 Welcome to this panel discussion on the importance of women as policymakers and enablers in peace and security and UN Security Council Resolution 1325. And a particularly warm welcome to our speakers today. Her Excellency Ambassador Minda Kalagian Cruz, Dr. Habiba Sarabi, Ms. Leanne Smith, and Dr. Lachlan Straughan. I'll be formally introducing each of our speakers prior to their remarks. But let me just say what a great honour it is to be chairing a session featuring such a breadth and depth of experience, wisdom, and as I'm sure you're going to hear some remarkable experiences. It's been a couple of years now since I've been involved in a national security college event. As those of you who know me will be aware, I decided a couple of years ago to move to a very different area of public policy. And I work now in the Department of Health, specifically on aged care, policy, funding and regulation. Now, aged care and what we're here to talk about today may seem at first glance to have very little in common. But as I reflected on the light that we want to shine in this session on women not as victims, but as enablers, agents and stakeholders in peace and security, I thought immediately of one of the key tenets of recent reforms in Australia's aged care system, namely putting the consumers of aged care at the centre of the system and empowering them to exercise choice and control in relation to the services that they access. And I was particularly reminded that when our Minister Ken Wyatt recently launched a very significant change to the system, one designed to increase choice and control, he was joined on the podium by several older women, not just recipients of aged care services, but women with whom we'd worked very closely to co-design the changes to our approach. Because not only is it the right thing to do to involve older people in consultation on changes that will affect them, but we know that the system can only be made more effective by doing so. So as I reflect today on both social and national security policy, I'm really looking forward to hearing from our speakers about those themes of empowerment, about the importance of having women at the table in the design and execution of policy and in drawing on their lived experiences. Each of our contributors is going to speak for 15 minutes and that will leave us with half an hour for questions, of which I'm sure there will be many and varied. Our first speaker today is my friend and colleague, Dr. Lachlan Straughn, from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where he's responsible for leading Australia's engagement in major multilateral institutions. Lachlan, in his diplomatic career, has served in Germany, Korea, and as Deputy High Commissioner in India. He's also served in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, where I had the pleasure of working with him. And wearing another hat as an academic historian, Lachlan's a published author. Please join me in welcoming Lachlan. Thank you very much, Margot. It's wonderful to see you again. I must say working in Prime Minister and Cabinet is like stepping into a furnace. And when you're inside a furnace, you need to be working with some very calm people. Now, the part of DFAT that I run covers three programs, international organisations, human rights, and general quality. And I'd ask you all, while I make a few remarks here, to think about the integration, in fact, of those three policy fields. As we all know in this room, sustaining peace, forging peace, is impossible without involving women. Frankly, we don't have an option to do it any other way. As we all know, the evidence is quite clear that if you involve women, you have a much better chance of resolving a conflict, of forming a peace which is more sustained, of preventing a relapse back into conflict. So this means, in fact, treating women as active participants, empowering them to be active participants. And one thing that we often find in all of the thought that goes into looking at conflicts and how they're resolved, is frankly to treat women purely as victims. Now, we do know that in conflict, women suffer disproportionately, and often gravely so. But part of what we need to do in the women, peace, and security agenda is to break that underlying perception that women somehow remain passive victims of a conflict. They're often victims of conflict, but not that alone. So we very much need to see women as agents of change. Now, this doesn't always mean that women are also not going to be at times part of the problem. And we see this probably most graphically at present in the world in relation to violent extremism, where some women, unfortunately, become part of the violent extremist problem. So we don't have a neat dichotomy that women will always give us the solution when men are the problem. Though, unfortunately, I must say, as one man, and just looking around this room, I can see a few other men, we have been primarily responsible for creating the problems. So for me, as I indicated, in the work that I do, there's a very powerful linkage between our gender equality work and our human rights work. And in fact, if you track the situation in various countries around the world, the early warning signs that should make us more and more concerned are mounting human rights abuses. And indeed, if you see escalating and mass crimes being committed against women, that is one signal that a society is heading towards a much more profound, much deeper conflict and possibly mass atrocity crimes. So one thing I'm very intent upon doing in our work is to make sure that we integrate these different strands of work to make sure that they don't travel in parallel. So the work that my team does on conflict prevention, on peace building, peacekeeping, human rights, development, humanitarian response, and women, peace and security are in fact all brought together. Now, we all know that this can't be effective if we don't have good, strong women leaders. And it's wonderful to look around this room and to see so many empowered women from Australia and other parts of the world. I must say as a man, I'm a little taken aback that there aren't frankly more men here because a real part of our challenge here is to make sure that men understand the changes which are required. And at another level, I must say as someone who's managed teams overseas and back home here in Australia, I've always found that the diversity argument still wins. That is, if you have the right proportions of good men and women, they help each other and you unquestionably deliver better results. I've managed teams which I think have had an over-concentration of men or women and certain dysfunctionalities can arise. We help each other. So next time this conference is done, I'd sincerely hope that there are more men here. Now, as Rory Metcalf pointed out at the beginning of this conference, we are at a quite unique moment in time where we happen to have a government which has women as foreign minister and defence minister. We have an opposition spokesperson for foreign affairs who is a woman. We have a development minister who's a woman and the opposition shadow is also a woman. And in our own organisation, thankfully, finally we have our first woman secretary. So that is a good result. But if you look more broadly, of course, a lot of the facts and figures about women's leadership are still very discouraging. If you look at New York, a city which is very important to my work, at present only 35 of 139 permanent representatives are women. And we have here with us one of our former permanent representatives, Penny Winsley, who was indeed a woman performing very proudly and very ably this kind of job. But that kind of number is troubling. Could also say that if you look at the global trends on women and leadership, most estimates tell you it's going to take us at least a century on our current trajectory to reduce the gap. One part of my job is to try to reform the UN system. That's a difficult job. And as Liano, who works inside the UN system, it's a big beast. When the UN gives you the data for how many women there are at different levels, it's going to take the UN decades to address the imbalance at the most senior levels. In addition to the leadership, of course, this change will not happen by accident. And we need changes in legislation, in policy, and in social norms. Can I say that one very important part of the work that my division does across the board is working with civil society? Because as we all know in conflict situations, it's those community groups, civil society organizations who were there before, during, and after a conflict. And so a lot of our effort, frankly, has to go into empowering those groups at the grassroots level, so they can play a role in, as I said earlier, of course, preventing conflict, solving a conflict, and sustaining peace. I won't dwell on our national action plan, which I see as an important part of our approach to women, peace, and security. But I must say that these documents are only as good as how they're implemented and monitored and reported on. We're doing some work with the Pacific Island countries