The focus of today's debate is "Women's equal participation and full inv...

The focus of today's debate is "Women's equal participation and full involvement in all effortsfor the maintenance and promotion of peace and security". In this my delegation would like to emphasize several points. To begin, it should be emphasized that in many countries suffering from armed conflict, women peace builders are often faced with male dominated institutions. These women work under difficult conditions and the space given to their issues is often negligible. Women's issues tend to be organized apart from other issues of post-conflict civil society and their associated support groups, which would explain why women's empowerment and gender based violence is easily overlooked, making it easier to exclude women from decision-making structures that could enh,ance their security.