Chile

My Government attaches great importance to this issue and to the difficult situation created by modern conflicts, in which women and children are most affected by the degradation of their living conditions and fundamental rights. We are therefore particularly grateful to you, Sir, for having convened this debate at an opportune moment for evaluating progress and dealing with pending issues. Among those is the implementation of this important instrument, which Chile has always supported together with its complementary resolutions 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009) and 1889 (2009). In our view, this implementation will be effective only if we undertake to ensure that this decade is focused on action and accountability in the areas of prevention, participation and protection.

Women's participation in peace negotiations has been limited to less than 10 per cent. We therefore strongly advocate the inclusion of women in the negotiation processes and the compilation of reliable statistics on the subject, in line with the indicators proposed by the Secretary-General, as well as women's organizational processes and the training of women as negotiators using, inter alia, mechanisms available in the system and cooperation initiatives for the training of women in this area. We also emphasize the need for greater gender mainstreaming in the system, in accordance with Economic and Social Council resolution 2009/12, entitled “Mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes in the United Nations system”, which Chile facilitated. This should be accompanied by a mainstreaming of resolution 1325 (2000) nationally and internationally.

First, in the area of foreign affairs, although the Foreign Ministry clearly bears primary responsibility for the implementation of this plan, we are taking the initiative of adopting a cross-cutting approach, incorporating it into our domestic policy. For example, domestically we are adopting gender-sensitive policies in staff recruitment, and externally we have shown our commitment to international humanitarian law through support for the adoption of the Ottawa Convention and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The action plan's third focus is civil society. One of the key aspects of the implementation of resolution 1325 (2000) was the inclusion of civil society in the public process of launching this initiative — not as a mere spectator or recipient of the final result, but as an active party. Furthermore, the plan resulted in the acceptance of the proposal to create an observatory of mixed membership, made up of public agencies and civil society bodies, with the task of participating in the process of accountability subsequent to the publication of the plan. We therefore believe that an element of vital importance in the implementation process will be the compilation of statistics to measure how well the mechanism is working. In our view, although there are few measurable examples, speedy action must be taken to allow quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the results of women's participation in the processes.

In this the inaugural year of UN Women, led by former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet; five years after the 2005 World Summit; 10 years after the adoption of resolution 1325 (2000); 15 years after Beijing; over 30 years since the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; and 35 years after the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City, Chile reiterates its strong commitment to women's human rights and their full and equal integration into society.