to help them develop national action plans. We're putting a lot of emphasis on, okay, have your plan, put together the right plan, but it's the actual implementation, which is really critical. Another thing which we are putting a lot of work into is making sure that we integrate the women, peace, and security agenda into the kind of work that the Security Council does. During 2013, 2014, we're on the council, we put a lot of effort into making sure that this agenda was brought into the workings of the council, and so when we looked at different conflicts around the world, it might have been the work we put into making sure that women play the right role in peacekeeping work, including as police officers, so we want to bring that work into the heart of what the Security Council does. And frankly, sometimes we're operating against headwinds because, gotta say, not everyone accepts the fundamental objectives which I said out earlier. Another thing we're doing is making sure that the women, peace, and security agenda is brought into the heart of our development program, especially in the work that we do in conflict affected and fragile states. I've just come back from bleeding outside in our annual high level consultations with UN bodies, UNDP, UNICEF, UN Women, UNCDF, the Capital Development Fund, and the Population Fund. And normally, we go to New York to do these consultations. This year, I said to these UN bodies, I want you to come to Suva. I want you to see the world from the perspective of the Pacific, where you're dealing with, to varying degrees, a lot of fragile states where conflict has taken place in the past and could take place again. In the end, I was very pleased that I managed to convince a lot of very senior UN bureaucrats who are very busy people to come to Suva, spend a week with us, in part looking at how do we make sure that we stay on top of the fragility that runs through large swathes of the Pacific. I think as some people might know in this room, we are the biggest donor to UN Women's Global Acceleration Instrument. Now, that instrument is an innovative, new approach to working on conflict. And what it's doing is piloting in Burundi, Columbia and Solomon's, an approach to empowering, as I said earlier, grassroots organizations. How do you reach out to grassroots women's groups in these countries and prepare them so when a conflict happens, or frankly, humanitarian disaster, they're already ready and able to play some vital role. Now, especially in the Pacific, in other cases, this kind of work is actually very difficult because the underlying capacity in civil society can be fairly thin. So you're simultaneously trying to build up the very basis of civil society groups, but also, that's my five minutes, but also very much empower them with new tools to play this role in conflict prevention and sustaining peace. We have also put a lot of money into work with UNHCR and the Red Cross on countering sexual and gender-based violence in displaced populations, as people are fleeing conflicts that that problem isn't replicated. We're also, for instance, doing some terrific work in Pakistan where we are working with women's groups and mothers to help them counterviolent extremism, which is, of course, a very big problem for Pakistan and for many of us. The last two things I wanted to mention, to give you examples of things which we're doing right now, here are two, give you an account of the work which we've recently done with the African Union's Special Envoy for Women, Peace and Security, Benetta Diop, who visited Australia recently, and then to talk about this new Women, Peace and Security focal point network which has been set up on our focal point. I'll get to that second and I've got a couple of questions about is this a good idea or not. Now, Madam Diop, when she came here to Australia, it was wonderful to talk to someone who's traveled across Africa through a lot of those very big conflict situations where you're seeing women being deeply, deeply maltreated. She told us, for instance, that in December, she went to the so-called Triangle of Death in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she dealt with girls who'd been raped as young as eight. So the kind of work that she's now doing is trying to provide the political space for women to play a role in resolving conflict. She says the pattern in Africa and elsewhere, of course, is you have a conflict and the people who were invited to the table are the combatants and that's basically men. So carving out that space for women to come to that table is actually very difficult and requires a lot of sustained effort. Secondly, you've got to give them the tools so when they get to the table, they've got the wherewithal to, often they've got to muscle in on some big conversation with some, if you're talking about parts of the continent she's dealing with, with groups who have been inflicting large-scale violence on their population, so they're very tough people. The other thing that she's doing is indeed working on national action plans across Africa. There are 19 in place and she's working with other countries to develop their action plans. What she says is that this is not a point in time you create your plan and then it's put on a shelf and gathers dust. It's a process, it's an ongoing process. So a lot of her work is going to how can you make sure that these plans don't just become tired documents. Another thing she's doing is trying to work on some regional national action plans on this front. She's doing that in West Africa and Southern Africa. She's formed a network of women mediators. She recently met with this group in Algeria and what she's trying to do is to institutionalize this group and give them the basis to play a much stronger role. In the end, coming back to my points about human rights, she says this is fundamentally about ending impunity and that's a terrible problem in many parts of the world and certainly in Africa. So for her it's about building up those systems of governance and accountability and justice which will end impunity. So this women peace and security focal point network which has been established at the initiative of the Spanish met for the first time in New York last year in the margins of hunger. It will meet for the second time in Spain later this month. In principle it's a good idea if it gets us all together to talk about our best practices and to make sure that we are all on the same page and to look at where we need to put most of our effort. The upcoming meeting later this month will look at three broad issues. The structural barriers to achieving the genuine involvement in women in peace and security efforts. Civil society engagement and countering or preventing violent extremism. I had two sort of worries as I was looking at the papers for this event. One is that the range of countries involved are still fairly limited and some of the countries who perhaps really need to be there aren't there. So I think we've really got to work on making sure that process is more inclusive. And secondly I'm still a little bit worried that people will get up and basically give reaffirmations of our core principles but not turn their minds to doing something practical. For us Australia in the end will always be guided by we should be reinforcing these norms. That's very, very critical but in the end you've got to convert it to stuff on the ground that makes a real difference in the lived lives of women. So my last point will be that we've got to be careful of one thing as we go forward. The people who played lip service to this agenda, the people who treated it as an afterthought, the indifferent, those who won't sustain it and don't underestimate the fact that we're still dealing with some active resistance to getting this agenda up. So that means all of us have to be very determined and pressing back against those five problems. Thank you. Thank you Lachlan both for giving us a very practical account and you mentioned the importance that Australia places on being practical, a very practical account of some of the things Australia is doing but also posing those challenges that we just can't lose sight of in taking forward this agenda. Our next speaker is Dr Habiba Sarabi. Dr Sarabi is currently deputy chair to the High Peace Council of Afghanistan and senior advisor on women to the country's chief executive. In addition to her roles as politician and reformer of the post-Taliban Restruction of Afghanistan, Dr Sarabi is also a qualified hematologist. She's been minister of women's affairs as well as minister of culture and in education. And in 2005 was appointed as governor of Bamiyan province, the first Afghan woman to become governor of any province in the country. Dr Sarabi really is the lived embodiment of women's experience in relation to roles as actors in peace and security under the most challenging circumstances and I know you'll join me in welcoming her. Thank you very much. Dear friends, distinguished colleague, good morning to all of you. Let me to begin by saying how happy and honored I am to be here with you for the National Security Conference and let me to thanks