Intensification of Efforts to Eliminate All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls

A/RES/69/147View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the General Assembly, under agenda item 27a Advancement of women, published in 2014.

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

1 report · 2016

Year	Symbol	Title		Mandate resolution
2016	A/71/219	Intensification of efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women report of the Secretary-General		A/RES/69/147

What subjects does this mandate have?

6 subjects

Coordination Within UN System Crime Prevention Databases Empowerment Gender Equality Gender-Based Violence

What’s in this document?

63 operative paragraphs

Stresses that “violence against women” means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women and girls, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life, and also notes the economic and social harm caused by such violence;

Recognizes that gender-based violence is a form of discrimination that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men;

Also recognizes that violence against women and girls persists in every country in the world as a pervasive violation of the enjoyment of human rights and a major impediment to achieving gender equality, development, peace, security and the internationally agreed development goals, in particular the Millennium Development Goals;

Further recognizes that all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated and that the international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing and with the same emphasis, and stresses that, while the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms;

Stresses that it is important that States strongly condemn all forms of violence against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination as set out in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women;Error: Reference source not found

Strongly condemns the targeting of civilian populations, including women and girls, in violation of international law, by violent extremists, and calls upon all States to intensify their efforts to counter violent extremism, including by addressing the conditions conducive to its spread, while ensuring that those efforts comply with their obligations under international law;

Also strongly condemns all acts of violence against women and girls, whether those acts are perpetrated by the State, by private persons or by non-State actors, including business enterprises, and calls for the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence in the family, within the general community and where perpetrated or condoned by the State;

Stresses that States have the obligation, at all levels, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, including women and girls, and must exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, prosecute and hold to account the perpetrators of violence against women and girls and eliminate impunity and provide for access to appropriate remedies for victims and survivors, and should ensure the protection and empowerment of women and girls, including adequate enforcement by police and the judiciary of civil remedies, orders of protection and criminal sanctions, and the provision of shelters, psychosocial services, counselling, health-care and other types of support services, in order to avoid revictimization, and that to do so contributes to the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms by women subjected to violence;

Welcomes the report of the Secretary-General on the intensification of efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women,³⁶ as well as the report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on violence against women, its causes and consequences;³⁷

³⁶A/69/222.

³⁷See A/69/368.

Also welcomes the efforts and contributions at the local, national, regional and international levels to eliminate all forms of violence against women, including by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, and encourages States to consider ratifying or acceding to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against WomenError: Reference source not found and its Optional Protocol;³⁸

³⁸United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 2131, No. 20378.

Expresses its appreciation for the progress achieved in the Secretary-General’s 2008–2015 campaign “UNiTE to End Violence against Women” and the regional components of the campaign, and stresses the need to accelerate the implementation of concrete follow-up activities by the United Nations system to end all forms of violence against women;

Welcomes the contributions already made by States, the private sector and other donors to the United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women, while stressing the importance of the need for further funding of the Fund in order to provide support for national, regional and international actions, including those taken by governmental and non-governmental organizations working to prevent and end violence against women and girls;

Reaffirms that the persistence of armed conflicts in various parts of the world is a major impediment to the elimination of all forms of violence against women, and, bearing in mind that armed and other types of conflicts and terrorism and hostage-taking still persist in many parts of the world and that aggression, foreign occupation and ethnic and other types of conflicts are an ongoing reality, affecting women and men in nearly every region, calls upon all States and the international community to place particular focus on their plight, to give priority attention and increased assistance to relieving the suffering, of women and girls living in such situations and to ensure that, where violence is committed against them, all perpetrators of such violence are duly investigated and, as appropriate, prosecuted and punished in order to end impunity, including by appropriate authorities contributing police, military or civilian personnel serving in peacekeeping missions, while stressing the need to respect international humanitarian law and human rights law, and invites States to consider the various provisions on sexual and gender-based violence set out in relevant international instruments, including, where appropriate, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;Error: Reference source not found

Stresses the need for the exclusion of killing and maiming of women and girls, as prohibited under international law, and crimes of sexual violence from amnesty provisions in the context of conflict resolution processes and to address such acts during all stages of the armed conflict, conflict resolution and post-conflict situations, including through transitional justice mechanisms, while ensuring the full and effective participation of women in such processes;

Also stresses the importance of ensuring that in armed conflict and post-conflict situations and in natural disaster situations, the prevention of and response to all forms of violence against women and girls, including sexual and gender-based violence, are prioritized and effectively addressed, including, as appropriate, through the investigation, prosecution and punishment of perpetrators to end impunity, the removal of barriers to women’s access to justice, the establishment of complaint and reporting mechanisms and the provision of support to victims and survivors, affordable and accessible health-care services, including sexual and reproductive health care, and reintegration measures, as well as by taking steps to increase women’s participation in conflict resolution and peacebuilding missions and processes and post-conflict decision-making;

