Under the UN Women supported project ‘Empowered Women, Peaceful Communities’ of BNPS with the support of local women organization and CSOs partners organized 29 consultations (21 in district level, 7 in divisional level and 1 in national level) on UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 that resulted to bring more than 150 grassroots recommendations encompassing Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Violent Extremism (VE), which was submitted to the core committee of National Action Plan (NAP) WPS.
UNSCR 1325 adopted in 2000, which reaffirms, “the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building”, and stresses “the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution”. The 1325 resolution urges Member States and the UN system to ensure that women and women’s groups are given meaningful opportunities to participate in these processes, particularly at senior levels, where prevention and counter strategies are designed and implemented.
In line with the spirit of UNSCR 1325 and its subsequent resolutions, all the recommendations of the consultations were analyzed under four pillars of WPS framework: Prevention, Participation, Protection, Relief and Recovery. The recommendations highlighted the areas of women’s participation in decision making and leadership, economic empowerment, legal support and effective role of judiciary, policy implementation and policy reform, access to resources, job opportunities and civic entitlements, promoting peace building processes in the context of rising violent extremism, fundamentalism, discrimination and gender based sexual violence, disaster, displacement and other relevant issues.
Around 900 participants including representatives of CSOs, women organizations, women affairs department, college teachers, students, housewives, lawyers, cultural activists, journalist and civil society members. Local elected representatives and govt officials of relevant departments were also present in the workshops.
District level recommendations were critically analyzed at divisional level and the collated recommendations were placed in the national level consultation on 24th of January 2018 at Dhaka where Dr. Shirin Sharmin Choudhury, Honorable Speaker of the Bangladesh Parliament was the Chief Guest. Ms. Sanjida Khanm, Member of the Parliament, Ms. Shoko Ishikawa, Country Representative, UN Women Bangladesh and Prof. Meghna Guhathakurta, Member of Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh and the lead consultant for the development of the National Action Plan WPS were present as special guests. Chief Guest and Special Guest conveyed sincere thanks to the grassroots communities particularly women for bringing these quality and meaningful recommendations and expected that the core committee of NAP would consider it with special care. Some more additional recommendations were come out from the floor, which is then added to the final recommendations.