from the organizer, the Australian National University and also the National Security College as well as other supporter for this conference. My warmest thanks go to you for the energy and effort you put in organizing this gathering. I feel very privileged to be here today with all of you. As societies struggle to make the difficult transition from conflict to peace, the importance of women peace and security agenda also grows. Women peace and security recognize that loud voice and crucial capacity of women are needed to ensure sustainable peace and maintainable reconstruction. I am pleased to briefly highlight some move that the government of Afghanistan has taken toward the institutional arrangement of WPS agenda at the national level. Our practices are in the three field. First, Afghanistan has developed the First National Action Plan NAP for the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in a collaborative process with the relevant stakeholder from government, civil society, UN and donor community. The NAP 1325 was endorsed by the President of Afghanistan on 13 June 2015, which clearly demonstrates the commitment of government toward promoting and realizing the women peace and security agenda in the country. It address the need of women in post-Taliban era and outlined a specific step for the participation, protection, prevention and relief and recovery of women. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs built the leadership rule and the coordinating the implementation, the NAP 1325 also benefit from the existing office steering committee. A body to monitor and evaluate the implementation of NAP. And a technical working group, a body that presents government and civil society and provides technical input. Being a member of the technical working group, Afghanistan High Peace Council has played active role in the development process of NAP 1325. Since its adoption, the government has taken bold step ensuring the meaningful participation of women at the decision making level and the peace negotiation table. I emphasize upon meaningful participation of women not only in the reconciliation, negotiation and reintegration level, but also call on the active role of women in the drafting of strategy and policy on the peace and security as its strategic objective. Furthermore, appointment of one woman at the leadership level and three women at the executive board of the council itself demonstrate the strong commitment of the national unity government for implementation NAP 1325. Second, woman and security advisory committee. Our presence and tireless effort an important platform such as WSAC or Women and Security Advisory Committee which is being coached by the Resolute Support Commander and also the First Lady of Afghanistan always kept the needs and interests of women at the top of the meeting agenda. Our aim has been to encourage and support women, more women to join the security sector, not only as security personnel, but also as the officer and other higher decision making level. I'm happy today. I have one of my friends that she has been worked with as Stacy as a gender advisor for this committee in Kabul. Third, high peace council also has the honor to have regular participation in the women, peace and security working group. We are a stakeholder of government and civil society, UN and donor community get together, coordinate and share information on the WPS agenda and the country. Through this platform HPC has kept the stakeholder updated on the development and peace and peace talk with the armed group Hezbozlomi and granted that the rights and need of Afghan women will not be compromised. Ladies and gentlemen, at the personal level, I as a female deputy in high peace council played a crucial role in the formulation of HPC strategy. The HPC strategy was drafted to ensure that presence of women at the decision making and policy making level is kept meaningful, active and not subject to compromises. Women's meaningful participation at the decision making is needed for the preventing conflict and maintaining sustainable peace. A force were made that in the new strategy of HPC, there is a women advisory board consisting of the key women's rights activists who regularly meet and discuss issues related to women in the peace process. In the recent peace talk with the armed group of Hezbozlomi, one of three negotiator of HPC, one was women who participated in the 25 phase-to-phase talk pushing not only for the successful peace deal, but also ensure that the interest and need of Afghan women are reflected into the final agreement. We are currently working to establish mechanism that ensure women's active participation in the formal and informal peace talk both at the government and community level. Ladies and gentlemen, despite numbers of achievement that we have, we have had in the realizing the women peace and security agenda in Afghanistan, we also face plenty of challenges. Being as a one who stand, work and cope with the challenges in daily basis, I recommend the following as ways to overcome the existing challenges and moving forward. First, strengthen coordination among the stakeholder for successful implementation of 1325. It is very important as finally we need to avoid duplication, bring synergy and fill the financial gaps. Second, raising awareness and political support on the implementation of WPS agenda among the lead implementing agency and NAP 1325. There is a very strong political will at the leadership of national unity government toward the WPS. However, when it comes to the ministerial and directorate level, then the need, we need to work further. The third, building capacity of the lead implementing agency to prepare monitoring, evaluate, collect data and finally report the progress as well as the challenges that they face. Fourth, talking the WPS agenda and particularly peace outside of the capital and searching for its success at the community level across the country. Lots have been invested in Kabul due to clear reason because Kabul is safe and the international community donor agency wants to work mostly in Kabul. Lots have been invested in Kabul while good initiative can be or should be initiated from the community level. As a result, I initiated a work with a woman on the grassroot level. It is a kind of pilot project with three provinces. We started to mobilize women well enter for peace. We called mothers for peace. And just it is a started and we want to mobilize this program with all over the country with 34 provinces. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Dr. Sarabi for that account. Not only of what's happening at the highest levels of your government but also what's happening on the ground. We'll now hear from her Excellency, Mrs. Minda Kalagian Cruz who commenced as Philippine Ambassador to Australia in April 2016. Prior to her current post, her Excellency was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs where she oversaw bilateral relations with 41 countries including all ASEAN member states, Australia, Japan and China. Her Excellencies overseas postings have included London, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore and she is a recipient of the Philippine Presidential Award. With her extensive and very hands-on foreign policy experience, Ambassador Kalagian Cruz is very well-placed to contribute to the theme of today's session. Ambassador. Good morning everybody. Thank you Dr. McCarthy. Fellow panelists, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. And before I proceed to tell my story, I'd like to say thank you to Professor Rory Medkov and Marina. I wish to congratulate them for putting this conference together. Before I begin my formal remarks, I'd like to pay tribute to the very first woman Philippine Ambassador to Australia, Ambassador Leticia Ramos Shahani who also served us the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs, a Senator of the Republic of the Philippines who was also the Secretary General of the World Conference on the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi in 1985 and was the UN Assistant Secretary General for Social and Humanitarian Affairs in the late 70s. She passed away on March 20 and our thoughts and prayers are with the late Ambassador. Ambassador Shahani is the epitome of the Filipino world-class Filipina. Strong, intelligent, articulate, accomplished, and one who was always passionate about the Philippines. The Philippine Foreign Service was fortunate to have her and had produced a string of strong and powerful women who such in a long period of time have paved the way for female diplomats to reach important positions in government. Indeed, the Philippines has benefited much from Ambassador Shahani. She was the crusader for women. She was the author of the Law on Rape. She was the author of the Philippine Baselines Law. She was a strong advocate for the protection of women and she was the one who changed policies in our own Foreign Service, whereby women diplomats who get married to foreigners had to resign their jobs in the early part of the Foreign Service. She was able to take that out and made women compete in this field