Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1)

notes that 24 October is United Nations Day which celebrates the entry into force of the United Nations Charter on 24 October 1945;

(2)

celebrates Australia’s key role in the formation of the United Nations and the drafting of the United Nations Charter;

(3)

recognises that Australia has been a consistent and long term contributor to United Nations efforts to safeguard international peace and security and to promote human rights, for example, by:

(a)

being the thirteenth largest contributor to the United Nations budget;

(b)

contributing to many United Nations peacekeeping operations;

(c)

firmly committing to increasing Australia’s development assistance; and

(d)

by continuing to push for real progress towards the Millennium Development Goals;

(4)

notes further the Australian Government’s commitment to the multilateral system as one of the three fundamental pillars of Australia’s foreign policy, namely that Australia is determined to work through the United Nations to enhance security and economic well being worldwide, and to uphold the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter;

(5)

notes that as the only genuinely global Organisation, the United Nations plays a critical role in addressing the global challenges that no single country can resolve on its own, and that Australia is determined to play its part within the United Nations to help address serious global challenges, including conflict prevention and resolution, international development, climate change, terrorism and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction;

(6)

expresses its condolences for the loss of 100 United Nations staff lives in January 2010 as a result of the earthquake in Haiti, and expresses its appreciation for the ongoing work in difficult conditions of United Nations staff around the world; and

(7)

reaffirms the faith of the Australian people in the purposes, principles, and actions of the United Nations acting under guidance of the United Nations Charter.

This evening I attended and spoke at an event at the ACT Legislative Assembly to celebrate United Nations Day and the 65th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. I would like to congratulate the UN Association of Australia, the UN Information Centre, UNIFEM, the UN Youth Association of Australia, the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Deputy Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher, for organising and supporting this event. Tonight I would like to recap some of the issues raised at the UN event. I began by remembering the victims of the Pakistan floods and the Haiti earthquake, as well as those of the numerous other disasters that occur but which seem to elude the attention of the media. Of course, Pakistan’s is a tragedy on an enormous scale. Some 21 million people —the entire population of Australia—are homeless and many of them are suffering hunger, malnutrition and disease. The food crisis may well be long term given that the floods have devastated agricultural areas and much land is still under water, preventing the planting of wheat and other crops. Members may recall that the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch in New Zealand recently caused no fatalities, while the same magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January this year killed more than 200,000 people, injured many more and left a million homeless. We are now seeing a serious cholera outbreak. The point is that disaster can strike anywhere but it is always the poor who are disproportionately affected.

The 17th of October was the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and of course yesterday, 24 October, was UN Day, which we celebrate here. These are good opportunities to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals, the progress that has been made and the considerable distance still to go. As I have heard the former Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance, the Hon. Bob McMullan say, ‘Of course when we reach the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 we still need to work on helping the other half of our fellow human beings who are living and dying in extreme poverty.’ I welcome foreign minister Kevin Rudd’s landmark speech to the UN MDG Summit in New York last month during which he commented that the richest among us have a profound responsibility to help the poorest members of the human family out of poverty and he announced that Australia will devote 0.15 per cent of national income to the least developed countries, which will mean a significant increase in aid flowing to the poorest countries, of which 15 are in our own region and 33 are in Africa.

This year, on 2 July, we have also seen the creation by the UN General Assembly of a new UN agency called the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women. UN Women merges four UN agencies and offices devoted to the interests of women, including UNIFEM, and it is headed by Under-Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet, former Chilean President. The creation of UN Women is very well timed, coinciding as it does with the tenth anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, which was adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000 under the presidency of Namibia. Resolution 1325 has been described by UNIFEM as ‘a landmark legal and political framework that acknowledges the importance of the participation of women and the inclusion of gender perspectives in conflict prevention, peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, post-conflict peace-building and governance’. Felicity Hill, of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, said of the UN Security Council resolution:

The Council agreed that … women deserve a place at the peace and security table, but this is not only because they have been tortured, raped and affected by war differently, but because they are simply alive and have the human right to participate in their society.

So the unanimous adoption of the resolution was a wonderful and breakthrough moment, but the problem with resolution 1325 is that, despite being the broadest and most comprehensive statement on the rights and roles of women in peace and security, it is weak in terms of monitoring and enforcement. The implementation of the resolution has been erratic by member states, both in relation to the behaviour of troops they contribute to peacekeeping missions and in relation to providing a more effective participatory, justice and security environment for women within their own countries.

