UN Aspirations for Gender Equality in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is both an island of stability amidst a tumultuous region and a traditionally conservative society in need of outside resources to address the challenges that arise with ensuring women’s equality. Fortunately, the United Nations and its partner organizations have committed such resources to the KRI and now play a critical role in tackling the structural impediments to women’s progress.

In this article,I review what actions the United Nations has undertaken thus far in the KRI and which ones they intend to implement in the future. The principles that motivate and inform the UN’s activities in the KRI are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Although there are seventeen SDGs—with each of them having the possibility of being creatively applied to women’s issues—for the purposes of this review, I was specifically interested in SDG 5 and 16, namely: (5) Gender Equality, plus (16) Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. I would add that the more you delve into the work that the UN has been conducting in the KRI, the more you realize that these SDGs are intertwined and form a symbiotic relationship.

As for the United Nations themselves, they describe their mission by outlining how: “UN Women and the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) are committed to addressing gender-based violence through strengthening institutional capacities to scale up and improving multi-sectoral responses and support the KRG (Kurdish Regional Government of the KRI) to advance its agenda on gender equality and empowerment of women.”[i]

To achieve this equality and empowerment in the KRI, the UN has devised an array of programs addressing the women’s rights issue and gender-based violence. One is the UN’s WPS (Women, Peace, and Security) agenda, which aims to achieve gender equality through increasing women’s participation in peacebuilding and conflict prevention.

UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) also operates in the KRI and looks to support children displaced by conflict, guarantee young girls access to secondary education, prevent child marriage, and promote the empowerment of young girls. One of the avenues that UNICEF, with support from the USAID (United States Agency for International Development), pursues that objective through is the GDCVAW (General Directorate for Combatting Violence Against Women), which debuted a radio station entitled “Voice for Equality”. The aim of this new communication platform is to advocate for the empowerment of adolescent girls and women, while advocating against gender-based violence (GBV) against girls; especially among IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) and refugees in the KRI. Relatedly, the UN recently held an event near Erbil’s historical Citadel as part of their 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.

The statutory motivation for the UN’s work in the KRI can be traced back to the landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 from the year 2000, which was the first legal document from the UN Security Council that mandated conflicting parties to prevent violations of women’s human rights, protect women from sexual violence, and ensure women’s participation in negotiating peace and reconstructing society in war’s aftermath. Because Resolution 1325 calls for special measures to protect women and girls and outlines responsibilities in different areas, the UN has a range of programs established to ensure its implementation. Some of these plans include the second National Action Plan for the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 (2020-2024), the National Strategy on Violence against Women and Girls (2018-2030), and the National Development Plan, which are viewed as “positive measures to make the Government accountable to protect women’s and girls’ rights.”[ii]

One of the administrative bodies responsible for ensuring that protection is the HCRW (High Council of Women Development), which was established by the KRI’s Kurdish Regional Government. The HCRW works with UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) to focus on fully implementing UNSCR 1325 by the year 2024. At the latest HCRW meeting in Erbil in June of 2022, which was attended by representatives from consulates, embassies, international organizations, and various UN agencies, HCWD Secretary-General Khanzad Ahmed delivered the opening address, where she spoke of the urgent need to provide protection and economic empowerment for women in the refugee camps and GBV survivors. To achieve this vision, Khanzad Ahmed has partnered with UN Women, but also more than 30 civil society organizations, 20 ministries, and the governments of Finland and Sweden to bring UNSCR 1325 to fruition.

For their part, UN Women have themselves signed a joint partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), aimed at increasing women’s political participation in the KRI and wider Iraq. Their goal is to strengthen women’s leadership opportunities in civic spaces by recruiting high quality female candidates for public office, while also pushing for women’s quotas in all political parties to increase access. To assist with that on the national level, the UNAMI (United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq) has a current mandate focused on a number of key areas. Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq, is heading up their initiatives, with a specific focus on SDG number 5. In this capacity, the areas that Secretary-General Hennis-Plasschaert is concerned with are the rights of women and children and their protection from sexual and gender-based violence, while also promoting judicial and legal reform for better protections for women – as well as focusing on inclusion of women in the public sphere. The latter goal is particularly important, because often times a nation will put women’s rights on the books, but it is not enough to codify women’s right to participate in public life, the more helpful goal is changing the mindset of men who would like to see them excluded, so they can become architects of their own destiny alongside men.

This is especially prescient as recently there has been an increase in femicide in the KRI,[iii] and it is estimated that at least 900,000 women and girls are at risk of GBV in all of Iraq.[iv] Moreover, the child marriage rate is still 28% and illiteracy rates among teenage girls are double that of boys. So, it is self-evident that the UN has an integral role to play in bringing women’s equality to the KRI, but there is still a lot of work to do. The hope is that through a combination of the UN’s initiatives, public education, and invested resources, women’s equality can go from being a development “goal” to a lived reality for the millions of women in the KRI and all of Iraq. 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views of CWS as a whole or of the University of Southern Denmark.