ODIHR Women’s power breakfast highlights importance of women’s participation to peace and security

The continuing – and in some places increasing – exclusion of women from participating in security strategies and implementation were the focus of the annual Women’s Power Breakfast organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Warsaw on 20 September 2019, on the sidelines of ODIHR’s annual human rights conference, the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting.

“Recruiting, training and then keeping women in policing, the border services and armed forces is critical in order to realize women’s rights to equal participation as well as to foster security and stability,” said ODIHR Director Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir. “States need to ensure that the security sector represents the society it serves and that international women’s human rights standards are thoroughly applied in all uniformed professions.”

The event gathered some 90 representatives from OSCE participating States, human rights and civil society organizations.  It featured highlights from ODIHR’s 2018 Women in the Armed Forces in the OSCE Region study, as well as material from the upcoming second edition of the joint ODIHR/DCAF Handbook on Human Rights of the Armed Forces Personnel and the UN Women/ DECAF/ODIHR Gender and Security Toolkit.