GENEVA (27 June 2019) – The Human Rights Council this afternoon held a clustered interactive dialogue with Dubravka Šimonović, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, and Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children.
Ms. Šimonović said that her thematic report analysed 25 years of the mandate, the current challenges, and the way forward. The global context of women’s rights was marked by a rise in various women’s movements across the world which called for an end to gender-based violence against women and girls. At the same time, she said, there was a mounting backlash against women’s rights and a rise in retrogressive movements, confirming the endemic and widespread nature of violence against women and its normalization in all areas of public and private lives. The momentum linked to the upcoming Beijing+25 review and the five-year review of the Sustainable Development Goal 5 must be used to develop a new global system-wide approach to eliminate violence against women and girls and bridge implementation gaps between international and national policy levels, she said, before introducing reports on her visits to Canada and Nepal.
Ms. Giammarinaro stressed the importance of innovative and transformative models of social inclusion of victims and survivors of trafficking in persons and related challenges, and noted that the idea of having been trafficked was not an irreversible condition. The social inclusion of victims of trafficking was not solely the responsibility of civil society; it was deeply rooted in the human rights obligations of States, particularly due diligence standards and the right to an effective remedy for people subjected to human rights violations. Combatting stigma associated with trafficking had been identified as one of the major challenges across all continents, she said, and underlined the importance of the economic empowerment of survivors, which was paramount to their psychological well-being: it increased self-esteem and self-fulfilment, contributing to social recognition and inclusion. The Special Rapporteur then presented the report on her visit to Nigeria
