Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) Hemispheric Programme on Citizen Security

Organization of American States (OAS) from a Gender Perspective

Proposal

Hemispheric Programme on Citizen Security from a Gender Perspective

Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Situation analysis…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The UN, OAS, CIM and citizen security from a gender perspective……………………………...
Description of the project……………………………………………………………………………………………
Performance measurement framework………………………………………………………………………
Project budget per immediate outcome.…………………………………………………………………….
Project partners………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Strategies for execution………………………………………………………………......
Monitoring and evaluation………………………………………………………………………………………….

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Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) Hemispheric Programme on Citizen Security

Organization of American States (OAS) from a Gender Perspective

Introduction

Since its creation in 1928, the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) has played a leading role in securing the citizenship rights of women in the Americas. Its role as the first hemispheric women’s rights forum in promoting and developing international jurisprudence and public policies on citizenship and equality is evidenced in the adoption of Inter-American Conventions on the Nationality of Women, the Civil Rights of Women, and the Political Rights of Women, as well as the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, “Convention of Belém do Pará.” These binding legal frameworks have been fundamental instruments for the recognition of women as subjects of human rights and active agents of democracy. In June 2000, the OAS General Assembly adopted the Inter-American Program on the Promotion of Women’s Human Rights and Gender Equity and Equality (IAP).[1]

The approval of the IAP responded to the situation, context, and hemispheric priorities that grew out of the political, economic, and social conditions in the Americas at that time. In the last decade, the region and the world have seen drastic changes, the result of the global security crisis, limited governability in some countries, a profound financial crisis, and an increase in unemployment. The events of this decade call for contextualizing the new challenges that emerge from the dynamic, changing hemispheric and global landscape. Against this backdrop, in February 2010 the CIM Executive Committee considered it necessary to update and operationalize the IAP with the support of the CIM Strategic Plan 2011-2016.[2]

In the 40th regular period of sessions of the OAS General Assembly (Lima, 2010), the Member States reaffirmed their commitment to implement the IAP. This programme, which began in 2000, has helped to gradually mainstream the gender equality perspective into some areas of the OAS. However, as the 2010 evaluation of the implementation of the IAP indicates,[3] the programme has faced certain weaknesses in terms of effective planning, execution, monitoring, and evaluation, as a result of the lack of operational goals, strategies, and management mechanisms and instruments that would allow for follow-up of the actions and efforts carried out within the OAS and its Member States. Likewise, there have been significant deficiencies in the allocation of human and financial resources from the OAS budget to support the implementation of the IAP.

In this context, and taking into account both the internal consultations regarding institutional priorities that were conducted with the various OAS Secretariats, and the external consultations that were carried out with other international organizations, civil society groups and academic institutions, the aim of the CIM Strategic Plan 2011-2016 is to make the IAP operational by adapting it to these challenges in order to advance toward securing the full citizenship and the rights of women.

Operationalizing the IAP points to three fundamental objectives: i) revitalizing the role of CIM as the hemisphere’s policy forum on women’s rights and gender equality; ii) laying the groundwork for a results-based management that will help strengthen the Commission’s institutional capacity and effectiveness; and iii) contributing to a stronger response from the OAS to the rights and demands of the women of the hemisphere.

Accordingly, the strategies of the CIM Strategic Plan 2011-2016 are: i) to harmonize CIM’s activities with those of the OAS; and ii) to institutionalize a rights-based and gender perspective in the main forums and programmes and in the institutional planning of the organization. The Strategic Plan is structured along four programmatic areas in order to better articulate it with the four thematic pillars of the OAS:

-Women’s substantive political citizenship for democracy and governability

-Women’s economic security and citizenship

-Women’s human rights and gender-based violence

-Citizen security from a gender perspective

CIM was one of the first inter-governmental bodies to make the fight to increase women’s security and their participation in peace and security initiatives one of its main objectives. One of CIM’s most important achievements in this area is the adoption, by 32 of 34 OAS Member States, of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Belém do Pará Convention, 1994). The CIM Strategic Plan 2011-2016 sets out broad goals and activities within the context of CIM’s work to promote the incorporation of a gender and rights-based approach in the implementation of regional agreements on security such as the Declaration on Security in the Americas (2003); to support the participation of women at all levels of the security sector, particularly in processes of policy formulation and decision-making; and to strengthen dialogue and the capacity of civil society to monitor the security sector from a gender perspective. The purpose of this programme proposal is to provide a more in-depth view of the activities, results, indicators and timeline of this programme within a results-based management framework.

Situation analysis

…a focus on security that is based on the exercise of human rights necessarily involves the inclusion of gender-related violence in security policies, plans, and programs. The incorporation of a perspective on women's human rights and gender equality in security promotion and protection—from a standpoint of citizen security—is essential to ensure that women enjoy security on a full and equal basis.