of Foreign Service. Now, this brings me now to my story about the Philippines, particularly the women as policy makers and enablers of peace and security in the Philippines and how the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark resolution on women, peace and security contributed to delaying the foundation for greater women participation. Just a very brief history. I will be a storyteller today. The Filipino women had always held long, I mean, they had long held positions of importance in the Filipino community. In the Philippines pre-colonial period, perhaps you've heard, the Philippines was in a convent for 400 years that was under the Spaniards and then 40 years under Hollywood with the United States. In the early pre-colonial Philippines, the woman priestess was called Dibabaylan, held a revered place in society in recognition of women's life-giving, nurturing, healing powers. This woman then became the protector of self, family, their livelihood and the community. To this day, she has become a great symbolism of women's role in Philippine society as enabler, protector and stewards of peace in communities and nations. In particular, in the Philippine peace and development process, women have been taking more active role making the Philippines a trailblazer in terms of women participation in peace processes. The Philippines adopted the national plan of action on women, peace and security in 2010. To operationalize our national commitment to the UN Security Council resolution 1325 and 1820. DINAP was a product of an intensive collaborative process between government stakeholders and a convergence of social movements across the Philippines. It serves as a guide for ensuring the protection of the rights of women in conflict, empowering women for their active and meaningful participation and promoting and mainstreaming a gender perspective in all aspects of peace building. The Philippines snapped on implementing the UNSC resolutions on women and security was the first in Asia and the 16th in the world. It would later serve the peace process well by providing the framework for more active women participation. To borrow the words of the then presidential advisor on the peace process, Secretary Teresita Quintos-Delis during the high-level review conference on the UNSC 1325 in celebration of its 15 years of its implementation, I quote. The story of the Philippine NAP may be best told through the metaphor of weaving. Just as weaving is not learned overnight but goes back to generations, the Philippine NAP benefits from decades of consciousness raising and organizing of women, peace and human rights advocates. Our NAP was crafted in a period of three years. It is anchored in Philippine law, particularly the Magna Carta of Women with government agencies and local governments required to allocate at least 5% of their budget for gender and development. NAP is ensured with resources for implementation. Our NAP is founded on four pillars, protection and prevention, empowerment and participation, and two cross-catching processes, promotion and mainstreaming and monitoring and evaluation. I'd like to focus now how this international norm is put within the context of Philippine peace and security. The Philippines has three large islands, Luzon, Desayas and Mindanao. Mindanao is the second largest island in the Philippines and the southernmost part of the country and has a population of over 21 million. People of various ethnic backgrounds and religion comprise the population. It is also an area of various conflicts caused by social exclusion, marginalization, dispossession of land and many others, including ineffective governance and also the inequality to access to basic resources. The decades old armed struggle in some areas by some Muslim groups on their rights to self-determination is the most predominant among them and this is where the negotiations dealt with, particularly the creation of the Bangsa Morrow, which is the homeland for the Muslims. These peace negotiations took cover and to address the various areas of conflicts between the Philippine government and the Morrow Islamic Liberation Front is a very good example of the crucial role of women participation in formal processes and how women have supported, mentored and empowered each other in their roles as policymakers and enablers of peace. It would be useful to note at the start of the peace talks decades ago, this ran for 40 years. Negotiation centered on ending the war. Women were not considered as primary actors in war and therefore were not seen as having a role in the decision making process on peace. This perception would later be challenged as we began to broaden our ideas of what peace and security meant for the ordinary Filipino. The first woman to be appointed as a member of the government peace panel in 1997 under President Fidel Ramos was Emily Marohom-Sar, the first and the only female president of the Mindanao State University. Since then, the government panel would have at least one female in the government panel. On March 24, 2014, when the comprehensive, let me go back, sorry, let me go back to the time of Coriakino, the first woman president of the Philippines. She was the one who started out inviting the parties back to the negotiating table in 1987, despite the disagreement within her cabinet, she pushed for people to come to the negotiating table. It was at her time that she also appointed women in the peace panel. Annabel Abaya was one of the first women in that particular panel. Then came President Ramos. He brought in Emily Marohom-Sar. And then while we were continuing the peace process after the President Fidel Ramos, there was a gap because President Estrada had an all-out war against the parties in Mindanao. However, when Gloria Arroyo came in, she was one who continued with the peace process and it was at her time that the nap was started and crafted by the Philippine side. As we carried on with the negotiations in 2014, the comprehensive agreement on the Bangsamoro was signed after 17 years of negotiation. The chairperson, Professor Miriam Coronel Ferrer, became the first woman to sign a major peace agreement. Out of the 12 signatories to the agreement, three were women. This may seem like a small number, but it is an important achievement considering that previous negotiations were dominated by men. Apart from this, 69% of the secretariat and 60% of the legal team of government panel, including the heads, were women. On the side of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, they did not have a woman in their negotiating panel, neither in their secretariat or technical working groups. But a breakthrough came in 2011 when the MILF appointed a lady human rights lawyer, Raisa Chachuris, to be a member of their board of consultants. She played a substantial role becoming a regular member of the MILF delegation and was frequently called by the chair to give her legal opinion. These women negotiators were crucial in ensuring that there were gender-sensitive provisions in the framework agreement of the BANGSA Moro as a basis of the CAB. So these included the right of women to meaningful participation, political participation and protection from all forms of violence and the right to equal opportunity and non-discrimination in social and economic activity and the public service regardless of class, creed, disability, gender and ethnicity. Professor Coronel recounted how the Philippine government panel first proposed this to the MILF panel. It was on Valentine's Day when they did this. It was a persistent debate on the use of the word meaningful political participation. So they were asked what meaningful political participation meant. The MILF did not agree to that term thinking it was a quota system or something else. But Professor Miriam Coronel said that it is the opposite of meaningless and what makes it meaningful is how women define what is meaningful for them. Then the chair of the government panel then, Marvick Lyonan summed up the discussions stating that the use of meaningful was appreciated by women in the panel and based on the understanding of the MILF panel closed the issue. If we go back into how these things have been done the civil society, the NGOs and the social activist groups in the Philippines played a great and important role. In fact, when we were to implement UNSC resolution 1325 the first groups that moved were the civil society and the NGO. This was the first group called We Act. We act for one, three, two, five. We could see that as the negotiations progressed more women got involved. In fact, the transition committee that brings about the enabling act for the Bangsa moral government has many women in the panel and the current government now had initiated moves to enlarge the membership of the transition particularly to ensure that peace is brought to the land. President Duterte did not just focus on the MILF but then agreements that have still some pending portions of them have been brought into the table. And this includes those with the Morro National Liberation Front with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the NDF and also other areas