I wish to highlight that 10 per cent of our peacekeepers are women — a ...

I wish to highlight that 10 per cent of our peacekeepers are women — a figure which will surely increase in the years ahead. The Philippines is a strong partner of the United Nations in the promotion of women's active involvement and participation in peacekeeping. We fully support the idea of integrating the gender perspective in the deployment of peacekeeping personnel, and continue to play our part in putting that into practice. The Philippines strongly advocates the continuous training and development of peacekeepers to strengthen the effectiveness and success of their missions. To this end, the Philippines successfully hosted the first training of trainers in the Asian region in June in Manila. Participants from 13 countries were trained to present the new United Nations police standardized training curriculum on preventing and investigating sexual and gender-based crimes to police officers, in preparation for their deployment to a field mission. The training-of-trainers course is specifically designed for the post-conflict environment and ensures that United Nations police officers will have the required knowledge of procedure and the skills necessary to assist their counterparts in the host State in preventing and investigating sexual crimes and gender-based violence throughout the investigation, prosecution and trial processes.