represented by Maria Gordon and Anne Dribbisch

The Commission on the Status of Women is one of the subsidiary bodies of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Its main focus applies to the matters of gender equality and advancement of women with the aim to set global standards and formulate concrete regulations. Female delegates are represented by the majority in this committee. There are forty-five Member States at any one time. Each state is represented by one delegate. The members are elected by ECOSOC based on geographical distribution and their membership lasts for four years.

Being the biggest donor for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Spain is very active when it comes to women’s rights. At the same time, Spain has made a lot of progress on the national level. Representing a country that is actively engaged in the empowerment of women, our starting position for the conference was accordingly very confident.

After the opening ceremony, which has been very impressive, we had our first committee session. First of all we had to set the agenda which contained the following topics:

1. Women’s Equal Participation in Conflict Prevention, Management and Conflict Resolution and in Post-conflict Peacebuilding;

2. Women’s role in Capacity Building within Civil Society Movements;

3. Fifteen Year Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

The challenge was to convince our fellow delegates to adopt Spain’s preferred order of the agenda. Spain favoured to set the agenda in the order 2, 1, 3 since Spain was convinced that topic 2 included topic 1. By providing women with capacities and strengthen their role in civil society, they could contribute to conflict prevention or be an integral part of the Peacebuilding process. Though topic 3 was similarly important for Spain, we were convinced that this topic was too comprehensive to be discussed in only 4 days. After a roll call, the chair opened the speakers’ list and Spain had the honour to be the second country to speak. During our speech and the first informal caucuses we tried to convince our fellow delegates to adopt our preferred order of the agenda. The voting on the agenda resulted in the order as it was set in the beginning, because the majority of countries preferred topic 1. Spain was satisfied with this order, because the first topic had been our second choice. After the first session, we arranged a delegation meeting, during which we were exchanging opinions and getting recommendations from our faculty advisors.

On Wednesday the session started with an informal caucus of the EU bloc, during which Italy developed the idea of a Safe Haven, a place where women could escape from war or conflict and get shelter. This idea was welcomed by all the EU countries and we started working on it. Spain’s role was to convince other countries of the idea to educate women for Peacebuilding and peacekeeping missions in the Safe Havens. Spain was working closely with the Committees for Women of NATO and the EU using its experience obtained in Spanish contributions to Peacebuilding and peacekeeping operations. We skipped lunch break in order to meet with some countries and continue working on our ideas. By the end of the day we started writing our report and named our project POWER SHIELD (Participation of Women in Educated Roles and Secured Hope for Innovative Elimination of Ladies in Distresses).

The next day our session started at 9:30 am and lasted until 10:30 pm. So we had a long day with the opportunity to get a lot of work done. In the morning, we decided to merge two reports since another delegation had been working on a similar idea of a Safe Haven with regard to post-conflict periods. During lunch break, this report was handed in to the chair in order to be corrected. After this was done, we started to develop new ideas. One of us started working with Belarus, Israel and Japan. Here the idea was a so-called sports campaign where by women and children should have the opportunity to do sports in our Safe Havens. The idea behind this campaign was on the one hand to give women and children the opportunity to have fun and on the other hand to educate them in social skills and endow them with confidence. Here Spain had the idea to combine this campaign with a programme called UN/EC Partnership, which was already active in 12 countries.

The other delegate worked with Germany on an idea called cinema campaign, which would enable women to not only learn the technical aspects of running a cinema centre, but also help them develop leadership capacities. Community cinemas should provide a forum for political and social discussion and empowerment through films, documentaries, and the participation of female role models, which can inspire women to be active members in their communities and participate in peace building efforts.

In the afternoon, we received back our POWER SHIELD working report and could continue working on some changes the chair pointed out. While we improved the POWER SHIELD working report, we continued working on the other campaigns. We started talking to the Delegates from Sweden, who worked on another report with the idea to have seminars, during which women would be educated in order to be able to access decision-making positions. We really liked that idea and convinced them to include Spain’s Millennium Development Achievement Fund to finance these seminars. Having finished a long but very successful day, we headed to our delegation meeting to have some pizza sponsored from our faculty advisors.

Friday’s session went from 9:00 am until 5:30 pm. In the morning, we continued our work and then went into voting procedure. The voting procedure was very exciting, because doors were locked and no one was to enter or leave the room during this period of time. Every country that had been working on the POWER SHIELD report had tried to convince other countries to vote in favour. In the end, it passed with a clear majority and we were very satisfied. Only one draft report did not pass, which was a very controversial report handed in by the Delegation of Iran. To make things more exciting and nerve racking Iran asked for a role call.

In the end our Delegation had a very successful conference in the Commission on the Status of Women and we both went home with a huge bag full of new experiences and impressions. We hope that a lot of other students will get this amazing opportunity to be part of the next NMUN.