where conflict had always been there. By August 2016, the government panel was a new chair for the government panel was appointed by the president and this time it's again a lady. Her name is Irene Santiago. I think people who have worked in the UN know her as a social activist in the same group of Leticia Sacrani, Gloria Steiner and all of that and she is now one of those who will have to steer the directions by which the decisions and agreements on the comprehensive basic agreement will be implemented. Now, there are key points that I'd like to share with you. Irene Santiago in one of her papers before the UN said that on the three barriers that have been broken, one, the conceptual barrier from peace talks being perceived as only about ending war became about building peace through transformation of our political, economic and social structures. The increasing involvement of the civil society and non-governmental organizations as well as the civilianization of the peace track contributed to broadening our view from traditional security towards human security. Second is the technical barrier. There is no longer any shortage of outstanding women who have the knowledge and experience to contribute to the peace process. Third is the political barrier. Our Filipino women now have vast leadership experiences as activists and organizers which had deepened their understanding of political dynamics and their relations with their constituencies. Women are appointing women and empowering each other to take on more senior and more active roles in formal processes. This now will continue. Peace tables have been created to be able to enable the continuing conversation on peace as part of the country's agenda. I think Irene Santiago said it also very boldly in one of the conferences that there are endless advocacies. There are numerous resolutions in the United Nations and there are many well researched documentation on women's equal and full protection in all political efforts to resolve numerous conflicts that have been completely absent or grossly insufficient. And so the lead convener of the group hashtag women seriously, the global campaign on women, peace and security. She put out an invitation. She said, talk to me, not talk about me because in order to amplify women's voices in peace, we are serious about peace. We must take women seriously. So the Philippines now has various people's peace tables where women are invited, the young women and girls and men are invited. It undoubtedly, this is a particular tool whereby peace hopefully can be achieved by the country. In closing, I'd like to just give you this line. I think we are moving in the right direction and the Filipino women at the negotiating table we thank them for infusing hope into the peace process. Hope because I think the woman has the heart and the head, the female protector, the one who takes care and protects the self, the family and the community. She is an O, she is open to new ways of solving age-old problems and challenges. P, she is pragmatic and practical in everyday life, fully recognizing the need to be strong and steadfast in the ups and downs of life. And E, she has empathy with the men, women and children and the nightmares of conflict and war bringing a sense of urgency in forging peace. Thank you very much. Thank you Ambassador and I think we were all struck by the very generous way in which you acknowledged women who've broken important ground in pursuit of peace and security. Our final speaker is Leanne Smith who's currently a visiting fellow at the ANU Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy. Leanne's a UN diplomat and human rights lawyer, currently on leave from her post as Chief of the Policy and Best Practice Service of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. In addition to her work in the UN, Leanne has worked in the Australian Judicial System for the Australian Human Rights Commission, in the NGO sector, regional human rights organizations for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She served in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Balkans and Afghanistan. And Leanne will be drawing on her deep expertise to reflect on the implementation of the women peace and security mandates that have evolved and been implemented since the adoption of 1325. Please welcome Leanne. Hello everyone and thank you to the organisers of the next two days event. It's a delight to be here and a big thanks to Marina, my old colleague from DFAT for finding me and inviting me to this wonderful conversation. I'm very conscious that I'm the fourth speaker after three excellent presentations so I hope you have a little more space to absorb yet one more perspective on the implementation of 1325 and the women peace and security agenda. I wanted to start by explaining a little bit of what I do for the UN in New York. My job is really about two things for peacekeeping in particular. One is about looking at the policy horizon, what's coming up for UN peacekeeping and trying to look at policy reform, the development of guidance and lessons learning and collecting best practices so we can look at how we've done in one particular context and try not to make the same mistakes again in the next one. It's a virtual cycle of learning for peacekeeping and I have to say in the time I've been at the UN we've come a long way in getting better at doing that. The second aspect of what I do at Headquarters is support the implementation of a lot of the thematic mandates that the Security Council gives to UN peacekeeping that apply across all of our missions. They include issues like the protection of civilians, child protection, the women peace and security agenda obviously, conflict related sexual violence and HIV AIDS. Our teams at Headquarters backstop our colleagues in the field who are of course at the pointy end of implementing these agendas and these mandates in a peacekeeping context. I am on sabbatical so please accept that everything that I'm saying today is in my personal capacity based on my own experience. What I'd like to focus on today in relation to peacekeeping is really about women peace and security in the peacekeeping context. I want to look at gender balance in the peacekeeping because the context of this conference is of course about women's leadership and also about how we're doing on implementing women peace and security in terms of gender mainstreaming. I won't touch on conflict related sexual violence today just because of timing issues but of course there's such an interlinkage between women peace and security and how we approach conflict related sexual violence so I'm very glad to discuss that in the Q&A session if anyone's interested. Why in a UN peace operations or a peacekeeping context why women and peace and security is important to us. I've included a quote here from our former ASG of DPKO, Office of Operations Mr. Edmund Mulett but I also wanted to share with you a quote from Ban Ki-moon the former Secretary General who said that sustainable peace is possible only with women's full participation. Their perspectives their leadership, their daily and equal presence wherever we seek to make and keep peace and we've certainly taken those words to heart and how we've tried to implement WPS in the peacekeeping context. This image I wanted to share with you for a couple of reasons. I think it helps us to distill and clarify what we're talking about. When you hear gender sometimes the word is bandied around in so many different ways it's very hard to understand what we're really talking about. In a peacekeeping context we often get confused between gender balance, a number of women serving in peacekeeping implementing the women peace and security agenda in the field which is of course about gender mainstreaming protection and empowering women in the field and also particularly more recently the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers. These are very distinct fields but they all overlap of course and we do start getting confused about which aspect of the beast if you like we're dealing with. This slide I think helps us to step back and think about our overall objective and how we're going to get that place of more action and better implementation on women peace and security and that really is that we need both gender mainstreaming and better representation of women in the work we do if we're going to achieve gender equality. So let me turn now to the first question of gender balance and how we're doing in UN peacekeeping contexts. This is one of the glossy images from the DPKO website which shows you in how many different contexts and where we have women peacekeepers both civilian peacekeepers and uniformed and when I say uniformed I'm of course including military and police colleagues. And it looks quite impressive you'll see the numbers at the bottom of that slide if you can see them show that there are you know roughly the same number of uniformed and civilian women that's that's not really an accurate reflection in terms of total numbers of course because we have a hell of a lot more uniformed peacekeepers on the ground than civilians so those numbers