32nd session of the Human Rights Council - Annual full-day discussion on the human rights of women
Panel 2: Women's rights and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: delivering on the promise to leave no one behind
16 June 2016
Ireland aligns itself with the statement delivered on behalf of the European Union and adds the following.
Mr. Vice President,
Ireland warmly welcomes this opportunity to discuss the centrality of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Mr Vice President,
The adoption of the 2030 Agenda marked a watershed moment in fostering our shared understanding of the central drivers of meaningful and lasting development. The negotiations on the 2030 Agenda, which Ireland had the honour of co-facilitating, have resulted in a broad consensus across the entire UN membership on the critical importance of empowering women and girls for sustainable development.
Crucially, this new Agenda gives clear recognition to the centrality of human rights and of non-discrimination. The Agenda is explicitly people-centred and gender-sensitive and places a particular focus on the poorest and most vulnerable. However, experience has shown just how easily inequalities can be concealed, and how, despite some areas of progress, gender inequality remains the most persistent and prevalent form of human rights violation, globally.
Ireland is acutely aware that, in order to achieve the ambition set out in the 2030 Agenda, this ambition must be matched by an equally ambitious drive to ensure implementation, a key element of which will be a robust monitoring and accountability framework. With this in mind, Ireland has supported the UN’s joint Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) initiative which aims to accelerate existing efforts in the generation of comparable gender data on health, education, employment, entrepreneurship and asset ownership.
We would be particularly interested in the views of the panel as to how the international community can contribute to a supportive policy environment which ensures the generation and use of quality and comparable gender statistics which address national data gaps and promote accountability for the commitments made in the 2030 Agenda.
