": Beijing applied this rights' perspective throughout the Platform of Action and adopted many recommendations to empower women to enjoy more fully their rights. In our view, CEDAW continues to be the bedrock of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.

It gives me particular satisfaction that one of the key recommendations of Beijing, the recommendation to develop an Optional Protocol to the Convention against all Forms of Discrimination of Women, has been successfully executed, under the skilled chairpersonship of a woman diplomat colleague from Austria, Aloisia Worgetter. The Optional Protocol and the provisions of the International Criminal Court on violence against women as a war crime and crime against humanity will greatly enhance the international legal regime on women's rights, once they enter into force. We have to push for their early entry into force. Austria is content that the Protocol received more than 30 signatures and was ratified by Senegal, Namibia and Denmark as of today. I am in a position to announce that Austria's ratification process is far advanced and will be completed most likely in early July of this year.

One precondition for the full enjoyment of human rights by women is sufficient knowledge about these human rights. Human rights education and legal literacy are therefore very important. I am pleased to report that training videos on CEDAW for development cooperation practitioners and women's groups were produced by our development cooperation which can also be viewed in the course of this week. In the context of Austria's endeavors to contribute to the emerging human security network, human rights education is our special focus.

All Austrian development cooperation programs and projects are subjected to a gender impact analysis. Furthermore promoting the status of women is a specific objective of Austrian development cooperation.

In order to increase awareness on the crucial role of women in the development process and to promote the work of UNIFEM, in the aftermath of the Beijing Conference I founded the Austrian National Committee for UNIFEM. It has thus far gathered momentum through awareness-raising activities and will hopefully move into fundraising soon.

With regard to promoting the equitable representation of women in positions of leadership the UN has a very important modeling role. I am pleased to report that endeavors are ongoing in Vienna to enhance the gender break-down in Vienna-based agencies. There is an active group of women ambassadors and the heads of agencies are responsive. Nevertheless there is a clear need for more female candidates to be put forward by national administrations for international posts.

One of the specific commitments undertaken by the Austrian Minister of Women's Affairs in Beijing concerned violence against women. I am glad to report that we have made excellent progress domestically in this area and are also cooperating with various international organizations in this field. The guiding principles of the Austrian Federal Act on Protection against Domestic Violence which entered into force on May 1, 1997 are

Human rights abuses and severe underdevelopment combine to a particularly heinous form of violence against women in the crime of trafficking in women mostly for sexual exploitation. According to estimates of the International Organization of Migration, some 500 000 women are trafficked from Central and Eastern Europe and shipped abroad each year, many of them through my own country.

The Vienna-based UN Center for International Crime Prevention has developed a Global Program against Trafficking in Humans for which Austria provides considerable funding for program components in Central and Eastern Europe. The Xth UN Congress on Crime and Justice adopted in the Vienna Declaration the target to significantly decrease the incidence of this crime by 2005. In the framework of this Congress, a workshop was dedicated to the analysis of the specific rights and needs of women in the criminal justice system. Austria will continue to work on these questions, in which our law enforcement authorities have developed a special expertise which we are also willing to share with other countries.

Gender issues are also of importance to Austria as the current Chair in Office of the OSCE where a gender action plan has been adopted and a high level Human Dimension Meeting will focus on trafficking.

Major Austrian civil society initiatives are particularly sensitive to the women victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. The initiative "Neighbor in Need", has raised some $120 million from non-tax-deductible contributions. 95% of these funds benefit women and children directly. More than 25.000 women, many of them victims of rape and gender-based violence, have received medical care in gynecological ambulances.

The impact of this Special Session of the General Assembly - as impressive as it is unfolding - will be decided, not by the quality of the conference proceedings, but solely by the increase in equality for women around the globe. .Austria looks forward to cooperating closely with all interested partners to make that increase in equality sizable.

We would find it useful, if stakeholders interested in particular aspects of the promotion of the status of women would form policy alliances and cooperate closely. We are ready and willing to do so in particular round issues of violence against women. Countries of comparable profile could give each other feed-back on a voluntary basis on implementation measures and encourage each other to intensify their endeavors to promote equality, development and peace. This would contribute greatly to a more humane world, for everybody, for women, men and children.

Thank you.