Resolution 1325 has since been supplemented by other Security Council resolutions calling for increased representation of women at all levels in the peace process, condemning conflict related sexual violence and aiming to strengthen coordination, monitoring and reporting including the appointment of a special representative for sexual violence in conflict.

We know that in World War I approximately 41 per cent of the war dead were civilians, while in contemporary conflicts 90 per cent of the victims are civilians, most of whom are women and children. And while, as the US Institute of Peace has noted, ‘wartime rape is probably as old as war itself’, there has been increased international attention in the past two decades due to the rape atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and, more recently, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other places. Just a few months ago we heard the horrific reports of mass rape that occurred in the eastern Congo between 30 July and 2 August, whereby more than 300 women and children, including elderly women and baby boys and girls, were raped by members of rebel armed groups. The horror has been amplified by the reports this month that the victims of the rapes now face the same abuse from government troops who have been sent to the region to enforce a government ordered moratorium on mining. Jeffrey Gettleman, the East Africa Bureau Chief of the New York Times, has reported that armed groups are actually committing atrocities to bolster their negotiating strength and that ‘in Congo’s wars, the battleground is often women’s bodies’.

On 14 October, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallstrom, who had visited the Walikale region where the rapes occurred, reported on the matter to the UN Security Council. She noted the connection between illicit exploration of natural resources by armed groups and sexual violence, saying ‘the mineral wealth that should be the source of their prosperity is instead the source of their greatest suffering’. Ms Wallstrom called upon UN member states to enact laws to require companies to disclose whether their products contain DRC minerals and she called upon the council to give MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission present in the Congo, the financial resources and other assets needed to carry out its mandate, which includes the protection of civilians, while noting that the primary responsibility for controlling the situation rests with the national authorities. Ms Wallstrom stressed that the rapes will continue so long as consequences are negligible and said they:

… will leave a devastating imprint on the Congo for years to come.

                        …                   …                   …

Rape is shattering traditions that anchor community values, disrupting their transmission to future generations. For the women of Walikale, peace is not a treaty, a resolution, or a conference but simply the peace of mind to live and work without fear. For these women justice delayed is more than justice denied—it is terror continued.

It is shocking to be standing here in Canberra, Australia and know that such abhorrent things as extreme sexual violence and preventable child and maternal deaths are happening around the world as we speak. But, despite the pain and cruelty that endures, we can take heart from the enormous strides that have been made in the last decade within the expanding consciousness of the international community as reflected in the progress on the Millennium Development Goals, the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and the increasingly specific Security Council resolutions 1325, 1889, 1820 and 1888 on women, peace and security. The fact that there is now a special representative reporting to the Security Council on the events in the Congo and calling for specific remedial action is significant. There is also the new agency, UN Women, which will put in place new strategies for progress on women’s rights and empowerment.

Although I no longer work for the United Nations and the only bombs and bullets I face these days are metaphorical ones, I remain inspired by the purposes of the United Nations as reflected in the UN Charter and the core principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which, as everyone here knows, Australia played a key role in drafting. I am heartened by the large number of parliamentary colleagues of all political persuasions who clearly feel the same way as evidenced by the substantial membership numbers of both the UN parliamentary group and the UNICEF parliamentary association and by the motions that are lodged and debated each year in recognition of UN Day.

In this debate tonight I would like to recognise the efforts of UN and humanitarian workers who provide life-saving assistance to millions of people around the world, who work in conflict zones and areas of natural hazards and who place their own lives at risk in the line of duty. I pay tribute to the UN staff who have lost their lives in the service of peace. In January the UN suffered its largest ever loss of staff in the devastating Haiti earthquake, where 100 UN civilian and military peacekeepers from 30 different countries were killed. Prior to that the largest loss of UN staff life in a single event had been the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003.

In both tragic events I lost a number of good friends and former colleagues with whom I had worked in Kosovo, Gaza and New York and the world lost some of its best and brightest people. As I said in a parliamentary speech earlier this year, these are people who thought only of bringing good to the world and they have now taken their place with Dag Hammarskjold, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and many other fallen UN colleagues whose memory serves to fortify us in carrying on our efforts to help restore dignity to the lives of the world’s most vulnerable.

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