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The Speaker of Sierra Leone Parliament, Hon. Dr. Abass Bundu has on Saturday 19 February 2022 questioned presenters at the UN General Assembly on gender equality.
During a forum jointly organized by UN (United Nations) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) at the headquarters of the UN in New York City between the 18-19 February 2022 on women’s empowerment, the Speaker of Parliament asked the following questions:
“Would the presenters agree that perhaps the time has come for some introspection by the international community through an innovative penetration of the glass ceiling by taking a pause in the adoption of more and more new treaties and conventions and resolutions and doing instead some stocktaking of how much actual implementation has taken place of the plethora of international instruments adopted so far.
At the national level, this speaks to a critical convergence of responsibilities between the Executive and the Legislature. The Executive bears responsibility to negotiate and sign international agreements while the Legislature is responsible for ratifying and passing into the mainstream of domestic l
So in addressing gender inequality, for example, we have had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Bill of Rights for Women comprehensively encapsulated in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) which clearly prescribes a 30% minimum quota for women representation in Parliament.
Yet, it has been nearly 43 years since the CEDAW Convention, 27 years since the Beijing Declaration, 21 years since the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, 11 years since the establishment of UN Women, and 7 years since the world set itself a set of targets in the SDGs, and today in 2022 we are still talking.
So in practical terms, should our priorities not be focused more on satisfactorily completing the implementation of existing obligations than on adopting new ones?”