indicate that the proportion of women in the civilian service of UN peacekeeping is actually a lot higher than in the uniformed services. So that's the glossy shot and this is the harsh reality. Let me start with women in leadership. The last figures that I have are from January 2016 which show that women represented 24% of the heads and deputy heads of our mission which doesn't sound terribly bad I don't think and was actually quite a high point for us but of course this fluctuates and it's important to keep in mind that when we talk about heads and deputy heads of missions we're only talking about 16 peacekeeping missions on the ground. So for example in 2015 of all of those senior appointments only two out of 19 were women. I think it's also important that we don't become overly tokenistic with statistics like this in terms of pushing out these figures because of course it's not just about having one woman at the head of a peacekeeping mission in South Sudan or Liberia or wherever else it's about that management level across the board and we've got a lot more work to do there. In terms of uniformed women I've got the 2014 statistics here they haven't changed much at all out of approximately 125,000 peacekeepers women constitute 3% of the military and 10% of the police personnel and we have a goal within the UN of trying to reach 50-50 parity so you can see how far we have to go. I just wanted to mention briefly also for civilian women like me working in peacekeeping something that a lot of you must have experienced as well when you're working in international peace and security more often than not you're working in contexts that are not exactly family friendly so for all of us working in this sector I think we really need to think flexibly about our careers if we want to be leaders in this field how do you carve out time to get to the field how do you carve out time to have a family how do you bring it all together in a way that is coherent and gives you a sense of both personal and professional satisfaction it's really not easy to do and we see that reflected in the statistics for civilian staff both at headquarters and in the field which is at the entry level the professional levels two and three there's 50-50 parity in the women who are joining the service of UN peacekeeping we get to the P4 level which is the beginning of that middle management level I suppose the statistics just drop off drastically because women are choosing to do other things with their lives and their careers so let me turn now to a little bit of the gender mandate in peacekeeping we first deployed gender advisors to the missions in Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 and we've had presences in most of our missions of gender advisors in some cases full agenda teams since then I mentioned here that we have gender advisors in all missions it's not entirely true I think in 9 out of the 16 we have full established gender units but in some of the missions we still only have focal points because of their size and scale and the nature of their mandates I'm proud to say that we've got a really strong architecture now of policy and guidance and training materials in place to direct what we do and I might go into that in a little bit more detail but we do have a 2010 policy on gender mainstream in peacekeeping operations that is very useful and a lot of associated guidance under that and a lot of associated training specifically target at military components police components and civilians as well so the architecture is there and the core functions that our gender advisors are there to provide are really around supporting senior management to see the gender perspective in the overall work of the missions mandate to mainstream gender into all of the activities we do and to build the capacity of our personnel on the ground in terms of gender issues there have been a lot of I noticed this morning there have been a lot of collections of P words about what we do on women peace and security and I guess we have our own too these are the ways that we're currently looking at entry points for how we can engage on women peace and security so firstly through policies I think it's good that we have a stand alone set of policies on gender but we're moving to a more nuanced level now in terms of policy engagement which is really about things like ensuring gender is considered in the more mainstream way we do business so for example we're now looking at how for the non-gender specialists we can provide them with training so that when we're about to start up a new mission in country X, Y or Z they have some skill set to be able to look at gender based conflict analysis which they haven't before so those things are often left to the gender advisers to do but when the gender advisers aren't part of the mission planning you're missing out from the very beginning of establishing a mission in terms of making sure that gender lens is present of course facilitating the participation of women in post conflict processes and decision making processes is a big aspect of what our gender team does I mentioned we have a goal of achieving 50-50 parity in terms of personnel at headquarters and in the field and we're really relying heavily on engagement with member states to try and achieve that goal because of course most of our contributions for peacekeeping do come from member state countries we're focusing on protection quite often in our work at headquarters in the field you hear people talk about protection of civilians over here women peace and security over there, child protection there, conflict related sexual violence there we've been doing a lot of work to try and make sure that all of those issues which are violence issues at the end of the day are seen in a cohesive fashion and that those entry points are connected and made relevant as much as we can and finally partnership we know as peacekeepers that we are not the only actors in the field that there will be actors who have been on the ground in a country long before we get there and actors who will be there long after we go hopefully who will continue the work so making sure whatever we do is aligned with those broader strategies and entry points is very important for us also I wanted to share with you or maybe before I go on to the forward looking gender strategy I can talk a little bit about the challenges of that structure we've had of gender advisors in the field so far and why we've been looking at ways to do things a little bit differently and hopefully a bit better part of what we've experienced since 1999 is that the gender work has become a kind of enclave of work inside the peacekeeping mission perceived as stand-alone separate and different from the broader mandate of the mission and this has really had an impact on limiting the effectiveness of the gender work we do I think a lot of senior officials in UN peacekeeping would have at one time or another question the relevance of the gender advisors work and so this is what's led us to try and think about how we can make the gender work more appreciated more valued and more relevant one way we've tried to do that is by the development of this forward looking gender strategy that we're in the thick of right now it's available on the DPCA website and if anybody's interested in peacekeeping and women peace and security I highly recommend it to you to take a look at of all of the things I've listed here that the strategy tries to do I think the probably the most important one is the accountability question it's become increasingly clear to us that leadership is key to making any difference whatsoever when it comes to women peace and security and I'll talk in a little bit about how we've tried to do the last couple of years to enhance that accountability 2015 was a particularly big year for us in peacekeeping many of you will know that the high level panel on peace operations produced its report then we also had the peacekeeping summit and of course the global study on women peace and security all at the same time I wanted to share with you some of the ways we've made some progress to change that dynamic that I just mentioned a moment ago so integrating gender into strategic and technical assessments the missions I was talking about when we're starting up a new presence in a country to avoid this enclave aspect of the gender work we have managed to relocate the senior gender advisors in our peacekeeping missions to the office of the SRSG the head of the mission to try and make sure that that voice is in the ear of the leadership at all times and we've managed to do the same thing at headquarters as well by moving the senior gender advisor to the office of the undersecretaries general and to make sure that they're being constantly consulted on the work that's being done and the problems that are being faced and in terms of that accountability question I mentioned a moment ago three things we've developed a senior management checklist that draws out for very busy people the key elements of the policies and the guidance and the training that they need to be aware of in their missions to make sure that the