Seeking Accountability for Women’s Rights through the Sustainable Development Goals

Organization(s): CESR, UN WOMEN
Author: Magdalena Sepúlveda
Year: 2017
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While the SDGs are a significant improvement over the Millennium Development Goals, including in their commitments to gender equality and women’s rights, there is no major advance when it comes to accountability: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides only for a weak and voluntary process of “follow-up and review”.

Building on the work CESR and UN Women have each done on the theme of accountability, this briefing dives deeper into how these accountability deficits can be improved with a specific focus on women’s rights. At a bare minimum, it argues, gender-responsive accountability requires that women are full participants in any oversight or accountability process; and that women’s human rights are the standard of assessment against which progress towards gender equality is judged and decisions made. Otherwise, governments may focus their efforts on the achievement of goals and targets which are not aligned with their existing international human rights obligations, nor with the priorities of national women rights’ and feminist movements, falling far short of their ambitions.

The briefing explains how the SDG-specific “follow up and review” mechanisms foreseen in the 2030 Agenda need strengthening, in order to boost their effectiveness and inclusivity, and build links with women’s rights mechanisms and standards. At the same time, because of the limited reach and weaknesses of the SDG accountability architecture, it is also crucial to seek other complementary pathways and tools for accountability. To this end, this paper proposes additional mechanisms and venues that might be used to monitor compliance with the SDGs from a human rights perspective. These venues potentially offer additional channels for women’s rights organizations to influence development policy making and implementation in the long term, and to identify systemic failures as well as good practices. In particular, the briefing offers new insights and recommendations into how national, regional and international human rights mechanisms (including the UN treaty bodies, special procedures and the Universal Periodic Review) could contribute to SDG monitoring and accountability at all levels.

Social Protection and Human Rights