Further stresses that, despite important steps taken by many countries around the world, States should continue to focus on the prevention of violence against women and girls, as well as on their protection, their empowerment and the provision of services, and should therefore implement laws and policies for ending violence against women and girls and monitor and rigorously evaluate the implementation of available programmes, policies and laws and improve, where possible, their impact, accessibility and effectiveness;

Stresses that States should take measures to ensure that all officials responsible for implementing policies and programmes aimed at preventing violence against women and girls, protecting and assisting victims and investigating and punishing acts of violence receive ongoing and adequate training and access to information to sensitize them to the different and specific needs of women and girls, in particular those who have been subjected to violence, so that women and girls are not revictimized when seeking justice and redress, including in peacekeeping missions and processes and special political missions;

Also stresses that States should take all possible measures to empower and protect women against all forms of violence, to inform them of their human rights, including by disseminating information on the assistance available to women and families who have experienced violence and ensuring that timely and appropriate information is available to all women who have been subjected to violence, including at all stages of the justice system, and to inform everyone of women’s rights and of the existing penalties for violating those rights;

Calls upon States, with the support of United Nations entities, to fully engage men and boys, as well as families and communities, as partners and agents of change in preventing and condemning violence against women and girls, as well as in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, and to develop appropriate policies to promote the responsibility and role of men and boys in eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls;

Urges States to continue to develop their national strategies, translating them into concrete programmes and actions and a more systematic, comprehensive, multisectoral and sustained approach, aimed at eliminating all forms of violence against women, including by achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls and keeping in view the responsibility of States to exercise due diligence to prevent, protect against and investigate all acts of violence against women, by, for example:

Establishing, in partnership with all relevant stakeholders and at all relevant levels, a comprehensive integrated national plan dedicated to combating violence against women and girls in all its aspects, which includes data collection and analysis and prevention and protection measures, as well as national information campaigns, using resources to eliminate gender stereotypes in the media that lead to violence against women and girls;

Reviewing and, where appropriate, revising, amending or abolishing all laws, regulations, policies, practices and customs that discriminate against women or have a discriminatory impact on women, and ensuring that the provisions of multiple legal systems and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, where they exist, comply with international human rights obligations, commitments and principles, including the principle of non-discrimination;

Ending impunity by ensuring accountability and punishing the perpetrators of sexual and gender-based crimes against women and girls under national and international law, and stressing the need for the alleged perpetrators of those crimes to be held accountable by national justice systems or, where applicable, international justice;

Evaluating and assessing the impact of current legislation, rules and procedures regarding violence against women with a view to ensuring access to justice, improving rates of reporting and addressing the high attrition rate from reporting to conviction, and reinforcing, where necessary, criminal law and procedure relating to all forms of violence against women, with a focus on prevention and the protection of women and easy access to redress for victims;

Adopting, as appropriate, reviewing and ensuring the accelerated and effective implementation of laws and comprehensive measures that criminalize violence against women and girls and that provide for multidisciplinary and gender-sensitive preventive and protective measures, such as emergency orders and protection orders, and for the investigation, submission for prosecution and appropriate punishment of perpetrators to end impunity, and support services that empower victims and survivors, as well as access to appropriate civil remedies and redress;

Addressing and eliminating, as a matter of priority, domestic violence through adopting, strengthening and implementing legislation that prohibits such violence, prescribes punitive measures and establishes adequate legal protection against such violence;

Promoting awareness among all stakeholders, in particular men and boys, of the need to combat violence against women and girls occurring in public or private life, and promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, inter alia, through regular and repeated use and funding of awareness-raising campaigns nationwide and other ways to promote prevention and protection and the transformation of discriminatory social norms and gender stereotypes, as part of an integrated prevention strategy;

Encouraging the media to examine the impact of gender role stereotypes, including those perpetuated by commercial advertisements, which foster gender-based violence and inequalities;

Ensuring that there is sufficient knowledge, including expertise in effective legal approaches to eliminating violence against women and girls, awareness and coordination in the legal system and, to that end, where appropriate, appointing a focal point in the legal system for cases of violence against women and girls;

Also ensuring the systematic collection, analysis and dissemination of data disaggregated by sex and age to monitor all forms of violence against women and girls, including on the effectiveness of preventive and protective measures, with the involvement of national statistical offices and, where appropriate, in partnership with other actors, including law enforcement agencies, in order to effectively review and implement laws, policies, strategies and preventive and protective measures, while ensuring and maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of the victims;