job is being done we've given them indicators for gender equality which is now included in all of their performance assessments for themselves by the secretary general and for their staff and we've also established a director level gender task force so that these kind of issues can't be flicked down to the desk officer but they have to be understood by people at that level so that they can be conversant about the issues to raise awareness and finally I just wanted to talk about some of the lessons and challenges we're facing going forward despite all of this good work and the lessons learning and good practice there's a persistent lack of understanding of why gender matters for us as peacekeepers as I said I think leadership is key to this but we have a responsibility as advocates of women, peace and security and as gender advisers or people working alongside gender advisers as well we have to get into the fray of the broader issues that a peacekeeping mission is involved in and we have to establish and develop a way of showing our colleagues why it's important and what value we can add to the overall mandate of the mission I know I'm out of time so I'm just going to share two quick examples with you now of a positive experience of this and maybe a negative one and I'll start with a negative so we can end high this is personal reflections by me as someone who works in the gender space but is not really a gender specialist and this one example comes from last year the Security Council passed Resolution 2242 there were two countries on the Security Council at that time who were really strongly pushing the women, peace and security agenda and helped us to make a lot of the change that I've just described in terms of our structures and processes now so a meeting was called late in the year in 2015 and these ambassadors of these countries were pushing my boss, the Undersecretary General for peacekeeping to do a lot more impact and to show that he was working hard on these issues so let me paint the scene for you it's 6pm on a Friday night there I am, the senior civil servant to attending the meeting I've got a one year old at home meeting is called at 6pm on a Friday night won't worry about that income the officials and we have three ambassadors and we have five note takers so we're sitting there and there are basically three old white men talking to each other about the problems women face in the peacekeeping context and what women need and breastfeeding in missions and this level of kind of ad hoc detail about women peace and security issues that was astonishing and astounding to me and I'm sitting there as the senior woman in the room and I'm looking at these four or five note takers all young women and I thought oh I've got to say something about this I shouldn't say anything I've got to say something so I said excuse me gentlemen I hope you won't mind me drawing out the irony of this situation where we have three old white men talking about what women need while five young women take notes about it and I thought oh there we go kiss that pretty good bye but they were all a bit gobsmacked and had nothing to say but if you think about it if this is what's happening at the height of this really exciting time about women peace and security and the picture of that I mean it's a bit like some of the pictures we've seen coming out of the US recently on certain policy decisions so that's one example of how far I think we have to go on a more positive practical level let me give you an example from the field I was part of the headquarters team sent to Juba to set up the new mission in South Sudan as it was being established and this planning team was on the ground for six weeks talking to all of the government officials talking to all of the political parties deciding what kind of mission should be established in South Sudan of that entire peacekeeping mission that was already on the ground because of the previous mission none of those groups none of that planning team was exposed to any women in the community at all except through the gender advisor and the gender advisors team on the ground the gender advisor organized a consultation for the head of the planning mission with 200 women civil society organizations and we thought it was going to be a one-hour meeting we sat down for six hours and talked through the conflict the causes of the conflict the impact, economic development healthcare, a full range of issues and by the end of the meeting these women civil society groups are talking to the head of the planning team saying you want to talk about early warning you need to know us you need to engage with us because we are the ones who will be cooking the particular meals that we prepare before a conflict we are the ones who will be organizing the kind of uniforms or the clothing or the war pain or whatever else we are your resource we care about this conflict not happening we are here for you and it was one of the most eye-opening experiences for the whole planning team I think of that entire six weeks on the ground and it just goes to the point about the importance of engaging civil society and making sure that we have a diverse range of stakeholders to talk through in that process so thank you and thanks again for letting me give you an inside UN perspective on this issue applause who would like to begin question at the back thank you, my question is for Leanne I was interested in your stats on the number of women peacekeepers am I right in thinking that the United Nations has now set quotas for countries that contribute peacekeepers a certain percentage needs to be women is that right to the extent that the UN can tell countries what to contribute basically we can't there are strong recommendations and there's a lot of pressure on countries to increase the number of troops but it's a huge problem for every national military who are trying to meet their own objectives in terms of increasing the number of women and then deciding where and how to deploy those women I think what I've experienced in engaging with member states through the special committee on peacekeeping operations is that that cohort really highly sought after and high profile and quite often it's not in that country's national interest to send them all to a peacekeeping mission so you can appreciate the challenges and the UN statistics on participation really do reflect the statistics at the national level across the board of course Australia is doing a bit better than some other countries but they're pretty dire across all of the contributing countries we've heard from Dr. Sirabi and her excellency about the amazing work done by women in countries of Australia to engage actively with the women's peace and security agenda I'm interested in comments made by Dr. Strahan about sort of passive language when we talk about women's experiences of conflict so women as victims or I mean they certainly are but how do we develop the way we speak about women in conflict to make them into agents of change or to identify them and identify their agency generally in the post-war context? All the work we have to do here has to be localised it always must be context context specific so it's all very well for us to have these kind of grand plans about how you make women agents for change but unless you come down to the local level and really understand in that context what are the factors that empower and disempower and that really lies in the hands of the people on the ground and it must involve getting inside the heads of men and so that's an absolutely critical thing that I said earlier that Madam Diopet said to me when she was here it's creating this space but if the men don't allow the space to exist then all the empowering of the women just doesn't you know it falls very very flat In my country in our experience of course women women is the largest victim of war and also women are suffering a lot when it comes to the women after the conflict but still we are a conflicted country the war is going on women in the rural area the urban area they are more motivated and they are working together through the network women in the civil society they are very active and their voice is very strong according to the Resolution 1325 and any things about their their rights but women in the rural area they are very impressed and so suffering a lot still we have a lot of problem how to mobilize them it will take a long time and also the changing the mentality of the people is a huge challenges a huge problem for us always we have to focus a lot on the changing the mentality of people especially men and mostly on the rural area the extremist people are a huge number that's why this battle is going in our country I just want to share with you in the negotiations for example in the Philippines it was not easy for women to be able to come in they had to find ways whereby they are recognized a very good example is the lawyer Raisa the lawyer in the more Islamic liberation front group she did not come because she was picked so she had one session riding in a car with one of the leaders and said I'd like to help she was a lawyer she is a human rights