Rocío García Gaytán, President of the CIM, at the Citizen Security and Human Rights Forum

jointly organized by the CIM, the OHCHR, the IIHR, and the IACHR(June 5, 2011)

The lack of citizen security[4]constitutes one of the principal threats to stability, democratic governance, and sustainable human development. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the murder rate is double the worldwide average, and in some areas it is five times as high. A region that is home to just 9% of the world’s population accounted for 31% of the world’s homicides (15.6 per 100,000 population, according to 2010 or latest available figures)[5] and 66% of the kidnappings worldwide in 2008.[6]

Although citizen insecurity is a problem that affects the entire population, women experience violence and other security problems differently than men (see Table 1)—a difference that results mainly from the construction of gendered social roles and contributing social, political, and cultural risk factors. As explained by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): “This is not about a simple quantitative difference, for example, in the number of homicides of men and women, or in who commits them.”[7]It is about the fact that violence against women, as defined by UN Women, “is both an extreme manifestation of gender inequality and discrimination, and a deadly tool used to maintain women’s subordinate status.”[8]Nevertheless, the gendered nature of violence is often excluded from security strategies, policies, and programmes. As Rainero explains, “...not only public debates about the insecurity in cities, but also public policies and actions designed to address this problem, are based on indicators that reduce violence to criminal typologies that generally exclude the violence that is directed specifically against women.”[9]

Table 1

Security threats against men, women, boys and girls[10]

Although all human rights exist in both the private and public sphere, violence against women (in particular, intra-family or domestic violence) is still conceptualized at a social level as a private problem, one to be resolved within the family, rather than a threat to women’s citizen security. This has meant that in practice, violence against women is not included in national public policies on citizen security, nor is it visible as part of the work of protection being carried out by the security sector in most countries of the region. Furthermore, there is a culture of impunity in the region for crimes of violence against women, and women may face further gender discrimination or violence when seeking access to justice. For example, in Guatemala, 99% of femicide cases fail to be prosecuted–a country where more than 5,000 women and girls have been murdered in the past ten years.[11]

Quick facts
-Women make up less than 10% of police personnel in Ecuador (9%), Colombia (6.4%), and Dominica (1%)
-In the United States, women hold just 14% of police officer positions and only 1% of police chief positions.[12] Women hold 18% of police positions in Jamaica; 18% in Canada; and 10% in Venezuela.[13]
-According to statistics of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO, March 2012), of 10,773 military and police officials participating in the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), 461 (or 4.3%) were women.[14]
-In Canada, in 2009, 15.1% of armed forces personnel were women.[15] In the United States, 14.6% of the country’s military were women in 2011.[16]
-In 27 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 24.6% of the positions in the highest court or Supreme Court are held by women (see Table 3).[17]

In addition to domestic and intimate partner violence, women are vulnerable to a number of other forms of physical, emotional, and sexual violence in the hemisphere, particularly in urban areas, such as gang violence, robberies, violence related to organized crime and the drug trade, conflict-related violence, human trafficking, and femicides, such as those witnessed in Guatemala or Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.[18] In a femicide database (2004-2009), the Geneva Declaration found that of the 25 countries with the highest femicide rates in the world, 50% (14) were located in the Americas: four in Central America, four in the Caribbean, and six in South America. El Salvador, Guatemala and Jamaica ranked the top three countries in the world, all presenting rates of 10 or more femicides per 100,000 women.[19]Table 2 demonstrates that while intimate partner violence is often a significant contributor to a country’s high femicide rate, in some countries the type(s) of violence experienced by women are more related to the overall security situation of the country. So while El Salvador and Guatemala both have high rates of femicide, the type of violence experienced by women is very different.

For women, the city can be both a place of opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, the city has allowed many women to question and break traditional gender roles, enter the labour market, participate in civic action and political decision-making processes, and reach a level of independence that would not have been possible in another context. On the other hand, cities are places of anonymity and danger where women can suffer more violence, and more types of violence, than in other contexts.

One contributing factor to women’s vulnerabilities to violence in the city is their exclusion from the planning of urban spaces and safety policies, which restricts their opportunities to use cities in the same way that men do. “In the same way that women are underrepresented in arenas of political power and decision-making spheres, the use of streets and public spaces, in both the collective imagination as well as city design, continues to reflect male domination. Urban planning has failed to sufficiently incorporate the diversity of people living in cities, including the different experiences of men and women that is the product of the ongoing changes that affect both social practices and ties among people. The different ways that people perceive and experience safety/lack of safety in the city is one of the differences that should be prioritized.”[20]

Table 2

Total femicide rates per 100,000 female population and estimated percentage of IPV-related femicides per country, 2004-2009[21]

For the most part, women are excluded from the discussion, formulation, and implementation of policies and programmes to address citizen insecurity, and are also highly under-represented in justice and security positions, such as police, peacekeepers, the judiciary (see Table 3), and the military.