Establishing appropriate national mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of national measures, including national action plans, taken to eliminate violence against women, including through the use of national indicators;

Providing adequate financial support and human resources for the implementation of national strategies and action plans to promote the empowerment of women and girls and gender equality, to end violence against women and girls, to prevent all forms of violence against women and girls and to provide for the redress of such violence and financial support and human resources for other related activities;

Investing in the realization of the right to education, by, inter alia, eliminating illiteracy, in particular in rural and remote areas, and by closing the gender gap at all levels of education, thereby contributing to the empowerment of women and girls and to the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls;

Adopting all appropriate measures, especially in the field of education, from the entry levels of the education system, to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women of all ages in order to promote the development of respectful relations and to eliminate prejudices, harmful customary practices and all other practices based on the idea of the inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes and on stereotyped roles for men and women, and raising awareness of the unacceptability of violence against women and girls at all levels, including through schools, educational programmes, teachers, parents, religious leaders, youth organizations and teaching materials sensitized on gender equality and human rights;

Improving the safety and security of girls at and on the way to and from school, including by establishing a safe and violence-free environment, by improving infrastructure such as transportation, by providing separate and adequate sanitation facilities in all relevant places and improved lighting, playgrounds and safe environments, and by adopting national policies to prohibit, prevent and address violence against children, especially girls, including sexual harassment and bullying and other forms of violence, through such measures as conducting violence prevention activities in schools and communities and establishing and enforcing penalties for violence against girls;

Developing gender-sensitive educational programmes at all levels and, in this regard, taking concrete measures to ensure that women and men, youth, girls and boys are portrayed in positive and non-stereotypical roles;

Promoting preventive measures at an early stage with families and children exposed to or at risk of violence, such as parenting education programmes, in order to reduce the risk of possible perpetration of violence or revictimization in later childhood and adulthood;

Ensuring that the appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures are in place to protect children from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse;

Ensuring also that the appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures are in place to eliminate the occurrence of child, early and forced marriages and female genital mutilation and to provide information regarding the harm associated with these practices;

Empowering women, in particular women living in poverty, by, inter alia, strengthening their economic autonomy and by ensuring their full participation in society and in decision-making processes, through, inter alia, social and economic policies that guarantee them full and equal access to all levels of quality education and training and to affordable and adequate public and social services, as well as equal access to financial resources and employment, and full and equal rights to own and have access to land and other property, and taking further appropriate measures to address the increasing rate of homelessness of and inadequate housing for women in order to reduce their vulnerability to violence;

Treating all forms of violence against women and girls as a criminal offence, punishable by law, contributing, inter alia, to the prevention and non-recurrence of such crimes, and ensuring penalties commensurate with the severity of the crimes and sanctions in domestic legislation to punish and redress, as appropriate, the wrongs caused to women and girls who are subjected to violence;

Taking effective measures, as appropriate, to prevent the requirement for victim consent from becoming an impediment to bringing perpetrators of violence against women and girls to justice, while ensuring that criminal justice processes are gender-sensitive and that appropriate safeguards and measures to protect women facing or subjected to violence, such as restraining and expulsion orders against the perpetrators, testimonial aids and adequate and comprehensive measures for the rehabilitation and reintegration of victims of violence into society, are in place;

Encouraging the removal of all barriers to women’s access to justice and ensuring that they all have access to effective legal assistance so that they can make informed decisions regarding, inter alia, legal proceedings and issues relating to family law, and also ensuring that they have access to just and effective remedies for the harm that they have suffered, including through the adoption of national legislation where necessary;

Ensuring effective cooperation and coordination among all stakeholders, including all relevant public officials and civil society, in the prevention, investigation, prosecution and punishment of all forms of violence against women and girls;

Ensuring the promotion and protection of the human rights of all women and their sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development,³⁹ the Beijing Platform for Action⁴⁰ and the outcome documents of their review conferences, including through the development and enforcement of policies and legal frameworks and the strengthening of health systems that make universally accessible and available quality comprehensive sexual and reproductive health-care services, commodities, information and education, including safe and effective methods of modern contraception, emergency contraception, prevention programmes for adolescent pregnancy, maternal health care such as skilled birth attendance and emergency obstetric care, which will reduce obstetric fistula and other complications of pregnancy and delivery, safe abortion where such services are permitted by national law and prevention and treatment of reproductive tract infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV and reproductive cancers, recognizing that human rights include the right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free from coercion, discrimination and violence;

³⁹Report of the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 5–13 September 1994 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.95.XIII.18), chap. I, resolution 1, annex.

