STATEMENT: Rule of Law and Development -Remarks by Ms. Michelle Bachelet at the General Assembly Interactive Thematic Debate on the Rule of Law and Global Challenges

Excellencies,

Distinguished Delegates

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First let me express my appreciation to His Excellency Mr. Joseph Deiss, President of the General Assembly, for the invitation to participate in this important discussion.

The linkages between the rule of law and development are multiple and gender-sensitive rule of law reforms are critical building blocks to furthering development.

Predictable, fair, and properly enforced laws in societies can create an enabling environment for long term investment returns, as well as ensure equitable distribution of rights and resources that underpin development efforts. More than this, the law itself can strengthen development efforts and ensure resources reach intended beneficiaries.

The role of legal institutions in mediating access to resources is critical for women and the families they support. The powerful link between focusing development resources on women and achieving poverty reduction targets are by now well established. USAID estimates that when 10% more girls go to school, a country's GDP increases on average 3%. Where women have access to the same amount of land as men, there is a more than 10% increase in crop yields. We know that targeting women and girls for education, employment, and health care can have a transformative impact- a so-called ‘multiplier effect' on the well-being and productivity of families, communities and societies in general.

But if these investments are not protected by a commitment to women's rights and justice, these gains will be short-lived. Securing equal access to justice for women and men must begin with ensuring that the laws themselves treat women and men equally and fairly. And that means three things:

• First, that the legal concerns that women face are addressed in the legal framework. For instance, issues like domestic work or violence against women have been viewed as private issues and have, until recently, been absent from the legal framework.
• Secondly, it means ensuring that there are robust mechanisms to implement laws in a gender equitable way. We have learned that it is not enough to legislate that women and men have equal access to land and property. Without legal aid, without titling strategies that encourage joint titles, we have seen how good efforts of governments to support greater equality through legal reform have had disappointing outcomes.
• And, thirdly, we have to be mindful about the impact of the law on gender equality and women's rights. Sometimes laws that attempt to provide greater protection can at times make women more vulnerable. Laws that criminalize transmission of HIV and AIDS, for instance, might end up penalizing a woman who was unknowingly infected by a partner, who cannot afford to be tested, and who unknowingly transmits the virus to another person.
  

We need to acknowledge that across the world there has been laudable progress in this area. 186 countries have ratified CEDAW. 139 constitutions guarantee gender equality, and two-thirds of countries criminalize domestic violence. Clearly laws themselves are insufficient to deliver justice for women. But we cannot underestimate the contribution of strong foundations. Laws that are properly implemented and enforced catalyze a change in attitudes and practices. Research shows that in countries where there are no laws against domestic violence, almost one in three citizens believe violence against women is acceptable. In countries with legislation, this falls to approximately one in five.

But even with strong laws in place, women face obstacles. A woman may fear retribution for standing up to male family members or officials. She may not be able to reach the courts because of the distances involved or because the costs are too high, or because she cannot leave her children unattended. Even if a good judgement is obtained, it may not be enforced, putting her in a worse position than before.

Women and girls are half of the human capital available to reduce poverty and achieve development. But they are unable to be full participants in these goals so long as they are crippled by fear of violence, mass discrimination and deprivation of property and inheritance rights. Justice for women is a development imperative, as well as a basic human right.

Obstacles to justice are common and may seem overwhelming. However there are real gains being made. We are seeing an increasing number of partnerships that address the gender dimensions of rule of law, and – in this regard – I want to commend the strong partnership that UN Women and UNDP have had in several countries in this area.

UN Women's flagship report this year – Progress of the World's Women – is dedicated to the issue of women's access to justice and highlights concrete innovations. I'd like to share a few of these examples with you.

The first and truly effective means to improve women's access to justice is to increase women's visible presence and leadership across the justice system. When women are the police, court officials, prosecutors, investigators, judges, and legal aid providers, it not only creates more representative and credible institutions, it has a profound impact on outcomes. For example, more women officers in police stations has been shown to result in a higher rate of citizens reporting sexual assault. In Liberia, the all-women Indian formed police unit that has been part of the peacekeeping operation there since 2007 has generated increased reporting of violence and has also boosted local recruitment of young women into the police force.

The second key means of improving women's access to justice are institutional innovations designed to overcome the specific obstacles women face. One important example is the creation of ‘one stop shops'. These are centers that gather all the necessary services of the judicial process in one place. The Thuthuzela Care Centres (TCC) in South Africa is a successful example of this approach. These centres are located in public hospitals and provide emergency medical care, counseling and court preparation in an integrated and survivor-friendly manner. Conviction rates for rape cases dealt with by one such centre in Soweto reached up to 89 percent, compared to a national average of 7 percent. The Thuthuzela model has already been replicated in other countries.