Table 3

Judicial power: percentage of women judges in the highest court or Supreme Court (2009)[22]

The failure to consider the security needs of women, on the one hand, and their absence from the spaces for decision-making and action regarding citizen security, on the other, means that the security policies of the majority of countries in the region ignore more than 50% of the population of these countries. This means in practice that women are less able, and less likely, to approach security-sector bodies about the violence they are suffering.

The incorporation of a rights-based and gender equality perspective in the promotion and protection of citizen security is essential to ensure that women enjoy this security fully and equally. Incorporating differentiating criteria for the analysis of existing threats[23]strengthens the security sector’s capacity to provide responses in line with the rights and priorities of each segment of the population, allowing the security sector[24]in particular to formulate an adequate response.

The UN, the OAS, CIM and citizen security from a gender perspective

In the area of citizen security from a gender perspective, the States of the region have assumed binding and voluntary commitments through numerous international and inter-American conventions, treaties, declarations, platforms for action, consensuses, principles, and other types of agreements.
The principal agreements are:
-Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (UN, 1979) and its Optional Protocol (1999)
-Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (UN, 1993)
-Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (OAS, 1994)
-The Declaration and Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (UN, 1995)
-Inter-American Program on the Promotion of Women’s Human Rights and Gender Equity and Equality (OAS, 2000)
-United Nations Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace, and Security 1325 (2000); 1820 (2008); 1888 (2009); 1889 (2009); 1960 (2010)
-Declaration on Security in the Americas (OAS, 2003)
-The Quito Consensus (UN, 2007)
-Commitment to Public Security in the Americas (OAS, 2008)
-Consensus of Santo Domingo on Public Security (OAS, 2009)
-The Brasilia Consensus (UN, 2010)

A strong international and inter-American legal framework has been established to enshrine and protect the rights of women and to punish discrimination based on gender, within which it is worth highlighting the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979) and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, known as the Convention of Belém do Pará (1994).

These two conventions establish the unlawfulness of any type of discrimination (explicit or implicit) against women that serves as an obstacle for the realization of their rights and the right of women to live free of violence.

In addition to these two conventions, recent commitments made by the countries of the inter-American system to ensure the guarantees and protection of women’s rights in conditions of equality with men are contemplated in the IAP, as they have been contemplated in many other programmes and platforms for action at the regional and international levels, including the Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995); the consensuses reached as a result of the Regional Conferences on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Quito Consensus in 2007 and the Brasilia Consensus in 2010) and the Inter-American Democratic Charter (OAS, 2000).

The States that have signed and ratified these international instruments are obliged to bring their national laws in line with their provisions. In terms of women, peace, and security, the Member States of the OAS and CIM have reaffirmed these existing commitments and adopted new ones in the decade since the adoption of the IAP. The 2003 OAS Declaration on Security in the Americas committed States Parties to promoting and strengthening peace and security in the hemisphere, including a reaffirmation of “the importance of enhancing the participation of women in all efforts to promote peace and security, the need to increase women’s decision-making role at all levels in relation to conflict prevention, management, and resolution and to integrate a gender perspective in all policies, programs, and activities of all inter-American organs, agencies, entities, conferences, and processes that deal with matters of hemispheric security.”[25]Furthermore, signatories to the 2010 Brasilia Consensus that resulted from the eleventh session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean agreed to address all forms of violence against women, including “to mainstream into public safety policies specific measures for preventing, investigating, sanctioning, penalizing and eliminating femicide and feminicide, understood as the most extreme form of gender violence against women”; as well as “to promote and strengthen programmes of awareness-raising and training with a gender focus, directed towards those responsible for administering justice, in order to ensure high-quality attention and eliminate institutional violence against women.”[26]

Most recently, the Ministers Responsible for Public Security in the Americas (MISPA) adopted the Port of Spain Recommendations for Police Management (OEA/Ser.K/XLIX.3) at the end of their third meeting in November 2011, in which the Ministers established a list of measures to professionalize and modernize police institutions in the hemisphere, including the incorporation of a comprehensive gender perspective. While Member States are not required to report on their implementation of the OAS Declaration on Security in the Americas (2003), the Committee on Hemispheric Security released a methodology and guidelines (CP/CSH-1280/11 rev. 1)in March 2011 to support States to voluntarily report on measures and actions related to the implementation of the declaration; however, there is no gender perspective or component to the methodology. In terms of implementing UN Security Council resolutions on women, peace, and security in the region, Canada (2010), Chile (2009), and the United States (2011) are the only countries in the hemisphere to have adopted national action plans on UNSCR 1325. However, these action plans tend to focus on State commitments to participate in international peace efforts, such as UN peace missions, or to cooperate with other countries, rather than outline plans to address internal security issues.