activist and she was able to get through with the conversation so she started as a resource person and then came to a point that she set with the delegation during the negotiations even for the chairperson the lady chairperson when the men who used to head the negotiating panel for government was moved as an associate justice in the supreme court he endorsed a woman but the first reaction was will the other party receive a woman as the hen of the other panel it was like something like a realization oh I hit a glass ceiling I thought things were like something acceptable but it was good because the president continued with her appointment and then the letter came from the more Islamic liberation front saying we don't mind dealing with a woman and I think this is not only the convergence at the highest point rather you see the convergence at the lower level mothers students at the community level started moving mobilizing groups organizing groups to be able to talk about the issue and I think the information campaign was massive it included men it included young girls and this particularly enlarged the discussion and I think it also opened the eyes better of the negotiators at the other panel I think those are good lessons to draw from you know it's not easy you have to find your way you have to raise your hand if you have to raise your hand and if you are sensible and reasonable I think you will be heard in the same way that this had the progress for us it was about Professor Hudson's discussion about ethics around working with local women's organizations or local prominent women she gave the example of Kunduz which you responded to about the idea that foreign intervention somehow creates risk for local women so if we follow Dr Strahan's idea about investing in local women's organizations that are supporting peace one of the types of resistance is that will create risk that will endanger those women we should not do that because it will be seen as cultural imperialism as foreign intervention so what is the way through that debate which seems very stalled in the UN system at the moment between let's invest in local women's organizations but what about the ethics of doing so what is the latest thinking on those issues and what was your response about women's agency and those local contexts? In a conflict or a post-conflict setting the empowerment of women is very important but very sensitive as we've heard several times this morning and I would just put in a pitch for an interrelated topic that we haven't touched on much yet I suppose which is rule of law and how important rule of law is developing that in a post-conflict setting to allow all voices to be heard and to allow people to feel like they have the security to take action and to be part of those conversations you mentioned that not much is happening in the UN context when it comes to this moral question about intervention and how we support things I would I would recommend that there's quite a lot in the high level panel on peace operations report about this issue of national ownership and local empowerment and that peacekeeping missions have not done enough in this regard in the past and that we need to be much more accessible and when we talk about national ownership we shouldn't just be talking about what the government of the day says or their ownership of these issues but we have to go broader and deeper into the community to reach those parts of the society that don't have a voice with the elites in the capital the responsibility as the UN to reach beyond that and to get a more diverse perspective so we know we haven't done very well at it but the writing is on the wall that we have to do more Dr. Serabi I'm supporting the idea of supporting the women organization and also the rule of law but let me to highlight a little bit in our own situation Afghanistan situation is very, very complicated situation so if we go back to 2001 when the Taliban left the country so we started to make the new state and the new government and of course the international community came together to make to support us for good governments and the rule of law and democracy and women's rights was one of the top priority for the international community but when it comes to the rule of law we started to make our new constitution the new constitution I was the minister of women's affairs on that time I remember that how we pushed hardly to bring the phrase for men and women they have the equal rights according to the law so it was 20 the whole jerka or big council they were working with the constitution the warlord dominated people so it was that big jerka or council divided in 22 groups one of the groups, one of the warlord he just wanted to play game with all the constitution so how much we pushed the international community was the special special envoy for Afghanistan and also the ambassador of the state so we finally I went to them that please help us because this is the time that we can bring some change for our constitution because constitution can play a big role or law can play a big role for the change of the life of the women we put on the article 22 that men and women in Afghanistan can have the equal rights according to the law so it is something that for the history of Afghanistan it was a big change so law can play a big role but I am focusing again for the international community through their fund so whenever I had the chance to talk with the international community and the representative I was focusing in many other women focused on that your funds should monitor the gender budgeting not like gender budgeting the meaningful gender budgeting but at least they can monitor how much of this budget can go to the benefit of women I can give you an example of the CDC's which is the community development this committee is one of the program is called NSP national solidarity program so the donor agency one of the condition was that the CDC should be women men and women the ministry of urban rural development set up the women's shura or council and men's shura so it was a kind of progress women recognized that they are a part of the community and can be interact with different level so this is the way that international community can play a big role of course it's very sensitive issue to drop something from the outside but at least if the international community have a good study from the bottom from the grassroots it can help a lot when we provide assistance to community groups around the world we're guided fundamentally by the no harm principle that means thinking through very carefully what are the unintended consequences of us providing funding I think it then becomes a balance between us being bold because if you're not bold then you don't get change but fundamentally it's about listening to the groups on the ground so to be frank we find the right people to talk to and say will we help or harm and if we're going to help then we'll provide the funding and if we're not going to then we will stay in the background. Thank you One last question I had a previous experience working for UN missions in South Sudan and T-Morteste my last work was in 2000 and so maybe I'm not so updated but what I did notice when I was working there is that there were like clusters of women working in just very determined areas for example UN police female UN police were mainly focused in T-Morteste community development instead of talking about crime the crime area or internal affairs so how do we break with these clusters in traditional roles of women within the UN Thank you for that really timely question because the debates that happen at least in UN headquarters around increasing women's participation are still putting up on a pedestal this idea of for example the formed police units that we've seen in Liberia and I can't remember which other missions right now but so we're still thinking that's the best practice to have like a full female unit doing a task like say the one you mentioned community engagement, community liaison kind of thing if we're thinking longer term obviously if you want a mainstream it's much better for us to have as you said a spread of men and women working across across the board but we face a lot of very practical difficulties in deployments in peacekeeping projects if you think about countries like DRC or South Sudan for example the conditions are very hard and our ability to deploy is we do everything in a compromised fashion on the smell of an oily rag it's not exactly world class conditions so we need more advice on what women need to be deployed in those scenarios and the work that the civil military center is doing on collecting experiences is really really important for us to know how we can make that work best some suggestions have been that if you're going to deploy a woman to a contingent out in the middle of nowhere that you need to pair them up and have at least two women so they've got that back up we're really at the beginning of understanding how we can make that more viable but it's a really good point I can't think of a better start to the panel sessions for the conference please join me in thanking our speakers