Another example of gender-responsive justice service provision is the use of mobile courts. These courts have been used in a number of contexts – in Indonesia and Haiti in the aftermath of humanitarian disasters, and in India and China to access remote rural areas. They can deliver justice rapidly and with limited resources. Last month, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mobile court supported by the Open Society Institute and the American Bar Association secured the first conviction for crimes against humanity through such a court. The case was the mass rape of more than 40 women and girls on New Year's Day in Fizi Eastern Congo this year. Just six weeks later this mobile court convicted nine soldiers of these heinous crimes, meeting standards of due process and delivering justice with unprecedented speed.

These and other innovative reform measures are vital. But they cannot stand alone. Even if every effort we make to strengthen and reform formal justice systems are successful, we will still not achieve our goal of establishing equal access to justice for the majority of women. No efforts towards this goal can succeed if we do not engage with sites of informal justice. For the vast majority of citizens in developing countries, and for women in particular, customary systems remain the only site for conflict resolution available.

They are often, however, deeply gender biased. They may exclude women from decision making processes and reinforce cultural or traditional norms of gender inequality.

Transforming informal justice systems is therefore of vital importance. ‘Tradition' and ‘custom' is not static – it changes to meet new challenges and needs. In Nepal, UN Women in partnership with UNDP has set up committees of women paralegals in remote communities to provide alternatives to traditional systems. Women paralegals have been trained on human rights and provide conflict resolution services for their communities. On a recent visit by UN staff, the women in one community were asked if paralegals were making any real difference. The women, some of whom had walked 2 hours each way for this meeting, reported enthusiastically that the traditional leaders were “closing down business” as community members brought more and more cases to the women paralegals. These paralegal groups had established trust through their fair judgments and were changing perceptions of justice in their communities.

Their message was clear – When given the knowledge, resources and opportunities, women can offer alternatives to the structures of injustice from the inside.

The last subject I will address is the one discussed in the panel held earlier today – that is, the issue of the rule of law in post-conflict societies. In the wake of a conflict, states face the daunting task of dealing with crimes committed during the conflict. In addition they often face a rise in social unrest and violence. In both conflict and post-conflict contexts, women are particular targets for violence. And it is during this period that securing justice for crimes against women is urgent, because impunity for crimes against women makes a mockery of the rule of law and hinders recovery.

For some years, there has been a debate between rule of law and development practitioners in conflict-affected societies. This is a tension between peace and justice, with some saying that the search for justice can slow down the establishment of peace. I must emphasize here – from the point of view of women, there can be no peace in the long term without justice. Without justice, the perpetrators of conflict and their violence shifts back to homes and communities. And it is here where women pay the price. High levels of insecurity post-conflict undermines development and obstructs women's participation in economic, social and political recovery In other words, spoilers for peace are spoilers for development. Justice processes can serve the function of removing spoilers and creating the necessary conditions for recovery.

In this regard, the International Criminal Court has made many gains, not the least of which is that we today have architecture for international justice that recognizes sexual violence crimes as war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly genocide.

However even at their most effective, international justice mechanisms will only ever be able to prosecute a handful of perpetrators. The vast majority must be dealt with within countries themselves through transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions, national prosecutions and community accountability structures.

Perhaps the most important transitional justice mechanism for women is their right to reparations.

In practice, efforts to provide reparations have been uneven and underfunded. They have also tended to marginalize women.

I emphasize reparations not because women's lives can be repaired through legal processes alone. But reparations, paradoxically, are the mechanisms that most concretely bridge the rule of law and development divide. They are a mechanism for public acknowledgement and justice whilst equally providing a vehicle to deliver the resources needed for recovery.

Because of the central importance of these programmes, UN Women is working with the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights to establish a fund for redress for victims of sexual violence in the DRC. We are also working together to identify, on the basis of practice around the world, how reparations programmes can be designed best to provide redress to women.

To conclude, I have discussed the key aspects of justice system reform that enable the rule of law to respect and promote gender equality. These include greater participation of women in the justice sector, innovative institutional reforms, an engagement with informal justice, and a focus on establishing women's rights to justice during the post-conflict period through transitional justice mechanisms. In our deliberations on the key challenges for the establishment of the rule of law today, I ask you to keep in mind this one fact – justice for women is not only a basic human right, but is a critical imperative for the United Nations and its Member States to achieve the shared goals of peace and development.