United Kingdom

We have a saying in the United Kingdom that sometimes you can stand for ages and ages at a bus stop waiting for a bus to come, and then suddenly two or three come at the same time. And it feels a little bit like that on this issue in the Council at the moment. But nine years on from the adoption of the landmark resolution 1325 (2000) we are glad to see the issue of women and peace and security receiving renewed attention in this Chamber with debates on different aspects two weeks in a row. We have come a long way since 2000. The resolution we have adopted today is an indication that these issues are acknowledged as central to many areas of the Council's work.

But we are heartened by the excellent effort led by the Secretary-General to address the lack of women in senior United Nations positions. He himself has appointed three of the nine women who have ever held the post of Special Representative of the Secretary- General, and he, of course, also appointed the Deputy Secretary-General, who is with us today. The numbers of women are growing steadily amongst key United Nations leadership functions in the field. But there has still never been a female special envoy.

The Security Council has agreed that we need to focus more attention on the linkages between peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Ensuring the engagement of the local female population is one obvious such link: empowered women both make peace and build it. And incidentally, this is not a new insight — very far from it. The playwright Aristophanes dramatized it for war-weary Athenians in his comic play Lysistrata nearly 2,500 years ago. Women have a pivotal role to play. Although often survivors of some of the worst effects of conflict, women are usually relied upon to form the foundation of a post-conflict society. They frequently perform this role with neither say over the peace process nor voice in any post-conflict planning.

We have one year remaining before the tenth anniversary of that resolution. That will be an important moment for the Council. We will want then to take stock of progress and set an ambitious forward agenda. To ensure that there will be real progress to take stock of, in the year ahead we will need to, first, generate imaginative solutions to the many obstacles to implementation, making use of the whole United Nations system. The steering committee to be established under the chairmanship of the Deputy Secretary-General, which we have welcomed in resolution 1889 (2009) this morning, will play a vital part in this.

Secondly, we must increase the number and standard of national-level implementation strategies, drawing upon peer experience and the excellent examples set recently by Liberia, Uganda and Chile. And thirdly, we must finalize and agree indicators to measure progress. We need data on success or failure in implementing specific provisions. We need to know what works and what does not. Today's resolution should help kick-start those efforts.

We all have a role to play in ensuring that a full and effective contribution can be made by women during peace processes, that their needs are met as survivors of conflict, that their voices are heard in local civil society and that greater numbers of talented women are appointed to senior peacekeeping and peacebuilding positions.