⁴⁰Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4–15 September 1995 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.96.IV.13), chap. I, resolution 1, annex II.

Preventing, combating and eliminating trafficking in women and girls by criminalizing all forms of trafficking in persons, as well as by raising public awareness of the issue of trafficking in persons, particularly women and girls, including the factors that make women and girls vulnerable to trafficking, and eliminating the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation and forced labour, and encouraging, where appropriate, the media to play a role with a view to eliminating the exploitation of women and children;

Establishing comprehensive, coordinated, interdisciplinary, accessible and sustained multisectoral services, programmes and responses at all levels to provide immediate protection and support, to be made available and accessible also in rural areas, through which shelter and legal, health-care, psychological, counselling and other services are available to all women facing or subjected to violence, as well as their children, and, where integrated centres are not feasible, promoting collaboration and coordination among agencies;

Encouraging the establishment or the strengthening of, or support for, national and local helplines that provide information, counselling, support and referral services to women facing or subjected to violence;

Ensuring that the prison system and probation services provide appropriate rehabilitation programmes for perpetrators, as a preventive tool against recidivism as part of an integrated response to violence against women, and that they consider the safety of women and girls as the highest priority;

Adopting a life-cycle approach in efforts to end discrimination and violence against women and girls and ensuring that specific issues affecting older women are given greater visibility and attention;

Urges the international community, including the United Nations system and, as appropriate, regional and subregional organizations, to support national efforts to promote the empowerment of women and girls and gender equality in order to enhance national efforts to eliminate violence against women and girls, including, upon request, in the development and implementation of national action plans on the elimination of violence against women and girls, through, inter alia, official development assistance and other appropriate assistance, such as facilitating the sharing of guidelines, methodologies and best practices, taking into account national priorities;

Stresses the contribution of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court to ending impunity by ensuring accountability and punishing perpetrators of violence against women, and urges States to consider ratifying or acceding as a matter of priority to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force on 1 July 2002;

Calls upon the inter-agency Programme Advisory Committee of the United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women, in consultation with the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality, to continue to provide guidance on the implementation of the 2010–2015 strategy for the Trust Fund and to further enhance its effectiveness as a system-wide funding mechanism for preventing and redressing all forms of violence against women and girls and to give due consideration, inter alia, to the findings and recommendations of the external evaluation of the Trust Fund;

Stresses that, within the United Nations system, adequate resources should be assigned to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) and other bodies, the specialized agencies, funds and programmes responsible for the promotion of gender equality, the empowerment of women and the human rights of women and girls and to efforts throughout the United Nations system to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls, and calls upon the United Nations system to make the necessary support and resources available;

Also stresses the importance of the Secretary-General’s database on violence against women, expresses its appreciation to all the States that have provided the database with information regarding, inter alia, their national policies and legal frameworks aimed at eliminating violence against women and supporting victims of such violence, strongly encourages all States to regularly provide updated information for the database, and calls upon all relevant entities of the United Nations system to continue to support States, at their request, in the compilation and regular updating of pertinent information and to raise awareness of the database among all relevant stakeholders, including civil society;

Acknowledges the work of the Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the Secretariat, as requested by the Statistical Commission, on the development of guidelines to support the production by Member States of statistics on violence against women and girls;

Calls upon all United Nations bodies, entities, funds and programmes and the specialized agencies, and invites the Bretton Woods institutions, to intensify their efforts at all levels to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls and to better coordinate their work with a view to increasing effective support for national efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women;

Requests the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences to present an annual report to the General Assembly at its seventieth and seventy-first sessions;

Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its seventy-first session a report containing:

Information provided by the United Nations bodies, funds and programmes and the specialized agencies on their follow-up activities to implement resolution 67/144 and the present resolution, including on their assistance to States in their efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women;

Information provided by States on their follow-up activities to implement the present resolution;

Also requests the Secretary-General to present an oral report to the Commission on the Status of Women at its fifty-ninth and sixtieth sessions, including information provided by the United Nations bodies, funds and programmes and the specialized agencies on recent follow-up activities to implement resolutions 65/187, 67/144 and the present resolution, including on the progress made in enhancing the effectiveness of the United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women as a system-wide United Nations mechanism and on the progress of the Secretary-General’s campaign to end violence against women, and urges United Nations bodies, entities, funds and programmes and the specialized agencies to contribute promptly to that report;

Decides to continue the consideration of the question at its seventy-first session under the item entitled “Advancement of women”.

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

What subjects does this mandate have?

What’s in this document?

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